Thousands gathered in Paris, Texas, for the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.

MAIN POINTS For more than thirty years Negroes were killed without due process. – “During these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution.” Race Riots Unjust Suffrage Violators of white women The government did nothing to stop brutal lynchings of Negroes. – “The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right.”

Main Points Continued After Negroes were given emancipation, White women from the north began teaching the negroes despite allegations by southern white women that these negroes were violent. – “ Before the world adjudges the Negro a moral monster, a vicious assailant of womanhood and a menace to the sacred precincts of home, the colored people ask the consideration of the silent record of gratitude, respect, protection, and devotion of the millions of the race in the South, to the thousands of northern white women who have served as teachers and missionaries since the war…”

Main Points Continued The Negroes were helpless in the fight against the white men. – “ The white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation, and murder. The franchise vouchsafed to the Negro grew to be a “barren ideality,” and regardless of numbers, the colored people found themselves voiceless in the councils of those whose duty it was to rule.”

Spectacle lynching. The Burning and Lynching of Jesse Washington, Waco Texas Although accurate figures on the lynching of blacks are lacking, one study estimates that in Texas between 1870 and 1900, extralegal justice was responsible for the murder of about 500 blacks—only Georgia and Mississippi exceeded Texas’s numbers in this grisly record. Between 1900 and 1910, Texas mobs murdered more than 100 black people. In 1916 at Waco, approximately 10,000 whites turned out in holiday-like atmosphere to watch a mob mutilate and burn a black man named Jesse Washington. (Source: Calvert, De Leon and Cantrell, The History of Texas, pp. 189, )

The lynching of Lige Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas.