Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 78

39. Marion L. Dawson, “The South and the Negro,” North American Review (February 1901): 279-84.

Essay on lynching in which the author concludes that mob violence is no more prevalent in the South than in other parts of the country and that black victims have actually brought lynching on themselves by committing heinous crimes. “The Anglo-Saxons have always been distinguished above other races for their passionate devotion to their homes; they have never considered life too dear a sacrifice to offer in its defense. When the intelligence, then, is flashed through a community that a home has been despoiled, that its protector has been slain, that the mother or the wife or the daughter or the idolized child—none has been spared—has been torn violently from the family circle and left worse than dead, I care not how quiet and how orderly the community may be, not how promptly the officers of the law may act, nor what barriers they may throw around the criminal, the chances are that all will be equally helpless to protect him. The deepest passions are inflamed, the fiercest instincts of the race are aroused, reason is temporarily dethroned, law and order forgotten, mob violence runs riot and death falls upon the criminal with a power as terrible and resistless as a thunderbolt discharged from an angry storm cloud.”