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15 Mob Law in the South In the summer of 1897, Fortune wrote “Mob Law in the South” for the Independent, appealing to the nation for assistance in ending the brutal acts of lynching. He extols the actions of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her internationalization of the issue—an act he supported early on as he and the Afro-American League held meetings to raise money for her travels. Fortune also employed Wells-Barnett when she fled the South after the 1893 lynching of her friends and the firestorm that her editorials started. In the end, Fortune, like WellsBarnett , placed the blame for the continued lynchings squarely on the apathy and silence of the nation. Mob Law in the South —Independent, July 15, 1897 When Miss Ida B. Wells1 went to England, a few winters ago, she horrified the British public by a plain, straightforward story of the prevalence of mob law in the United States, and especially in the Southern States. She had herself been a victim of the mob spirit. Her newspaper property at Memphis Tenn., which it had taken her years of hard labor and self-denial to build up, was destroyed in an hour, and she was warned to remain away from Memphis or take the consequences. Why? Because she had the courage to denounce, in her newspaper, the lynching of three of her acquaintances, reputable young men, one of them a letter mail carrier, who were lodged in jail at Memphis for defending their grocery store from the assaults of what they believed to be white ruffians, instigated by a rival white concern, but who turned out to be special constables, deputed to arrest the three young men on a trumped-up charge, and for the special purpose of breaking up their business. The recital of this simple story, and of hundred of others like it, by Miss Wells, so excited the public mind of Great Britain that public meetings were Mob Law (1897) / 159 held all over England and Scotland, which eventuated in the organization of an Anti-Lynching Society, in which such men were interested as the Duke of Argyle, Henry Labouchére, Justin McCarthy, the Rev. Charles F. Aked, Earl Russell, of the Chronicle, and many others. The interest manifested by the British people in agitation was felt in this country; but instead of arousing a responsive sympathy and cooperation on the part of press and people here, it aroused, with reasonable exceptions, a spirit of bitter resentment that the people of Great Britain should interest themselves in our domestic affairs, as if the interests of humanity can be circumscribed by race or nationality.2 The public opinion and the newspapers of the Southern States were particularly outspoken and malignant against Miss Wells and the people of Great Britain. The chivalry of Memphis, which had not scrupled to hound a weak woman out of their community, and to destroy her property, because she had fearlessly denounced wrong and outrage, and because God had endowed her with “a skin not colored as their own,” pursued her beyond the ocean. The British newspaper offices were flooded with Southern newspaper articles intended not to disprove the story that Miss Wells told, but to prove that she was a moral leper and unworthy of credence. In this infamous business of seeking to deny the truth and to blast the woman’s character who told it, the Memphis Daily Commercial was easily foremost.3 The vulgarity and mendaciousness of its utterances upon the subject were such as should not enter any Christian home; but as they were intended to justify the bloody work of the mob and to vindicate Southern honor, whatever that may now mean in the South, and as the woman assailed was of the black and not of the white race, the publications were considered to be in good taste by the people of Memphis, for whom it spoke. As an evidence of the esteem and affection in which it is held its editor was elected to Congress at the November election by the people of Memphis. When shall we have an end of mob law, if the vile champions of it are selected by their fellow citizens to represent them in the highest legislative body of the Republic? The agitation started in Great Britain three years ago, and which gave promise of effecting some permanent good, has, to all intents and purposes , subsided. The reception which the American people gave the agitation...

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