New Iberia enterprise and independent observer. (New Iberia, La.) 1902-1944, 1904-07-16
THE NEGRO PROBLEM IN THE NORTH.

The atrocious assaults by negroes
upon white women in Northern States
are arousing the people who long
thought they were free from such ter
rible risks. and were able to denounce
popular justice i'll the Southern States
as the worst of crimes, To the dreadful
reality that they are being placed in
situations that are likely to make
lynching a necessity to save their in
stitutions and protect the sancity of
their home
The recent tiendish outrage com
mitted by three negroes upon young
wife at Burlington New Jersey, is
only one of many cases in the North
ern States that have lately excited the
people. Says the Philadelphia Public
Ledger on the subject:
We are meeting new conditions in
this part of the country. and we have
laws made to apply TO conditions
which no longer exist When the
Pennsylvania law providing penalty
of fifteen years imprisonment for Grim
statute very similar TO it were enacted,
there were few negroes in this com
munity, aud those here were of diff
ferent class from many of those who
now infest our cities and country dis
tricts They were law abiding, de-
cent and respectable in the main, and
the crime of atrocious assault was rare.
Times have changed; scarcely day
passes but the reader of the newspaper
is shocked to read of negro's bestial
crime. Women are attacked frequent
ly in the city or in some of the subur-
ban towns Thousands of negroes
live in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
and, unfortunately, as the police and
criminal records show. there are
among them very large number of
the worst class of human beings. We
are now confronting the terrible pro-
blem which the South has long had to |
deal with, and we have the old North
ern laws which do not meet the re-
quirements.
The black mans crime is a horrible
thing; it stirs the bad passions of all
good men, and it usually adds to the
crime by inducing the breakdown of |
the law in n lynching. The problem
for New Jersey and Pennsylvania is to
pass such law as will be, if not an
adequate punishment that is impos-
sible at least deterrent to the crime
and check to lynching; and the Leg
islatures of the two States should at
their next sessions enact law intiict-
ing the death penalty for criminal as
sault. 1t will be an indelible disgrace
to the commonwealtbs if they are slow
to act when wild men more dangerous
than SO many tigers are permitted to
practice their barbarous crimes. -
Circumstances alter cases. A few
decades ago the press of the Northern
States was accustomed to denOunce
the lawless savagery of the Southern
people, who in communities where
the whites were largerly outnumbered
by negroes were driven to employ
every possible means and particularly
those which were at once prompt,
stern, immediate and terrible, to pro-
tect the sancity of their homes from
the most frightful atrocities. The
dreadful conditions which created such
state Of affairs are no ereonfined
to the States south of the Ohio and
Potomac Rivers. They have moved
northward across the Sc rivers, and the
people who believed they could be
forever immune to such conditions are
now suffering from and because of
them Therefore it is that human
opinions of acts depend very much
from the point of view Truly, cir
cumstances make great changes i'll
opinions. -Picayune.