The Twin City star. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn.) 1910-19??, 1911-09-02
coATEsviLLE INCIDENT AS SEEN
BY LOCAL WHITE MAN
WRITER.

lCOATESViLLE INCIDENT AZ SEEN
BY LOCAL WHITE MAN
WRITER.
Burning Of Negro Walker Calls Out
caustic Letter From Native
Born Southern.
Talking interest in the recent
Coatesville, Pa, outrage Louis j.
Livingston, now in Dowagiac on BUSH
ness, writes the following open let
ter in the Dowagiac Daily News, Aug.
10, 1911:
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MAYOR
OF COATESvILLE, PA.
AUG. 16, 1911.
Sir:
am a white man of pure Cauca-
sian blood, with not drop Of negro
blood in all my ancestry. I am a
Southerner by birth-a native Of
Louisiana. In politics am an In
dependent Republican, and in every
line of thought am an Independent
and Progressive.
am not in love with the negro,
! but am in love with Justice and
with Humanity; and II the awful
deed, the more than savage burning
Of the negro, Walker, that has for
ever blackened the name Of your
city, and left stain which not even
justice can wipe out, Is not followed
by bringing to swift and merciless
punishment the worse than hyenas,
who somehow or other, have acquired
the semblance of human beings, then
/ ask God to call down upon them the
punishment commensurate with such
an awful deed, and to wipe from the
face of the earth the community
that would condone such sdperlative
fiendishness, incarnate! Knowing to
what a degraded level the police Of
our country-North, South, East and
West, in rural communities as well
as cities and towns-have fallen that
they form one of the principal sourc-
es and main abettors, instead of the
preventers and curers, Of vice and
crime. that almost universally their
sole interest in their work is the &C
emulation of human misery and
want, that they may feed and fatten
upon it; that they have become a
scourge, and not protection, to
most communities, large or small,
that they secretly encourage and con-
nive at the breaking Of the very
laws they are specially selected to
uphold; and that, instead of bending
every effort to the capture of GRIM
inals they expend that energy in the
effort to make criminals of innocent
men and women, who, without
friends, money or influence, win their
displeasure and fall into their power;
until today the police Of America are
almost universally known as the most
brutal, depraved and corrupt on
earth!
knowing, tlso, that the negro
whatever his faults, is nearer to our
Americanism by birth, inheritance
contact, environment, education and
tradition than the scum of almost
every nation and race on earth thai
are allowed to swarm through the
gates of our Castle Gardens; that the
negro, since the shackles Of slavery
have been stricken from his limbs
has paid for that emancipation II
full, not only by fighting the battles
of his white prosecutor, with distinc
ton, and even glory, in the Civil
Indian, Spanish and PHILIPPINE wars
Zone of his greatest deeds being the
storming of San Juan hill, and win
ming of the crucial land battle of the
Spanish war; but by emancipatine
himself from ignorance, helplessness
and poverty, and making himself a
useful, industrious and helpful citiz
en-; and knowing that there Is a Ger
tain element of many American com
munities, associated with those secret
powers-hierarchic as well as pol
itical-that are secretly bending
every energy to the destruction Of
/, American institutions and American
spirit!
Knowing these things, l repeat, ant
feeling that the statement given on
as to the acts and the confession o
Walker are one-sided and cannot nov
, be confuted by the miserable victim
of their awful savagery, and tn
meagre fact in his favor, that ha
been allowed to creep through tn
: press censorship, that he killed tn
policeman in self-defense, ], as a
, old newspaper man and man Of tn
world, expert in the analysis an
> study of human actions, base my pr
test upon the we'll known facts give
by me above.
al Next to the awful inhumanity
= such fiendish deeds, my create!