The North Cumberland Reformer. — 1895-08-03 (Carlisle, Cumbria, England)

LYNCHING IN THE UNITED STATES. Mr. Moneure Conway has presented to the AntiLynching Committee his report of observations on this subject made during his six months' sojourn in the United States. Mr. Conway, who is a native Virginian, says that his visit greatly strengthened his conviction of the value and importance of the English. Committee. There is a combination of forces in America tending to induce torpor with regard to the lynchings in the South. He has not seen in any daily paper of New York for several years a single editorial protest of any earnestness, against these atrocities. In Boston, "The Boston Transcript," an influential evening paper, has,ahowever, written powerfully on the subject, and in Chicago, the residence of Aliqa Wells, now Mrs. Barnett, the services of the " Chicago Inter-Ocean" have been very great. But the American conscience has not been fully aroused. At the late meeting in London of the British Women's Temperance Association an American speaker, Mrs. Rounds, said, "If we in America could only feel that when a criminal has been brought to trial and comderuned, his sentence would be carried out, we should feel very different on this question of lynching." "This," says Mr. Conway, " vise a mere imposition on the English women. Where are the instances of pardons contrary to public feeling ? In all American history there has never been an instance of pardon for a negro violator. That any one making such a misleading statement in presence of leading American women should not hav e been °heel. ed illustrates what I have said that my country women are not yet generally awakened to this frightful wrong." Before Miss Wells's mission he never heard of one resolution against lynching, but now there are hundreds. "I have no doubt," continues Mr. Conway, "that the visits of Ida Wells to England, and the formation of the Anti-Lynching Committee here have had a good effect in America. Discussion has been excited, and lawless localities have been admonished by the authorities. In some of the Southern States crime seems nearly to have disappeared, and the curious phenomenon has appeared that in these orderly States, such as Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, with their large negro populations, no suggestion is now heard of the negro's propensity for crime. The states mentioned as now comparatively free from lynching are the oldest and most influential of the Southern States, and there is good reason to hope that their refolmation will set the fashion—though it should be said that bad crime was always rare in Maryland." Mr. Conway, however, is inclined to a " meliorist " rather than an optimist view of the South generally, as, according to the New Orleans " Daily Crusader," thirty-five negroes were lynched iu the first five months of this year. At a great meeting in Faneuil Hall, the traditional " Cradle of Liberty," 'a coloured lawyer said that a fund was being raised for the legal defence of negroes under accusation in the South. "When in my speech," says Mr. Conway, "I alluded to the work of Ida Wells in England, there was much applause, and in conversation afterwards with eminent coloured men on the platform—among them a bishop—l found them all proud of Miss Wells, and indignant when I told them of the slanders transmitted for use against her in England- The addresses of Mr. Garrison and myself at this great meeting were fully reported in the Boston "Christian Register" (whose services are beyond all praise), and distributed in influential quarters throughout the South, comments and answers being invited. The result proved that there is a good deal of feeling in the South adverse to the atrocities, much of it being latent. It is not improbable that some great protest will presently arise in that region, where the millions of respectable people are disgraced by the few thousands of ruffians who hunt rind murder negroes."