I have stated before that it is the labor question, more than any other, which causes the Colored people to suffer greater indignities than any other class of Americans in this country, and I believe it is not on account of their color, so much as it is the desire of white laborers to do the work and to receive pay which might go to him. It is an admitted fact that these same laborers or mechanics in search of a job, will go South, where the Colored men have charge of such work, or nearly so, and will not only work with them, but hire to them and be bossed by them. Foreigners, seeking employment, have gone to the South in large numbers during the last five years, and finding there the typical poor whites, who are the ancient enemies of the Colored people and ever ready to do them harm, have united with them on the color line and raised that old familiar cry that “this is a white man’s country, that white men must and shall rule it; no Negro domination over white men.” When that feeling has grown sufficiently strong to cover the real designs of the vicious elements, and to deceive the better class, then it is that the charges against some harmless, helpless Colored man are trumped up, and they lynch him. So rapid is the mob in forming and blood-thirsty in its murderous howls, that the better class is powerless to assist the helpless victim while alive, and when dead the charges which were preferred by a poor white man or a foreigner, for a mere trifle or sinister purpose, are magnified until it would appear that the victim was a savage brute and deserved the punishment inflicted. So brutal are these charges made to appear after the death of the victim, that the better class of southern white people, allow these lynchers to escape punishment, upon the ground, I suppose, that they had rid the community of a bad character.
The lynching of the Colored people is always the work of the poor white laboring class, and as a striking incident tending to show the facts, I call attention to the list of the killed and wounded at Roanoke, Va., in September, 1893, when the State militia, in upholding the dignity of the law of the State, fired into a mob, killing and wounding thirty men, twenty-four of whom were laborers, track-walkers, section hands, and employes in the machine shops of that city. I take these figures from the published report made at the time of the occurrence; and to my mind one thing is made plain by this incident, which is this, that it was not the aristocracy that was doing the lynching at the South, or any other part of the country, though they are held morally responsible in the eyes of the nation.