morning terrorized Winston-Salem in their effort to lynch a black man, innocent of the crime of assault for which he had been arrested on suspicion … and incidentally killed four people, one a little white girl. The Mayor of the city acted with promptitude and courage, calling out the Home Guards and the fire department … nearly every policeman was hurt. The Governor rushed troops from Camp Green at Charlotte. For many days cannon guarded the streets.³⁵

RACE RIOTS

Race riots are more than mass lynchings; they frequently become local wars against Negroes. They involve murder, whipping, deportation and destruction of property. The elements in such conflicts are too complex to be given here, and the list too long. They are not confined to the South. Some of the most serious have been in Springfield, Illinois, Chicago, and in Washington, D. C. Perhaps the most shocking of modern race riots occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. It is summed up thus:

On the 2d of July, 1917, the City of East St. Louis in Illinois added a foul and revolting page to the history of all the world … a mob of white men, women and children burned and destroyed at least $400,000 worth of property belonging to both whites and Negroes; drove 6,000 Negroes out of their homes; and deliberately murdered by shooting, burning and hanging between one hundred and two hundred human beings who were black.³⁶

The disastrous effects of such riots have been officially recorded in a report on the Atlanta riots in August, 1906, by a white committee headed by W. G. Cooper, secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, and George Muse, a prominent merchant. The sensational exaggeration of reported attacks on white women brought on a clash that lasted several days, with this result: