Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/242

218 One of the judges who has been severely criticised said privately to a friend : " The public had no necessity to do this thing. In all such cases the courts for years and years have found the persons guilty when they were guilty, and there was no reason for such undue haste. " The manner in which the community at large was stirred up over the awful crime would have rendered it impossible to get an impartial jury before Septem- ber." " Representative Citizens " J. Frank Bell, one of the trustees of the workhouse, said : " The affair, I do not think, could have been avoided. The crowd was composed of representative citizens, and it could easily be seen that there was somebody at the head of the movement who had per- fect control of the mob." Chief of Police Black said he had discovered imme- diately on his arrival on the scene that he could not cope with the situation. He is authority for the state- ment that the mob had twenty pounds of dynamite with which to enforce their demands. Sheriff E. F. Stidham said he was powerless to stop the mob, since they had already left the workhouse with the prisoner when he arrived with his posse of fifty men, gathered along the way. Judge Bull, secretary of the Board of Trustees of the workhouse, who was in the jail when the mob approached, said they quickly decided after a hasty consultation to offer no resistance, since to have done so would have meant the useless sacrifice of many lives. "Don't Shoot," Was Order Warden Meserve, of the workhouse, said today : were on the upper floors. '' The mob had a competent leader, and included skilled mechanics. The man who opened White's cell, did it without damage to anything but the bolts."
 * We had instructions to shoot no one. All our guns