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A MATTER OF FACT AND TRUTH.Savannah Morning News. 1In a letter to the New York Sun of May 21, written by William H. Holden of New London, Conn., appears this paragraph:“Recently a negro soldier who had recently returned from overseas to his home in Blakely, Ga., was ac-#cused of wearing his uniform too long and ordered to take it off or leave town. On his refusal to comply with the demand he was brutally murdered, lynched by a mob composed of the usual prominent white citizens, who ignore all laws and statutes, are upheld as benefactors of the white race by the states in which they reside, who regard the constitution as a scrap of paper and whose brutalities have never been surpassed by the Hun in Northern France and Belgium. Will the government ever make any effort to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice?”“If you see it in tae Sun, it’s so,” was a saying once. “Except the editorials and communications concerning the South, is one amendment suggested. Because it was in the Sun, there came to Georgia readers an immediate suspicion of the statement. The Morning News, to get the record of South Georgia straight, wired C. M. Deal, the mayor of Blakely, for the facts and received this reply:“No negro has been lynched in this county because he refused to take off his soldier uniform. Wilbur Little, who was reported lynched, is living and working on the farm of Judge R. H. Sheffield in this county. Cliff Hughes, a negro soldier, was robbed and killed by Nolan Williamson, a white man, who began life sentence twenty days later for hiscrime.”The statement of the Connecticut contributor to the Sun is one of a long list of deliberate misrepresentations of the facts. The waiter invokes a law that will protect the uniform and the black man. There is such a law and the concise statement of the mayor of Blakely indicates how the law is expeditiously enforced in this State. But there is no law to protect the character of communities against the repeated, malicious, Slanderous, deliberate lies that are eagerly told and avidly read in sections where the crimes against law and order, even against the colored man on account of his race, are matters of almost daily record.Georgia does not claim to be innocent of wrong doing at all times. There are instances of lawlessness and there is individual law’-breaking which is at times heinous. It is not true that there is more crime in Georgia than in other States. It is true that there are many instances like the one cited by Mayor Deal in which the courts, with a white judge, white officers, white jurors and colored witnesses mete prompt and s?-vere punishment to white men for crimes against negroes. The question of color had nothing to do with the case. There wras a crime; it was proved; the criminal was sentenced— and is serving his term.It is also true that there are occasionally negroes “reported lynched/* The report usually starts from a ma-licious or an irresponsible source. But there are waiting ones, narrow between the eyes, prejudice and jaundice soaking their systems, venom under their tongues, ready to seize every rumor and make it the basis for a gross calumny, a bald libel, o\i a community, a state, an entire section.One day the world will calmly judge between the people of a county in which a white man is speedily brought to the severity of justice for a crime committed against a negro, a people endeavoring to deal fairly and do justice and enforce its lawns—and the cowardly assassin of the reputation of a whole section who is greedy for rumors and publishes, without the thought of obtaining the facts, flatly asserted reports that are as black in their falsity as they are mendacious in their purpose.[lt;•*c(
Newspaper Details
Blakely Early County News
Blakely, Georgia, US
Thu, May 29, 1919
Page 4
Full Page
Clipped by
Roy S.
USA 28 Jul 2020
Other Publications Near Blakely, Georgia
Blakely Early County News
