Archibald Henry Grimké

There have been a few notable instances of Southern Judges who have refused to lend their Courts to this iniquitous business, like Judge Emory Speer, of Georgia, and the late Judge Jones, of Alabama, but such examples are like angels'…

Here we have Judge Lynch's Court in full operation in the execution of one suspected Colored criminal and the manufacture at the same time of a thousand white criminals.

I think that a private inquiry into his case subsequent to his murder, pointed to his probable innocence.

But he was an object of suspicion, and that was enough to justify the act of his murderers.

If the mob failed to lynch the guilty and lynched instead an innocent man, it was so much the worse for the innocent man, not at all for the mob, however red their hands were with that innocent man's blood.

Because that innocent man was black, and because his murder helps to uphold white supremacy over millions of people whose only offense is that they are black.

Into the violent death of a man like Hamilton there might not be instituted any official inquiry at all in many parts of the South any more than if he had been a horse or a dog.

But it does not end the matter so far as the South is concerned, for the Devil will exact his share of the black deed from that section to the uttermost farthing.

In the murder of one black man, whether innocent or guilty, the South has, as in the case of Hamilton, made hundreds of white criminals, has tainted the blood of whole communities like Shreveport with the virus of lawlessness and crime.

In this same Shreveport there were five colored men lynched in ten days and eight in a year, and one white woman testified at an investigation conducted by the attorney general's office that she rode in an automobile crowded with men…

Because what a state sows that it shall surely reap.

I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.