2 - “Of the Coming of John”

Summary

On June 22, 1903, George White of Wilmington, Delaware, was at the workhouse while the pastor of Olivet Presbyterian Church was giving a sermon. Suddenly, several members of the community broke in to abduct Mr. White, who was actually a black man accused of rape and murder. He was tied to a stake, burned, and riddled with bullets. When the Chamber of Commerce of Wilmington met a few days later, it refused to pass a resolution condemning the lynching but instead passed one against forest fires. Their unwillingness to take a public stance against lynching was paralleled on the national level.

In 1899 George Henry White (no relation), a former slave, a Congressman (1897-1901) and the only African American in the House of Representatives, introduced the first anti-lynching bill in Congress. This resolution would have made lynching of a citizen a federal crime. Pointing out that most lynchings were committed by Anglo-Americans against African Americans, White argued that lynching was an extra-legal method used to terrorize them. In spite of his endeavors and passionate plea, the bill was defeated. In fact, 1901 saw the lynching of eighty-six black Americans. In 1902, during the consideration of his “Philippines Bill,” President Theodore Roosevelt intimated that lynching was taking place in the Philippines; and in 1903 he publicly commented on the lynching of George White. That year, the same year in which The Souls of Black Folk was published, eighty-four African Americans were known to have been lynched in the United States.