whole city into a ferment of the wildest excitement and despair. Three reputable members of the race had been confined in the county jail for defending themselves and property from an attack by white ruffians masquerading in citizens clothes as officers of the law. Several of these ruffians had been wounded. A mob of white ruffians proceeded to the jail and securing the three Afro-Americans did them to death. Panic seized upon the people. Confidence in the legal machinery of county and State was undermined and many began to move away from the mob-infected city, encouraged thereto by the Free Speech and the ministers of the gospel.
After these brutal murders the white papers of Memphis, in the mad effort to placate the mob sentiment, teemed with the vilest utterances that ever disgraced the freedom of speech. They wrought the white masses to a state of absolute frenzy. It was in this state of the public temper that a paragraph in the Free Speech was taken by a daily paper and distorted into an excuse for calling on the white citizens to mob the proprietors of Free Speech. To this end a meeting was held. The business manager of the paper fled for his life, and Miss Wells, the editor, who was in Philadelphia at the time, was warned that she could not return to the city without danger to her life.
As in the old days at Alton, Ill., her splendid business was destroyed, the voice of a brave champion of right, justice and law was silenced in the home of oppression, and free speech, which John Milton has made the heritage of Anglo-Saxon-speaking races, was strangled to death. The concerted attempt of many Southern white
