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"That black-" -Paul Laurence Dunbar, "The Lynching of Jube Benson" 236
Enthroned upon the mighty truth
Within the confines of the laws,
True Justice seeth not the man,
But only hears his cause.
Unconscious of his creed or race,
She cannot see, but only weighs;
For Justice with unbandaged eyes
Would be oppression in disguise. -Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Justice"
On December 6, 1898, Richard Coleman's mother came to gather his ashes in Maysville, Kentucky, from beneath a sapling that had been chosen as his execution site weeks before. Surrounded by more than 2,000 persons, this "trusted employee of Farmer James Lashbrook" was whipped, stabbed, dragged, and finally bound to a tree. His eyes were doused with acid, and then peppered, while his body was repeatedly pushed into the blazing flames surrounding him ("Negro Burned" 1). Indicted for allegedly killing his female employer, Coleman, the murdered man, stands among the countless lynched African Americans. Their deaths would be enumerated within the daily lists posted on the front pages of the Richmond Planet, and precipitate a more than 50-year anti-lynching movement that would end without federal prohibitions against mob violence, without substantive reparations for victim's families, and without jurisdictional changes that might yield impartial trials in the federal court system.
Published in the year lynching reached its peak, claiming over 200 lives, Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases (1892) and Frances E. W. Harper's "Duty to Dependent Races" (1892) joined numerous black protests against lynching. Black social, religious, labor, and political organizations such as the Western Union Baptist Association passed resolutions challenging the US government not simply to protect black life, but to protect citizens who "were being burned, lynched, mobbed, and denied every right as men and citizens ... without regard to law or justice, without a word of condemnation, advice, or exhortation from the Chief Magistrate of this Nation" ("Negroes Ask Protection" 1). Nine months after Coleman's death in Kentucky, Paul Laurence Dunbar's native state of Ohio suffered a blow to its own legislative sanctions against lynching. The Ohio State Supreme court struck down the Smith law, an anti-lynching bill, in a case brought against the assailants of "Click" Mitchell ("Ohio Anti-Lynching" 5). By the following year, Ohioans would read...