Negroes

1 One night in April or May, his daughter saw someone's hand make the curtain which was drawn tightly across her window bulge and ran to the adjoining room in her night clothes where he and his son were sitting. He ran around the house one way and his son ran the other way and they found a Negro under a workbench within six or eight feet of the window holding a piece of plank before his face— begging them not to shoot. 2 The Negro was dead when the doctors examined him. They found upon his belly bruises: he died, the doctor said, of peritonitis. The jailer testified that the Negro had been brought to the jail charged with burglary; but no warrant for his arrest was produced and the jailer did not know—or tell— who brought him. The Negro said that a crowd of men had taken him from a store to the woods and whipped him with "a buggy trace." He was not treated by a doctor, the jailer, or anybody: just put into the jail and left there to die. The doctor who saw him first—on a Monday— did nothing for him and said that he would not die of a his beating; but he did die of it on Wednesday.