ple have blackened their faces
and committed a crime, knowing that some Negro would be suspected and
mobbed for it. In other cases it is known that where Negroes have
committed crimes, innocent men have been lynched and the guilty ones
have escaped and gone on committing more crimes.

"Within the last twelve months there have been seventy-one cases of
lynching, nearly all of colored people. Only seventeen were charged
with the crime of rape. Perhaps they are wrong to do so, but colored
people do not feel that innocence offers them security against
lynching. They do feel, however, that the lynching habit tends to give
greater security to the criminal, white or black."

Mr. Washington often pointed out how the lynching of blacks leads
inevitably to the lynching of whites and how the lynching of guilty
persons of either race inevitably leads to the lynching of innocent
persons of both races.

Let it not be supposed that Booker Washington confined his
condemnation of lynching to the comparatively safe cover of the pages
of an eminently respectable Northern magazine. Some years ago when he
was on a speaking trip in the State of Florida two depraved Negroes in
Jacksonville committed an atrocious murder. The crime aroused such
intense race feeling that Mr. Washington's friends foresaw the
likelihood of a lynching and, fearing for his safety, urged him to
cancel his engagements in Jacksonville, where he was due to speak
before white as well as black audiences within a few days. This he
refused to do and insisted that because there was special racial
friction it was especially necessary that he should keep his
engagements in the city. While he was driving to the hall where he was
to address a white audience the automobile of one of his Negro escorts
was stopped by a crowd of excited white men who angrily demanded that
Booker Washington be handed over to them. When they found he was not
in the car they allowed it to pass on without molesting the Negro
occupant, who enjoyed to an unusual degree the confidence and respect
of both races in the city. What they would have done had they found
Booker Washington one may only conjecture. At about the same time the
Negro murderers were captured. The howls of the infuriated mob on its
way to the jail to lynch the accused murderers could be heard in the
distance from the hall where Mr. Washington spoke. Without referring
in any way to the event which was taking place at the time Mr.
Wash