Note (return) — Chapter XV

Crime demands justification, and it is not surprising that after such violence as that which we have described, and after several states had passed disfranchising acts, there appeared in the first years of the new century several publications especially defamatory of the race. Some books unfortunately descended to a coarseness in vilification such as had not been reached since the Civil War. From a Bible House in St. Louis in 1902 came The Negro a Beast, or In the Image of God, a book that was destined to have an enormous circulation among the white people of the poorer class in the South, and that of course promoted the mob spirit.220 Contemporary and of the same general tenor were R.W. Shufeldt's The Negro and W.B. Smith's The Color Line, while a member of the race itself, William Hannibal Thomas, published a book, The American Negro, that was without either faith or ideal and as a denunciation of the Negro in America unparalleled in its vindictiveness and exaggeration.221