In May 1918, a white mob lynched 11 black men in Georgia after the murder of a white farmer. The distraught widow of one of the victims, who was 8 months pregnant, protested. The next day the mob hung her upside down, doused her with petrol and set her on fire. One man slashed open her abdomen, tearing the unborn child out and beating it to death.
These particularly brutal crimes incensed a young Harlem-based African-American journalist, Asa Philip Randolph, who had founded a successful monthly magazine, the Messenger, the previous year. Randolph published an editorial demanding that the government make ‘Georgia safe for the Negro’ before sending troops to fight on the western front in France. He was imprisoned for this attack on US policy during wartime. None of the people involved in the mass lynching were ever brought to trial.
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