White's Only

"The loathsome lynch law whose application which has always been a common place thing in this country and Is now unfortunately all to frequently in the border towns neighboring our country, in which a day doesn't go by that you don't find bodies of Mexicans hanging from trees like macabre fruit."

- A History in Document, Lynching in America

 

Project by Lindsey Phillips and Christine Paterson

Sources

 


 


Personal Accounts





After the murder of a Justice of the Peace in Brownsville the Mexican culprit was lynched. Frank C. Pierce reported, “while hanging but just before his pulse had ceased to beat, a stranger with a flowing cape and slouched hat, embraced the body and lifting his own feet from the ground so as to throw the greater weight on the murderer, muttered, ‘That’s the way we used to do them in Californy.’”

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In a different case, Jesse Sumpter, a white on friendly terms with the Mexican American community related, “When apprehended, the Mexican was turned over to the girl’s father for surrender to the authorities at Uvalde. But a lynching party took the prisoner behind the hills half a mile from town, gathered wood, and began building a fire. With the fire lighted, the party commenced torturing their victim.”
According to Sumpter, “the whites mutilated the Mexican’s nose and ears and split his hands and feet with their knives. The party severed various members of his body, gouged out his eyes, and finally picked him up and threw him into the fire. The Mexican, still alive, tried to scramble out of the fire, only to be flung back into the flames. There he was kept until his life was extinguished.