JUNE 4, 1899
The Rev. D.A. Graham stepped to his A.M.E. pulpit in Indianapolis. He often read from the Gospels or spoke about the love of Jesus, but on this day, he decried the mistreatment of Black Americans.
Over the past seven years, there had been more than 1,200 lynchings of Black Americans, but nothing had been done to halt them, he said. The newly formed Afro-American Council had just held a National Day of Fasting and Prayer to protest the lynchings of Black Americans:
“We are arrested and lodged in jails on the most frivolous suspicion of being the perpetrators of most hideous and revolting crimes, and, regardless of established guilt, mobs are formed of ignorant, vicious, whiskey-besotted men, at whose approach the keys of these jails and prisons are surrendered and the suspicioned party is ruthlessly forced from the custody of the law and tortured, hanged, shot, butchered, dismembered, and burned in the most fiendish manner.”…