Jasper County Democrat, Volume 7, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 August 1904 — NEGROES BURNED TO DEATH BY MOB [ARTICLE]

NEGROES BURNED TO DEATH BY MOB

Frenzied Georgians Wreak'Summary Judgment on Hodges Family Murderers. Savannah, Ga., Aug. 18.—Despite the prayerful exhortation of the Rev. H. A. Hodges, whose brother, his brother’s wife and children were murdered and burned by the fiendish atrocities committed by Will Oato and Paul Reed, two negroes convicted of the crime at Statesboro, this state, a wild mob of frenzied men charged the state militia guarding the courthouse during the afternoon, overpowered the soldiers and dragged the terror-stricken Reed and Cato from the officers. Shouting with glee at their task, the mob beat, kicked, and dragged the ter-ror-stricken negroes to a point two miles from Statesboro, on the road toward the Hodges farm, where the two negroes were burned at the stake by the mob. No such lynching bee has occurred before In Georgia. With communications during the early evening severed between Statesboro and surrounding points, suspense in Savannah and Atlanta was at fever pitch lest the mobs, but more hungry for blood at the death of the two negroes, would assail the jail to get at the thirteen other negroes, men and women, now confined there awaiting trial as accomplices in the Hodges crime. Later.—A telephone message to the Savannah Press from Statesboro says Handy Bell, the negro implicated as ringleader in the murder of the Hodges family, by confession of the negroes burned, was burned at the stake a few miles from Statesboro late at night