In a 1905 article journalist Ray Stannard Baker described a lynching in Springfield, Ohio. His series of articles on lynching in the North and the South provoked criticism not merely of lynch mobs but of law officers who failed to stop them. Baker's articles were collected in his Following the Color Line (1908):

They murdered the Negro in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they dragged him to the principal business street and hung him to a telegraph-pole, afterward riddling his lifeless body with revolver shots.

That was the end of that! Mob justice administered! And there the Negro hung until daylight the next morning — an unspeakably grisly, dangling horror, advertising the shame of the town. His head was shockingly crooked to one side, his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs, exposed in places his bare body: he dripped blood. And, with...