St. Louis' massacre in 1917 of Negroes

"In New York, the Age republished an eyewitness account by a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch [July 3, 1917]. "For an hour and half last evening I saw the massacre of helpless Negroes at Broadway and Fourth streets, in downtown St. Louis, where a black skin was a death warrant... I saw man after man, with hands raised, pleading for his life, surrounded by groups of men--men who had never seen him before and knew nothing about him except that he was black--and saw them administer the historic sentence of intolerance, death by stoning. I saw one of these men almost dead from a savage shower of stones, hanged with a clothes line, and when it broke, hanged with a rope which held. Within a few paces of the pole from which he was suspended, four other Negroes lay dead or dying, another having been removed dead, a short time before... I saw Negro women begging for mercy and pleading that they had harmed no one, be set upon by white women of the baser sort, who laughed and answered in coarse sallies of men as they beat their faces and breasts with fists, stones, and sticks." P.100-101, HARLEM'S HELL FIGHTERS, by Stephen L. Harris, (Potomac Books, Washington, D.C.: 2003)