A letter from A. M. Middlebrook to Albion Tourgée about a lynching to be held in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Sept. 28, 1894.

Albion Winegar Tourgée was a judge and lawyer active in Reconstruction politics in North Carolina as an advocate for equal rights for African Americans during the 1860s and 1870s. In 1896, Tourgée represented Homer Plessy in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and championed an anti-lynching bill in the state of Ohio. A. M. Middlebrook was a Baptist minister in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Transcript (reverse side of letter):

Ps. I have referred to the three men that they lynched at McGhee’s Section on last Saturday night for the killing of H.C. Patton a merchant. This place is near the? Miss. River where leaping of the [[object Object]] banks is going on more or less all the time and rough whitemen are continually killing each other and robbing each other. As to the helping of the lynching of these men by negroes that is a lie. Nothing of the kind was done. The mob passed in some Negro boys at a railroad hotel at that railroad junction they took the three men and hung them by the necks and tortured confessions from them.

Yours,

A.M.M.