Following Lynching, Editor Calls for Peace in 'Dear Old Warrenton' Jan. 25, 1921

Our dear old Warrenton is now in the limelight for the first time since Horace Greely was married there in Emmanuel Church away back in ‘48. This time it has had a lynching—two negroes being thelynchees. We are regretful over this thing. The old town has been peaceful for the near 200 years she has nestled in the low lying hills of the county that was named for the hero of Bunker Hill soon after he fell.

Warren had about the largest slave population in the State when Lincoln issued his emancipaton proclamation. Even in our childhood the colored people greatly outnumbered the white. When they voted they shared county offices with the whites on practically an even basis. But the negroes of Warren were good people. They worked their fields, plied their trades, schooled their children, accumulated wealth; they were respected and duly respectful. In all the history of the county there is but one instance of a negro committing the nameless crime against woman—and in that instance the offender was a Yankee product and would have suffered lynching at the hands of the native negroes had not the State protected him.

The present trouble is most unfortunate. We sincerely trust that there will be no further bloodshed. It started over a dispute about a dime’s worth of apples at Norlina, a new railway town some distance form the old settlement that has left its mark upon American history. Follwong the dispute five white men and three negroes were badly wounded. Eleven negroes were subsequently arrested and lodged in jail. It was two of these that a mob took from the old prison, carried to a hill near town and shot to death.

Newspaper dispatches state that a general round up of negroes in the old town disclosed the fact that many of them were armed. Some had barricaded themselves in the basement of their fine stone Episcopal church. This leads some to believe that they were prepared to attack the white people. Knowing the negroes of Warrenton as well as we do, we cannot believe this is true, for there are few among them who have anything but the highest regard for the white people who have helped them to attain the unusual success that has come to the industrial activities and their high mark of intelligence. White people of Warren have given the negro an ideal environment for his development, and we cannot think that such an environment has bred men (line obscured) is good in that ??? old county whose sons—wherever they may wander—retain a deeper love than do most folk for their mother county.

We repeat that we sincerely trust that both white and colored people of Warren will regain their sanity and return to the pursuits of which they lived in such harmonious spirits.

(From the editorial page of The Dunn Dispatch, Jan. 25, 1921, L. Busbee Pope, publisher)