Tom Bost in Greensboro News
Raleigh, Feb. 10—“The prisoners sought to destroy the very process of government upon which they now rely,” Governor McLean said this evening when he turned down 6,000 prayers for clemency and sent the 15 Buncombe County near-lynchers of Alvin Mansel and assailants of the county jail to their punishment in the State’s prison and on the county roads.
His excellency’s power statement must have been rooted in a mob scene in which that great Presbyterian Paul turned upon High Priest Ananias, who had caused the Apostle to be smitten in the mouth, and gave the religious rascal this:
“God shall smite thee, thou whited wall; for sittest though to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary to the law?” The Buncombe crowd smote the jail in defiance of the law and then ha the impudence to invoke the law to save themselves.
Governor McLean had few backstanders in this case. There was such terrific pressure on him as no executive has ever had. The executive utters a beautiful sympathy for the innocent families of these grotesque defenders of the home. Just offhand we would guess that one of these days his excellency will be thinking of some state action for the smitten members of society, victimized by novice or wrong doing of their own. He gives the hint to the Asheville people. But he cannot turn the State over to the mob.
Most of the men who must serve there terms seem to have friends. Various of them had good records. Not a few of the fools seemed to think that they were really virtuous in beating down a jail in the effort to lynch a prisoner who had been taken by no enterprise of their own. The governor had been importuned from all angles. He had been asked to save the negro, his victim joining in the request. But Governor McLean quickly sensed the situation—the friends of the mob were behind the woman.
Governor McLean is delighted at the resistance of Buncombe’s officers who were protecting a negro indicted for a capital offense against a white woman He I s pleased to see the anti-mob spirit which was shown in the Buncombe and Martin County cases.
From the front page of The Concord Daily Tribune, February 11, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-02-11/ed-1/seq-1/
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