Source Type: Newspaper
Place of publication: The Tuskaloosa Gazette
Date of publication: 1894
Transcript:

The South has enough to endure without having laid to her doors lynching that have never occurred. The latest instance of fascination for the record is the most fragrant one. On February 26 news was “telegraphed” from Sherman, a village in Sumter County, Ala., far removed from any railroad and telegraph station, That Deputy Sheriff John H. Cowlett, while levying upon a cow belonging to Melinda Douglass, and old negress, was instantly killed by the thirteen-year-old son of the woman, and at the woman’s order. This story was substantially correct, save that Cowlett did not die until March 4. The following day a “special” was “telegraphed” from Sherman to the New York Herald that this negro child had been filled with lead. The “dispatch” related in pathetic terms how the aged mother cut the body down and the cororner’s jury sat on same and declared that death was caused by persons to the jury unknown. It is hardly necessary to say that this last dispatch was wholly an effort of imagination, and was probably concocted by the Birmingham “fake” bureau, and fictitiously dated at a place which has no telegraph office. The denial of the truth of the story comes late and will never reach the New York Herald nor the press association which circulated the falsehood but we print it here, adding that the boy is alive and well, and is logged in the county jail at Livingston.-Mobile Register.