Disputing Facts of Ptomey Case

Judge Miller’s charge to the Grand Jury was forceful, direct and squarely to the point, nothing was left unsaid to make their duty plain and thoroughly understood. He sets the pace in Wilcox that all counties could follow with satisfactory results, get witnesses before the Grand Jury, and reach existing evils through your indictments, get facts and you can get results. Wholesale arraignment in a Grand Jury report, composed of “hot air” and eloquence and no true bills to back them up, only tends to bring adverse criticism and shows the county up in a bad light abroad, and besides the unenviable reputation it gives to a good county, it gives the sensational, South-hating writers of the Northern press a chance to unload their sulphurous brain and hiss their venom at a people unjustly accused by misleading or implied evidence. The following clipping from “The World To-day Magazine” published at 67 Wabash Avenue Chicago, will give some idea as to how facts are distorted, and charges brought against a people and community that do not exist only in the fertile brain of a prejudiced writer. In their calender of crime in the South for the month of March on page 564, they credit Wilcox county with the hanging of Will and Ed. Ptomey, for fatally shooting Prof. Claude Hardy of Pine Apple, when the facts show that Prof. Hardy was not fatally shot, (no fault of the Ptomey’s, however,) nor has the Ptomey negroes been hanged by a mob or otherwise, Claude Hardy was in Camden Monday, looking very much alive, and Will Ptomey is in the Mobile county jail, put there by the Wilcox County Sheriff, (an unnecessary precaution) but, put there all the same, who brought him from Waco, Texas, and Ed. Ptomey is still at large and in Texas when last heard from. Such publications are unjust and injurious. Wilcox county is composed of good people, she has good lands, and wants imigration of the right kind to come to the county, she guarantees them protection and fair treatment and such a tissue of falsehoods written, no matter where or how they get their data is as misleading as it is false and does an irreparable injury to a law-abiding people.