Murder in The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer

The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer has a problematic way of portraying race particularly black people. As the egregious example in the Sex and Murder page demonstrated, they are not above racebaiting or sensation.  In 1880 it was easy to see the racism in the paper, however in 1900 the paper seems to have turned around and come out in support of blacks

The above articles demonstrate the problematic portrayal of blacks in the paper. In both cases, the black men are portrayed as behaving oddly or downright sinister. In "Four Black Men Hanged Today" the paper writes that black convict George Price's only regret "was that the detective and others
escaped him." Furthermore he "showed no contrition whatever, and repeatedly said that if it was to do over again he would kill his employer just as he did before." All this is done to paint Price in a very unsympathetic light.

The second article is not as obvious about its racebaiting. A colored man was about to be lynched but he escaped and climbed the tree and perched himself on a branch. The paper writes he he sat on the branch "unconcerned and defiant" invoking a Cheshire cat like image. Once he was pulled down he given ten minutes to pray (which might be an attempt to portray the mob as somewhat civil) but as the paper put it:

"With the June daredevil coolness he replied that he didn't want the half of it. He laughed, He was not only offensively wicked but insulting."

These two cases illustrate the racism in the reporting, as the black men are portrayed as cold calculating killers.  

But there is a change in 1900, the paper seems to have reversed it's previous stance on lynching. In "The Craze of Lynching" the paper goes out of its way to condemn the lynching of two black men. "There is not any manner of doubt but that a fearful wrong was done" the paper writes of the lynching. Further the paper claims the two black men lynched were innocent in no uncertain terms: 

"Not so much as a title of evidence pointed to the complicity of two men in the outrage and murder of Christina Winterstein; but on the contrary, every vestige of testimony obtained or obtainable pointed to the diabolical crime as being the work of one man."

There was surprising for me to read, though this was a republican newspaper in the time when republicans were associated with progressivism. It was a nice change of pace to the first two articles.