Richmond Times, 15 March 1891, page 1: Foul murder avenged: the New Orleans prison killings

Front page of The Times, Richmond, Virginia, Sunday, 15 March 1891. The headline, “Foul Murder Avenged. Assassins of Chief Hennessy Pay Death’s Penalty,” continues with a deck that names two citizens, Parkerson and Wickliffe, as the leaders of what it calls “indignant but orderly citizens.” The dispatch, datelined New Orleans, 14 March, says eleven men were lynched, shot or hanged at the parish prison after a mass meeting, and reports the speeches made there. The headline was confirmed on the page image.

The headline calls the men “convicted and indicted.” The Cheyenne Daily Leader and Savannah Morning News pages of the same date report that the jury had acquitted six defendants and returned a mistrial as to three, so “convicted” conflicts with them. In the passages read for this record, this page refers to “the finding of the jury in the murder trial yesterday” as the cause of the meeting, and does not give the verdicts.

The page endorses the killings and uses language about Italians that is not quoted here. It is filed only as evidence of how the lynching was reported in Virginia, not as a source of facts about the victims or the trial.