Anti-Lynching Bill [excerpt]

     Buffalo had an attempted lynching once. On the night of the day William McKinley was shot, a mob estimated at between 20,000 and 50,000, its leaders carrying a section of telephone pole to be used as a battering ram, swung down Franklin street [sic] fully determined to smash the old police headquarters and summarily execute Leon Czolgosz, the assassin. Inspector John Martin led a few dozen police reserves out of headquarters and lined them up, a pitifully thin line, across the street from curb to curb.
     “At the word Fire, shoot and shoot to kill,” came the command of the inspector. Men in the forefront of that mob heard those words and knew they meant business. The thin line of policemen met the massed ranks of the mob, nightsticks rained blows on members of the mob, and the mob scattered and that ended the lynching party.