In spring of 1897 African American editors were outraged when President William McKinley ignored the lynching of an Ohio man, “Click” Mitchell. In somewhat sensational style, the Indianapolis Freeman depicted the mob scene, with insets showing the prisoner being removed from jail and lynched. The Richmond Planet noted in its own pages that the unmasked lynchers had murdered the innocent Mitchell in broad daylight: “No lynching in the South was ever more daring or atrocious.”
Following the lynching of "Click" Mitchell in spring of 1897, African American editors criticized both President William McKinley’s silence, and Booker T. Washington’s suggestion that lynch victims were “invariably vagrants”—troublemakers who deserved their fate. Many African American newspapers expressed outrage that lynch law, in accepting the accusations of the lynchers without due process for the accused, violated fundamental tenets of American and English legal tradition. The Cleveland Gazette used few illustrations generally; here, the “Not Guilty” headline, combined with a portrait of Click Mitchell while alive, emphasized the travesty of justice inherent in mob violence.