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.