they should not be allowed to vote. Frederick Douglass noted the political link of black men being accused of rape: "It is only since the Negro has become a citizen and a voter that this charge has been made." "[This] charge was made to blast and ruin the Negro's character as a man and as a citizen." Vigilantism and lynching were deemed necessary evils to protect whites – politically, socially and economically – from the "lawlessness" of black people. During such attacks, black men were ritually castrated as an act of further emasculation, making them "examples" of the fate of black man who dared to "step out of their place". Simply being accused of any offense against whites, regardless of evidence or the motives of the accuser, would result in the conviction, or lynching, of black people. White women, as social and economic beneficiaries of a white-dominant racial hierarchy, were not only purveyors of this treatment of black people, but in many cases, actively sought such treatment against black people. Such notions commenced an era of terrorism and lynching of black men. In the 43 years from the end of the Civil War until the attacks in Springfield, instances of labeling black men as some variation of "brute", "menace", "beast", "nigger", "rapist", "fiend", or otherwise "inferior" had been printed in newspapers across the country over 200,000 times, approximately 13 instances per day. In the 12 months before the events began in Springfield, such labeling appeared in newspapers across Illinois over 500 times, more than once per day. The frequency of black men being labeled in such negative terms accentuated the perception among whites of their very presence as a threat, a perception in which blackness, vice, and crime were conflated. In 1907, the year before the attacks in Springfield, this perceived threat was addressed on the floor of the U.S. Senate when Senator Ben Tillman delivered a rousing speech advocating the economic and political protection of white men from black men by nullifying the 14th Amendment, and the social protection of white women from black men by means of lynching: In the period after the end of Reconstruction, approximately 1897–1917, lynchings coincided with mass disenfranchisement efforts throughout the country. During this time, wealthy white men sought to keep political power from black people and poor white men sought to keep economic power from black people, while European immigrants sought to