This Mob Will Surely Take My Life : Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871-1947 9781441137227, 9781847252388

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THIS MOB WILL SURELY TAKE MY LIFE

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This Mob Will Surely Take My Life Lynchings in the Carolinas

Bruce E. Baker

Continuum UK, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX Continuum US, 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © Bruce E. Baker 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. First published 2008 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84725 238 8

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall, Great Britain

Contents

Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1

1 Reconstruction Violence and the Foundations of the Lynching Era: Unionville, S.C., 1871

9

2 Black Politics and Lynching after Reconstruction: Giles Good, Yorkville, S.C., 1887

43

3 Rape and Lynching in the New South: Manse Waldrop, Central, S.C., 1887

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4 North Carolina’s Turn Against Lynching: J. V. Johnson, Wadesboro, N.C., 1906

93

5 Lies and Lynching: Richard Puckett, Laurens, S.C., 1913

121

6 A Wartime Lynching: Rev. Watson T. Sims, Sharon, S.C., 1917

145

7 A Disgrace to North Carolina: Oliver Moore, Tarboro, N.C., 1930

165

Conclusion

189

Notes

193

Bibliography

219

Index

233

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Illustrations

1

Map of North and South Carolina

2

2

William H. Wallace

10

3

Samuel Nuckles

13

4

Unionville Jail

27

5

Turkey Creek

44

6

Map of York, Chester and Union Counties

46

7

Lynching of Giles Good and others, 1887

69

8

Railway yard and coal chute in Greenville, similar to the one in central

76

9

Judge Thomas J. Shaw

106

10

J. V. Johnson

111

11

Governor Robert B. Glenn

113

12

Walter Meeks, H. D. Kendall, Sr, and H. D. Kendall, Jr

115

13

Laurens Cotton Mill Store

124

14

Richard Puckett

128

15

Governor Coleman L. Blease

129

16

Camp Jackson

151

17

Tobacco farmers near Wilson, North Carolina

173

18

Arthur F. Raper

182

19

Oliver Moore, published in the Raleigh News and Observer

185

For George E. Strait, Daniel W. Patterson and George B. Tindall,who taught me how to tell stories about the South

Acknowledgements

While filling out forms and comprehending and following guidelines are hardly the most intellectually stimulating part of the research process, they are the invaluable activities that clear the space and provide the resources for the more interesting part of the endeavour, so I want to begin these acknowledgements by thanking the head of my history department, Justin Champion, for signing the various bits of paper that helped this project along cheerfully and promptly and fending off the various unseen forces that can stifle a young academic’s energy and creativity. David Cesarani provided sage advice and solid encouragement as I applied for funding, and Hitesh Patel and Lotte Boon of Royal Holloway’s Research and Enterprise Office were, as always, helpful, diligent and hard-working. All this effort paid off with a small research grant from the British Academy which made it possible for me to spend seven weeks in the United States in the summer of 2006 carrying out the bulk of the research for this book. I am very grateful for this support. Despite my list of publications over the past decade, lynching is not a topic that I sought out but rather one that I was directed to by my teacher, Daniel W. Patterson of the University of North Carolina. For getting me interested in understanding why and how people good in so many ways could do such terrible things and what it all meant to them, and not least for making me a much better writer than I was before I studied with him, I must offer profound thanks. Other teachers and mentors, connected one way or another with Chapel Hill, have also taught me much about lynching through conversations as well as their own scholarship. First among these is Fitz Brundage, whose peregrinations eventually brought him to Chapel Hill, and, of course, Joel Williamson and Jacquelyn Hall, who had been studying lynching there for quite a long time already. For a few years between finishing my M.A. and starting my Ph.D., I

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had the opportunity to correspond with a number of the new generation of scholars of lynching including Amy Wood, Bill Carrigan and Michael Pfeifer, all of whom were doing exciting and fresh work that has now matured into a body of scholarship that is reshaping the field. I had in the back of my mind the idea that I wanted to write a full book on lynching after finishing my first book, but it was Tony Morris of Hambledon and London whose interest prompted me to think more seriously about the project and formulate the book before you. His colleague Martin Sheppard gave me good advice in the earliest stages of the book. On a visit to London, Bryant Simon and I spent an enjoyable morning visiting Starbucks and talking about lynching and the fascinating problems of trying to write effectively, imaginatively and interestingly about it. Ben Hayes at Continuum has been both encouraging and patient, the ideal balance for an effective editor. Although some of the cases I write about here are ones I discussed in my earlier writings on lynching, all of them required significant amounts of new research, and the staff of a number of archives in North Carolina and South Carolina, some of them old friends and others new to me, provided invaluable assistance. Laura Clark Brown at the Southern Historical Collection was her usual helpful self. The microfilm room at Duke University’s labyrinthine Perkins Library was cool and quiet and efficient. The North Carolina State Archives turned up some very helpful materials for me, and the welcome and expertise at the South Carolina Archives and History Center sustained me in this project as it has in several before. Ola Jean Kelly of the Union County Historical Museum went far out of her way to find copies of some important primary sources for me. In Wadesboro, the librarians and the courthouse staff pointed me towards materials I needed to see. The Carolina First South Carolina Room of the Hughes Main Library in Greenville is a wealth of material for the researcher, and the people who work there are uniformly knowledgeable and helpful. Of course, once the writing began back in England, I discovered all those things I had forgotten or just plain didn’t know. Jim Farmer explained Presbyterians and despair to me, and Barbara Hahn filled in useful details on cotton farming from her new home on the Texas plains. Allan Charles

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helped me track down sources he had used in his comprehensive history of Union County. A chance encounter with Douglas Eckberg in the archives put me in touch with Elaine Parsons, whose brilliant work on the Ku Klux Klan in Union County overlaps with my own, a connection that has been helpful and thought-provoking for both of us, I hope. Hyman Rubin and Nicholas Butler via the new H-SC discussion list gave me important bits of information about local government during Reconstruction in South Carolina, and Scott Nelson cast a useful eye over parts of the work in addition to giving me ideas on writing readable history for an audience broader than just other historians. Matt Harper helped me out with some questions about African American masculinity. Having a friend in Chapel Hill to chase down stray items in the libraries there is a luxury to the historian of the American South, and I must thank Kerry Taylor for sending some newspaper clippings my way via the marvels of modern file sharing and reading one of the chapters. Claude Clegg generously provided comments and assistance on the 1906 chapter. Jim Good helped me make sense of how the various folks named Good in southwest York County were related. Before this project took on its current form, some people had read some of my earlier work and contacted me with information and questions about a couple of the cases I wound up discussing here. Nathania A. Branch Miles and Zachary Branch are both descendants of Giles Good, and I hope they will approve of the work I have done to try to flesh out their ancestor’s story. Rhonda Krebs emailed me from Tarboro about the Oliver Moore case, and though I have never been able to get back in touch, the message had a lot to do with convincing me to look at how this case could be useful in discussing some of the things I wanted to cover in this study. Having a congenial environment in which to write is always important, and while most of the writing happened in the mundane surrounds of my home and my office, I was fortunate to find a few pubs which combined a peaceful atmosphere with hospitality and good beer: the Angel in St Giles High Street, the John Snow in Soho, the Grog and Gruel in Fort William, and the Happy Man in Englefield Green. Even better, though, was the home cooking provided by my mother, Peggy S. Baker, for two weeks of the research trip. My wife, Amanda Gillespie Baker, had much to bear

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during the research and writing of this book, my seven-week absence in summer 2006 the least of it.

Abbreviations

AME ASWPL CIC FBI FWP IRSS KKK NAACP SCSL YMCA YWCA

African Methodist Episcopal Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching Commission on Interracial Cooperation Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Writers’ Project Institute for Research in Social Science Ku Klux Klan National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Southern Commission for the Study of Lynching Young Men’s Christian Association Young Women’s Christian Association

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Introduction

On a spring evening in 1887, a black man named Mose Lipscomb said to his neighbour and friend Giles Good, ‘Just as I told you, old man; we’ll soon be together in glory.’ A moment later, a white man spurred the horse Lipscomb was sitting on, leaving him to drop a couple of feet before the rope around his neck went taut and slowly strangled him. Such a scene was distressingly common in the South in the late nineteenth century and even in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the five men who died just west of York, South Carolina, that evening should have been glad they were spared the kind of torture meted out to many lynching victims. Still, if the comment Lipscomb made just before he died was reported accurately (it had to have come from one of the men who killed him), we might want to know more about what it meant. Why had Lipscomb told Good they were doomed? Why, for that matter, would Good have thought they were not? Filling in the background of this remark requires looking around through a variety of records, piecing together a story that is usually not told, the story of how a given lynching happened and why. This Mob Will Surely Take My Life does this for seven lynchings that occurred in North Carolina and South Carolina between 1871 and 1930. Besides originally being one colony, North Carolina and South Carolina have some of the similarities we might expect of two states that border one another. Both have a long stretch of coastline on the Atlantic, though South Carolina has nothing to compare to the spidery string of barrier islands cast far out from the mainland that make up the Outer Banks. Moving west, the coastal plain occupies about a third of each state, flat, hot, broken by swamps and broad, blackwater rivers and, till King Cotton was deposed, the source of great wealth for the owners of the plantations that dominated this region. The edge of an ancient sea is now marked by the Sandhills, an area familiar to non-Carolinians with military experience

2 T H I S M O B W I L L S U R E LY TA K E M Y L I F E

Map of North and South Carolina.

INTRODUCTION

3

as the home of Fort Jackson outside Columbia, South Carolina, and Fort Bragg, outside Fayetteville, North Carolina. Above the fall line, where slowmoving rivers hit the first real rise in elevation and navigation becomes difficult, are the broad, rolling hills of the Piedmont, a region where the longleaf pines of the flat coastal plain with their roots in rich black earth give way to a mix of hardwoods rising out of red clay. The creeks and rivers here rush over rocks and often down steep inclines, this hydropower running the first wave of textile factories that came to dominate the economy of the region for a hundred years after Reconstruction. Just skirting the upper corner of South Carolina but covering maybe a fifth of the western part of North Carolina are the Appalachian Mountains, starting with the wall of the Blue Ridge escarpment. Despite similarities, the Carolinas have had their differences. North Carolina probably always had the more diverse economy, with agricultural exports such as naval stores and later tobacco playing a much more important part in the economy than they ever did in South Carolina, where the cotton boom of the 1850s and the decline of the rice industry after the Civil War meant cotton was always much more dominant. Even when manufacturing came to the Carolinas, North Carolina could claim a world-renowned furniture industry and also had the dubious distinction of being the home of cigarette manufacturing in tobacco towns such as Durham and Winston-Salem. Manufacturing in South Carolina, until after World War II, meant almost exclusively cotton mills. Partly as a result of the different economic bases, especially the large part of western North Carolina that never engaged fully with the antebellum plantation economy, and partly as a result of antebellum political habits going back to the Nullification Crisis of the 1830s, North Carolina always had greater diversity in political affiliation. In South Carolina, Democrats ruled the day, except for the brief flash of Reconstruction when Republicans held power. North Carolina, on the other hand, saw its antebellum Whigs evolve into postwar Republicans, who later cooperated with Populists in the 1890s to drive the Democrats from power for several years. These kinds of differences make a book like this, that studies the same phenomenon in two different states, more interesting, and throughout I will be trying to account for the differences in the phenomenon of lynching between these two places.

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Lynching itself played out differently in the two states. Using the dates of 1880 and 1930 to bracket the lynching era (these are the years when the most reliable statistics on the number of lynchings are available), we quickly see that neither of the Carolinas tops the list of southern states with the most lynchings. North Carolina had 96 people killed by mobs in this period, and South Carolina 155. Mississippi, by comparison, had 704. Still, it is worth wondering why South Carolinians lynched half again as many people as North Carolinians. What sets the states even further apart is the racial breakdown of the victims. Fourteen of North Carolina’s 96 victims, or 15 per cent, were white. In South Carolina, of 155 people lynched, a mere 6 were white, or 4 per cent. That is a significant difference, and while my book will not spend much time explicitly trying to come up with theories for why it is the case, the difference is worth keeping in mind. And although lynching happened on a larger scale in South Carolina, it was North Carolina that made the first concerted effort to stamp out the practice, prosecuting mobs fairly vigorously from the early years of the twentieth century, shooting would-be lynchers on occasion, and enjoying nearly a decade without a lynching in the 1920s as a result. South Carolina’s response to lynching did not match that level of determination or success until after World War II.1 A handful of themes return throughout this book. The most important is that we need to pay attention to the context and background of individual lynchings if we are to understand the phenomenon as a whole. In some cases, the brief and superficial newspaper accounts that reported most lynchings to the public are not simply incomplete or erroneous on a few details, but almost completely wrong. Looking at a broader array of contemporary sources, as I do for the lynching of Rev. Watson T. Sims in Chapter 6, can show that what was initially said to be the cause of the lynching was but a smokescreen. In other cases, such as the lynching of Richard Puckett (Chapter 5), the crucial bit of information needed to unravel the story is hidden from view for decades. While the basic listings of lynchings have become more complete in recent years, due largely to a project undertaken in the 1990s by sociologists E. M. Beck and Stewart Tolnay, I suspect that many state-level studies of lynching have risked

INTRODUCTION

5

drawing conclusions on the basis of superficial accounts. My book does not challenge any of their conclusions directly, but it does suggest that scholars of lynching generally need to be more wary of the data they are using. The power of narrative was important to lynching at many levels. Historians have observed that lynchings were sometimes arbitrary and have tried to sort out the factors that determined whether or not a lynching would occur in a given set of circumstances. How the preceding events were narrated seems to have had quite a lot to do with precipitating certain lynchings. By the time the practice of lynching was well entrenched in southern society, everyone knew there were certain things that could be counted on to cause a lynching, and in two and maybe three of the cases studied here, it seems clear that people deliberately told stories in ways they knew would spark a lynching. How the lynching was narrated immediately afterwards influenced the response to the lynching. In the aftermath of the Ku Klux Klan killing of militia members in Union, South Carolina, in 1871 (see Chapter 1), Republicans used the story as an example of the outrageous actions of the Ku Klux Klan that demanded federal intervention. The federal action eventually came, but it did not redress the changes the lynching had effected in local politics. When a black mob lynched a white man in 1887 (see Chapter 3), observers on all sides found themselves uncertain of how to tell the story of what had happened. Was it an example of lynching’s legitimacy that it could be used on those allegedly rare occasions when the rapist was white, or was it a dangerous precedent of African American men deciding it was appropriate to use violence against a white man who had offended them? Over the longer term, how historians have narrated lynchings has affected how we place individual events, and racialized violence generally, into the big picture of the history of the South. The example of Giles Good in Chapter 2 is a case in point. If we tell just the story of a lynching in retribution for a murder, we miss the long-simmering tension over black political organization and activism that eventually resulted in the lynching in York County. This Mob Will Surely Take My Life is built around seven case studies which taken together give an episodic account of the rise and fall of lynching in

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North Carolina and South Carolina from the Reconstruction era to the Great Depression. In each case, I try to set the stage and explain in some detail the nature of the place where the lynching happened and what I can figure out about the people involved. If a case study approach like this is to have value, it is necessary to be sensitive to the differences between places and times, to understand that Union County, South Carolina, and Edgecombe County, North Carolina, for instance, are very different places and that it did matter whether the governor of South Carolina at the time a lynching occurred was the raving demagogue Cole Blease or the businessoriented progressive Richard I. Manning. I have tried to provide detailed accounts of the lynchings themselves, something that is possible in some cases because of the availability of coroner’s inquests and other first-hand accounts. There is perhaps a danger that when historians, trained to be objective, write about violence they do so in a way that tends to be a bit bloodless, in both the metaphorical and the literal senses of that word. Hopefully, very few of the people reading this book will have experienced violence themselves, and certainly not lethal violence of the kind described in these pages. Yet, if we are to appreciate what it meant to people at the time, to understand violence both as the product of historical forces and as a historical cause in its own right, we need to try to feel its impact as did those who were immediately affected by it, and I hope the way I have written about these lynchings recaptures some of that. In terms of how this book fits into scholarship on lynching, I have tried in some ways to split the difference between two dominant modes of writing about lynching. One approach is to survey lynching activity in one or more states, compiling comprehensive lists of all the lynchings that occurred there, and then beginning to account for patterns in the distribution of lynchings across time and space. Works by Edward L. Ayers for the entire South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage for Virginia and Georgia, George C. Wright for Kentucky, Terence Finnegan for South Carolina and Mississippi, William D. Carrigan for Texas, and Michael J. Pfeifer for seven states across the country take this approach. These studies tell us many important things about the broad sweep of how lynching developed and how it interacted with other historical forces. The second sort of study about lynching tends to be the monograph-length case study, such as accounts of the lynching

INTRODUCTION

7

of Claude Neal in Florida in 1934, the lynching of Mack Charles Parker in Mississippi in 1959, or the lynching of two men in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. This Mob Will Surely Take My Life incorporates elements of both these kinds of lynching studies, taking enough space to develop a very detailed picture of each lynching and its context, but then stringing those lynchings together in a sort of rough narrative that hopefully recreates the broad historical sweep of the survey and analysis approach.2

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1

Reconstruction Violence and the Foundations of the Lynching Era: Unionville, S.C., 1871 On 5 December 1877, William H. Wallace was elected to the bench of South Carolina’s seventh judicial circuit. He had practised law for twenty years by that point, but these two decades had been interrupted, for four years by war as he left Unionville as a private and rose to the rank of brevet major general, and then for a further twelve years after he returned to Union County, as he took a leading role in resisting, stalling and turning back the work of Reconstruction in that Piedmont county and in the state as a whole. Just a year before his election, Wallace had presided as Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives. Actually, for nine weeks, he was one of two Speakers of two separate bodies, as a Republicancontrolled House of Representatives contended against the Democratic body Wallace led for power in the state after the chaotic election of 1876. With the removal of federal troops in April 1877, Reconstruction came to a crashing end in South Carolina and in the nation. The years Wallace would spend on the bench, from 1877 to 1893, would see African Americans steadily lose more and more power across the South and, as their political power declined, fall prey to lynch mobs with ever-increasing frequency until in the 1890s someone was being lynched in the South every week. Wallace was not single-handedly responsible for this shift, of course, but he is representative of former Confederates who resisted Reconstruction by whatever means necessary until they toppled it. And Wallace was involved at the highest level in one of the most violent episodes in the white South’s long war against Reconstruction, the two assaults on the jail in Unionville in the winter of 1871 that saw hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members lynch twelve African American members of the state militia. Wallace was connected with this event, and it was the political fallout of this dramatic lynching that made possible his election to the House of Representatives in 1872 and put him in place for the events of 1876.1

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William H. Wallace (second from right, seated). Courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Historians have long realized that the Ku Klux Klan operated as the ‘military arm of the Democratic party’ in the Reconstruction South. The Klan targeted economically independent and socially assertive African Americans, but as volumes of testimony taken in summer 1871 by a Congressional committee make clear, the Klan paid special attention to beating, killing and intimidating anyone who supported the Republican party. However, it would probably be a mistake to think of the Klan as simply taking orders from the Democratic party leadership. Democrats in the Reconstruction South were resisting the encroaching power of state and federal governments dedicated broadly to centralizing political power and creating a more modern state. We can see these changes in everything from the creation of public school systems to the redrafting of South Carolina’s constitution in 1868 on the model of the Ohio constitution, and the 1871 adoption of New York’s criminal code. All these changes

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threatened the local control that for decades white elites had exercised over politics, resources, and justice. In South Carolina, this local control dated back to the 1769 extension of the local courts from Charleston into the backcountry. Local elites, Democrats to a man in South Carolina, whose tradition of one-party politics went back to John C. Calhoun and the Nullification Crisis of the 1830s, sought to destabilize the Republican government of Reconstruction not only because of its racial composition, its foreign regional connections and its taxation policies, but also simply because it threatened their power at the local level, where it counted most. Violence directed at agents of the Republican state government was one effective means of doing this, and as Elaine Parsons has shown in her study of Union County, local elites were happy to tap into a thriving demi-monde of drinking, gangs and interpersonal and collective violence when they could. All violence and disorder, even if it got out of hand, could be turned to serve their purposes.2 Union County’s geography makes it at once typical of the Piedmont, that land of low but sometimes rugged red-clay hills that squeezes between the Blue Ridge and the Sandhills across the middle of the Carolinas, and yet one of the Piedmont’s more out-of-the-way corners. A series of waterways cut through Union County from north-west to south-east, all eventually merging into the Broad River. During Reconstruction, the Pacolet River marked out a boundary of sorts, the land to the north lying within Union County but considered distant from the county seat of Unionville. Coming south, Fair Forest Creek winds down from Spartanburg, opening into grey, sandy bottomlands a half-mile wide before merging into the Tyger River, which itself meanders through a broad valley before being channelled back between a pair of ridges a couple of miles apart and emptying into the Broad River where the railroad crosses it at the south-east corner of the county. Running parallel to and just south of the Tyger and dividing Union County from Laurens County and Newberry County is the Enoree River, twisting through steep and tight valleys before the lower, gentler country around Sedalia, Goshen Hill and Maybinton. The land these rivers run through was once granite and still is down beneath the clay.3 Before the Civil War, Union County sat on the north-western edge of

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South Carolina’s rich belt of cotton plantations. Only fifteen years after Eli Whitney’s cotton gin revolutionized the South’s economy, Union County was one of the lower-Piedmont counties in South Carolina producing a substantial amount of the staple. As one historian noted, Union County’s ‘slaveholding elite was small but unusually affluent’. Much of the cotton that made their fortunes and built plantation houses like Rose Hill was carried down to the markets of Columbia on boats. A forty-foot boat could handle forty bales, the ten tons of cotton rowed by half a dozen slaves, bringing supplies back upriver. But the rivers carried more than just cotton downstream. The voracious crop mercilessly stripped the nutrients out of the soil, and much of that soil itself washed into the swiftmoving water, headed down to Columbia along with the fleecy fibres it had produced. Many planters began to leave for newer lands in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, and there were fewer whites in Union County in 1850 than there had been twenty years previously. With the arrival of the railroad in 1858, farmers had another option for transporting their crops, but not a good one. Freight rates on the Spartanburg and Union Railroad ran about twice what they did on railroads in the North, making the cost prohibitive for many small farmers who might otherwise have tried to get in on the high cotton prices of the 1850s. Instead, farmers with smaller parcels of land and muddy hillsides carved by gullies turned to livestock, a product that could carry itself towards the plantations lower in the state where hungry slaves on better land raised cotton and rice. Cattle and hogs, though, were not the stuff of plantation glory, and by the eve of the Civil War, Union County ranked twentieth among South Carolina’s thirty districts in per capita wealth. Even five years after the end of the war, Union County was a fairly isolated place, with no telegraph service and the seats of the neighbouring counties – Yorkville, Chester, Newberry and Laurensville – each a hard day’s ride away over rough clay roads.4 Though the armies bypassed Union County, the Civil War nevertheless shattered the basis of the social system built around plantation slavery, and the fortunes of individuals rose and fell in ways they could never have imagined. We can glimpse some of the changes in the trajectories of two men important to the events of 1871, Samuel Nuckles and William H. Wallace. The son of a planter and Congressman, Wallace tried his hand

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Samuel Nuckles. Courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

at planting for a few years in the 1850s before moving from Jonesville to Unionville in 1857. He edited the Union Times and in 1859 began practising law. Joining the secessionist movement, Wallace was elected to the state legislature in 1860 and signed the Ordinance of Secession on 20 December of that year. During the war, he rose to the rank of brigadier general before surrendering at Appomattox. When Wallace got back to Unionville, he settled back into planting and his law practice with a new partner, Isaac G. McKissick, who had come from the Pea Ridge section of Union County. Nuckles’s life was about as far away from Wallace’s as could be imagined within the tight confines of a small place. Born around 1811, Nuckles was one of the roughly 11,000 slaves freed in Union County when the war ended. Freedom gave him the opportunity to become a Baptist

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minister, and Nuckles was elected to the state constitutional convention in 1867, just over two years out of slavery.5 Reconstruction in South Carolina was a twelve-year whipsawing struggle over who would participate in political life, and on what terms, a struggle made all the more vital by the role politics played in structuring economic and social opportunities. In the first two years after the end of the war, known as Presidential Reconstruction since it was Andrew Johnson who was directing policy at the national level, South Carolina’s white elites tightened controls over blacks that had slackened during wartime, and in much of the state, including Union County, they used violence to do so. Johnson’s priority was stability, and he moved quickly to put the traditional leadership of the southern states back in control. Wallace participated in the constitutional convention in September 1865 that worked to bring South Carolina back into the Union and to pass a set of restrictive laws known as the ‘Black Code’ to regulate the lives and labour of the former slaves. The year after the end of the war was characterized by chaos and violence all over the South. Major riots at Memphis and New Orleans left scores dead, but hundreds or thousands of scattered episodes left black bodies lying across the southern landscape. Union County saw this period of violence begin in the closing days of the war, when Saxe Joiner, a slave living in Unionville, was lynched by a mob on 15 March 1865. The antebellum slave patrols and Confederate home guard units across the South often stayed together after the fighting ended, operating as a dangerous blend of criminal gang and vigilance committee. In Union County, a group known as the ‘Slickers’ formed in December 1865 ‘to keep the negroes in subjection’, according to the frank words of one of the founding members years later. An example of how this was accomplished was the murder of freedman Andy McCravey for burning a cotton gin in December 1865.6 Events such as these outraged northern voters, and when the Radical Republican majority elected to Congress in fall 1866 took office, they wrested control of Reconstruction away from Andrew Johnson, and away from white elites in the South. The Fourteenth Amendment had passed Congress and gone to the states for ratification in June 1866, but little progress had been made in getting southern states to accept its provisions

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for equal rights. The passage of the Military Reconstruction Act of March 1867 put the military in charge of governments in the South. Most exConfederates were disfranchised, and it became clear that the only way the states would enjoy full participation in Congress was after they had drafted new constitutions on the basis of universal male suffrage. It was in this radically changed environment that power was torn from the hands that had traditionally held it, hands like those of William H. Wallace, and given to men like Samuel Nuckles. To make sure things went as planned, the federal army returned to occupy South Carolina, establishing eleven outposts across the state, including one in Unionville. Nineteen companies of approximately one hundred men each were dispatched to keep the peace between indignant Confederates and terrorized but hopeful freedmen. With about fifteen square miles per soldier, the army was spread thin.7 The first task under the new political dispensation was to elect delegates to the state constitutional convention. The army supervised the registration of eligible voters in summer 1867, completing the task by October. In Union County, 1,426 whites and 1,893 blacks registered. African Americans were a majority of the voters in Union County, but in no other county in South Carolina with a majority of black voters did African Americans have such a slender lead. The demographics of the county would become critical in the unfolding of Reconstruction and the use of political violence partly for this reason. The voters of Union County elected three men to represent them at the constitutional convention in Charleston: J. H. Goss, a white man; Abram Doggan, who was black; and Samuel Nuckles. The Republican party, which had no existence in South Carolina before the Civil War, was the vehicle of this political mobilization. Building on the existing framework of Union League clubs, the Republicans sent out organizers in May 1867 and also used evangelical camp meetings and civilians associated with the Freedmen’s Bureau to recruit voters and local political leaders. At the party’s first convention, in Columbia in late July, no delegates from Union County were present, a hint at the difficulties the party would face there over the next decade. The relationship between race and political power in Reconstruction is worth paying attention to because it shaped the dynamic that led to the events of early 1871. In areas with a high majority of African Americans, such as the Low Country of South

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Carolina, a number of offices were commonly held by African Americans, and white voting strength could never be determinative, not in counties where whites might be outnumbered two or three to one. In areas such as Union County, though, with a narrow African American majority, whites would tend to hold the higher offices, with African Americans filling the lower tier. Here, the votes that kept Republicans, black and white, in office tended to be balanced between a very small number of white scalawags and a much larger base of black voters.8 Across the South and across South Carolina, existing collectivities long familiar with the use of violence and various other social networks merged with political activists opposed to the Republican party and the changes it was bringing, to ride through the night under the banner of the Ku Klux Klan. Originating in the summer of 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the Ku Klux spread rapidly out of that state in the spring and summer of 1868. Their first appearance in South Carolina seems to have been in York County at the end of March. It was after the April 1868 elections, however, when the Republicans gained control of the new state government and recalcitrant whites failed to scotch the new constitution, that the organization really took off. The Ku Klux Klan in Union County appears to have drawn on a set of young merchants and professionals from Unionville and the railroad town of Jonesville for its leaders, and on the county’s plentiful supply of drinkers and brawlers for its foot soldiers. J. Banks Lyle, a teacher at Limestone Springs Academy in nearby Spartanburg County, was the Grand Cyclops of that den, and he became a significant catalyst for Ku Klux organization in that area. James Gideon Long, an unmarried clerk living in the back of the Lyn and Company store in Jonesville, established the first Ku Klux den in Union County. A scrapbook belonging to William H. Wallace’s daughter claimed that Wallace was the ‘Grand Dragon of the Realm of South Carolina (Invisible Empire)’, and a man from Union County recalled in the 1930s that the two leading figures in the Ku Klux Klan there had been Wallace and his law partner Isaac G. McKissick.9 After the loss of the April 1868 state elections energized the formation of South Carolina’s Klan, they demonstrated their capabilities with a wave of violence leading up to that fall’s federal election. Their attacks tended to target black Republican party activists, with whippings and

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intimidation. The summer of 1868 saw a series of assassinations of Republican politicians across South Carolina, and in Union County the Ku Klux routed a disorganized local militia. The violence worked in places with a delicate political balance like Union County; in November 1868’s federal election, the Democrats carried twelve upstate counties they had lost in April and elected two Congressmen.10 As the Ku Klux Klan began to exert real influence over the fledgling Reconstruction government, Governor Robert K. Scott realized the state’s citizens needed a counterbalancing force to protect their political freedom; without it, the Republican administration and its freedmen supporters would be wiped away. Scott had already set up a constabulary, but this was only a policing force and hardly enough to contain the kind of spreading disorder taking over the upcountry counties. The state militia was established in March 1869, and by fall 1870 had around 100,000 men enrolled. On a local level, at least at first, the militia’s presence made a real difference. As one army officer stationed in Unionville observed, ‘it is remarkable that no Ku Kluxing is done in the County in the vicinity of the armed militia’.11 While it is not likely that the Ku Klux Klan was ever quite under the control of the Democratic party, it is clear that Democratic activists were willing and able to use the Klan’s violence to further their political goals. And with the presence of the militia stifling the Klan’s anti-Republican activities, the militia became the target of Democratic hostility and Klan attacks. The simple idea of black men going armed disturbed many whites. Unionville attorney Robert W. Shand complained that starting in November 1870 he began to be afraid to ride alone at night for fear of the armed militia patrolling. Other whites complained about the hostility they perceived from armed blacks in the militia. Around the middle of November 1870, complaints began to appear in the local press about the militia firing into the houses of whites who had angered them, including one young man named Tom Hughes. The militia, whites said, were congregating at the home of Junius Mobley, Union County’s leading black politician, just above Unionville on the Spartanburg Road and stopping people as they passed along the road, even including Frank Gregory, the town’s peace officer.12

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At the same time as the complaints about the black militia were increasing, whites began to express their anger over African Americans holding political office. Because of the threat of the Ku Klux, black officeholders could only serve with the protection of the militia. And it was these African Americans holding local office who arguably accomplished the most during Reconstruction. It was their actions that affected most people directly, that offered blacks and whites alike a new model of how political power might operate and what role race might play in that operation. With the dissolution of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s judicial system, local trial justices often were the first and last place where contracts were adjudicated and other small disputes were handled. For instance, when a white man observed a black boy mistreating a dog, he hit the boy with a switch. Something so common during slavery times as to have gone unnoticed and unremarked now resulted in a charge of assault and battery against a white man for correcting the behaviour of a black boy! And to add to the upending of the old ways, the case was heard before an African American trial justice, Alex Walker. This was the texture of life, of race and political power, during Reconstruction under Republican government, a mosaic of tiny incidents such as this adding up to a revolution, a revolution whites were increasingly determined to turn back.13 In early 1870, some significant changes to the relationship between local and state government and how vacancies in county government were filled opened up a window of possibility for Democrats who were not too scrupulous about how such vacancies came about. First, at the very end of the legislative term in February 1870, the General Assembly passed ‘An Act to Provide for the Filling of Vacancies in County Offices’. If a county office fell vacant for whatever reason (including death or resignation), the governor had the power to appoint someone to fill it for up to a year. If, as would turn out to be the case, the governor was more amenable to compromise with the Democrats than the local voters in a county who elected Republicans to office, then it would be in the Democrats’ strategic interests to produce vacancies, by one means or another. Another change in the law around this time that would shape the conditions of the violent winter of 1870–1 was how elections were managed. In the past, election managers at each polling location counted the votes after the polls closed.

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A law was passed to require that the sealed ballot boxes be instead turned over to the county commissioners, who would keep them for ten days and then count the votes. In the 1870 election, the number of polling places in Union County had decreased from the traditional eighteen to a mere five outside of Unionville. Both of these developments suggest that Republicans were trying to get better control over the monitoring of elections and the counting of votes. It did their party little good to have a majority of registered voters if there were several polling places (which would have tended to be traditionally at sites associated with the county’s Democratic elite) where pressure could be brought to bear to keep Republicans away from the polls or where, simply, weak election managers could allow the vote count to be tampered with before it ever made it to the county seat. Reducing the number of polling places meant that the Republicans needed to find fewer election managers to supervise the polls, and handing responsibility over to the county commissioners for counting in the relative security of the county seat rather than far-flung crossroads stores and plantation house front porches would give the party holding power at the county level a better chance of keeping it.14 Another election season brought a concerted effort by white elites to win political control, by ballot with a new party formation and by bullet with a crescendo of Klan violence. The Union Reform party arose in the spring of 1870 from an alliance between Democrats and Republicans who had bolted their party over the issue of corruption. As one Union County supporter later said, all they wanted was ‘honest and competent men’. One such man was William H. Wallace, who served as Union County’s delegate to the founding convention of the party in Columbia in June 1870 and went on to serve on the state executive committee. The new political party spread rapidly through Union County, forming clubs that included nearly all the white men and even some blacks. In tandem with this political organizing, the Ku Klux picked up the pace of their operations. Whites had grown convinced that Governor Robert K. Scott meant to use the militia to carry the election by keeping whites away from the polls and giving blacks an unfair advantage in the scrum that characterized the polls in the nineteenth-century South. One former Klansman recalled in the 1930s that they would seize black militia members and carry them

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in a boat to the centre of the Broad River. Using wire, they would fasten the man’s rifle around his neck and dump him into the swirling current to drown and eventually wash up at Neal’s Shoals. The official side of the campaign saw a number of heated encounters around the state between candidates for the Union Reform party and Republicans. Matthew C. Butler, the Union Reform candidate for lieutenant governor, came near to provoking a riot between his supporters and Republican militiamen in Chester.15 The entire structure of county government in South Carolina had changed as a result of the 1868 constitution and subsequent elections, as a glance at Union County after the 1870 election demonstrates. The new constitution had placed considerable power in local hands (and now many of those hands were black, not just white) by making many county offices elected rather than appointed, part of the general democratizing process of Reconstruction. Each county had one senator serving a fouryear term and one or more representatives serving two-year terms. While Union County’s senator, H. W. Duncan, was a white Unionist originally from North Carolina, its three representatives, Samuel Nuckles, Junius Mobley and Simeon Farr, were all African Americans. While these men were responsible for representing the county in the state government, the changes were also seen in those who administered the county’s affairs. The three county commissioners were responsible for maintaining the county poorhouse, keeping the roads and bridges passable, managing all county buildings and spending all money at the county level. John Tinsley, an African American living in Unionville, was one of the county commissioners; H. R. White, a white man living at Pea Ridge, about eight miles north of Unionville close to the railroad to Spartanburg, was another; and the third was an African American living at Scaife’s Ferry along the Broad River, Sampson Giles. Helping run the board of county commissioners’ affairs was its clerk, John L. Young, a man who occupied an uncomfortable and ambiguous position in Union County’s turbulent politics. A white man who had lived in Unionville since 1837, Young had served previously as the clerk of the board of county commissioners and voted the Union Reform ticket in 1870. When three Republicans were elected as county commissioners and had trouble posting the necessary bonds to hold the

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offices to which they had been elected, some prominent white Democrats in Union County urged Young to stay in his post to help these political neophytes and, no doubt, to keep an eye on them. Young was not nearly so implacable in his response to the 1870 election results as were many of the Union Reform ticket’s supporters. He believed that the commissioners ‘were honest in their desire to do what was right, if they knew how, but they were very ignorant’. Significantly, he explicitly denied the claims that these new county commissioners were corrupt. Recognizing his experience and basic goodwill, the new board of county commissioners asked him to remain in the post, and he agreed. The man elected as school commissioner was Berry Cannon, an African American in his early thirties who lived in Fish Dam township in the southern part of the county and who already had experience as a trial justice. The school commissioner supervised the hiring of teachers and also appointed trustees in each school district, a role which had great significance for a poor population eager for the opportunities education afforded. In the hiring of teachers and also the general spending of county funds, these local government officers had the opportunity to hand out work to political supporters in the best nineteenth-century fashion, and a few months of teaching or some work repairing the county poorhouse could be an economic lifeline for the working-class constituency that supported the Republican party and also a means of making those who might be neighbourhood political leaders a little less dependent on white landowners.16 The election on 19 October 1870 was chaotic, and fraud was rampant on both sides of the political divide. White leaders saw the voters’ rejection of the Union Reform ticket as an irreversible declaration of war. There would be no more talk of compromise. Matthew C. Butler expressed the position of whites as they had approached the election: We do not ask Governor Scott to renounce his party or principles; we only ask that he give some consideration to the opinions and suggestions of men who have a right to know and be heard. I do not say he ought to be governed by them, but there is always a moral power with that class of people which entitles them to respect, and until he has treated them with respect he cannot expect their cooperation.

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When ‘that class of people’ felt they had been spurned despite their best efforts, the olive branch was withdrawn. The Columbia Daily Phoenix called on its readers: ‘We must stand shoulder to shoulder. From the mountains down to the sea coast, we must stand – we – the whites of South Carolina – must stand together. And to redeem the State, we must work on, and do everything that is justified by truth, by honor, by manhood.’ Everything that is justified would turn out to be quite a lot.17 Klan violence ratcheted up yet another notch after the election, creating a world of chaos from which the Democrats could hope to recapture power at the local level. In Union County, A. B. Owens, a white trial justice, was murdered on 1 November. The Ku Klux had gone to Owens’s house up beyond the Pacolet River to whip him, but he fired on them. They fired back as he tried to flee, putting two bullets through the back of his head, one in the middle of his back, and two in his leg. Another trial justice, D. D. Going, tried to convey the seriousness of the situation to Governor Scott as he forwarded the report of Owens’s death. ‘Is there no way to bring these outlaws and Klu Klux to justice?’ Going asked. ‘If we do not get some assistance no republican’s life is safe in Union County.’ As if to affirm Going’s claim, the Ku Klux Klan came to his house on 1 December 1870, dragged him out, and beat him badly enough that many thought he would not survive. Also in November, a black man was killed and three others whipped. When Samuel Nuckles came back up to Unionville from Columbia after the legislative session ended, he was warned that it would be more than his life was worth to make his way to his home in the countryside. On Christmas night, the Ku Klux attacked the home of black minister and politician W. F. M. Williams, but he had been warned and was hiding in woods nearby.18 The climax of Klan violence in Union County, in the entire South for that matter, came in response to an encounter between the militia and some of the foot soldiers of the Klan which left local bootlegger Mat Stevens lying dead in a rail fence corner to see in the New Year. G. Matterson Stevens was twenty-five years old with a wife and young child, a white man the census listed as a farmer and described as illiterate, though contemporaries noted that he made his living as a drayman. What he hauled was mostly

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whiskey, brought down from North Carolina and hidden in the woods until it could be delivered to the barrooms of Unionville. On New Year’s Eve, Stevens was hauling a barrel of whiskey from the Ballou place outside of town to Steen’s hotel. Leaving the driving to his next-door neighbour, B. H. Robinson, Stevens lay down in the back of the wagon to sleep, the bright moonlight filtering through the cold air and lighting the way for the mule. Earlier that same evening, a group of twenty-five members of Alex Walker’s militia company set out, led by Sylvanus Wright. Their goal was to stand guard over Budd Williams, a white state constable who also served as an election commissioner. They headed out towards Williams’s home, seven miles out of Unionville, and some accounts suggest they may have also been targeting ‘one of the Belue men’ who lived in the same neighbourhood, near Duck Pond Church. The two missions may not have been mutually exclusive. If Stevens and Ballou were involved with the Ku Klux Klan, which seems to have been closely tied to bootlegging in this area, then protecting Williams may have involved checking up on Ballou.19 The encounter that got Stevens killed seems to have been fuelled by a fatal combination of alcohol and nervous bravado, with a strong undercurrent of fear on both sides. The militia knew the urgency of their task to protect the political party that defended the rights of themselves and their families. They must also have known that many if not most of the Ku Kluxers they faced were battle-hardened veterans who could outfight them any day of the week. It was important, then, that it not come to fighting, that the militia manage to command the kind of respect from whites, from wealthy planters down to no-account rednecks like Stevens, that would allow them to maintain order without resorting to self-defeating violence. The militia had been stopping people along the road near Means Crossroads, apparently trying to make sure no Ku Klux were assembling to attack Williams. As Stevens’s wagon came down the hill and into sight, the militia hailed Robinson, and he pulled the wagon to a stop next to a persimmon tree. With the cold weather, and seeing the barrel of whiskey in Stevens’s wagon, members of the militia demanded a drink to warm themselves and perhaps ring in the New Year. Facing a number of armed and hostile men on a road in the middle of the night, Stevens listened to

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Robinson’s urging and decided to be generous, offering them the contents of a flask he carried. But a part-full bottle did not go very far among a couple dozen men, and when that was gone, they demanded more from the barrel. They could have it, Stevens explained, but they would have to pay for it since it belonged to someone else and he was just hauling it. Such a high-handed response from a low-down white man angered the militia members, and they pointed out that they might just take the damn whiskey anyway. Stevens said they would do so at their peril. He told Robinson to drive on, that the men at the barroom were waiting for them. As the wagon began to roll down the road, taking the barrel of whiskey with it, maybe providing a story of uppity but ultimately cowardly blacks to be told over a drink later that night, some in the militia raised their rifles and opened fire on the moonlit target. Robinson rolled off the right side of the wagon, scrambled into the pine thicket alongside the road and was gone. Stevens jumped to the left, saw a house close by the road, and ran hard the few yards that brought him inside. Militia members burst in close behind, and in the small house it took only an instant to find Stevens under the bed, to drag him out from under, through the door to the outside, just as the Ku Klux had been dragging men out of their homes for months. One of the men hit Stevens in the mouth with the butt of his rifle to stop his struggling, and they threw him in the wagon, driving a few hundred yards on down the road.20 Around four o’clock in the morning, Robinson finally made it into Unionville, having come through the woods, avoiding the roads. He told of the encounter, of the gunshots he heard as he was running through the woods, and groups of men went out to search for Stevens. Late in the day, J. M. Greer found him. Stevens was lying on his back in a rail fence corner about a hundred yards behind Duck Pond Church. His coat was thrown over his face, and blood crusted his shirt where a bullet had pierced his heart. Removing the coat, they saw another bullet had entered his throat and taken off the back of his head. Even before Stevens’s body was found, the intendant had called a meeting in Unionville, and the citizens quickly decided that the time had come to take the guns out of the hands of the militia. About fifteen black men were arrested and placed in the jail near the centre of town. Rumours said that the rest of the militia, the ones who

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still had their guns, were planning a bold rescue, so a heavy guard was posted. Groups of white men went to the homes of militia members and came away with state-issued rifles. Some militia members cautiously came into town to turn their guns in, having heard about the sweep.21 By Sunday evening, the militia had been substantially weakened, but a rumour went round of a group of armed black men holed up at the Yellow House, Silas Hawkins’s place near the depot and the marble yard. A posse went to disperse them, and to bring in their guns.22 It was around ten o’clock when the African Americans inside heard a loud banging on the door, followed by a rough ‘Open the door!’ ‘Who is there?’ asked someone inside, probably Joe Vanlue. ‘Never mind who it is; open the door, and every God damn one of you come out of here.’ Hearing this, Eliza Chalk got out of bed, picked up a lamp and started towards the door, but the impatience of the white men outside was increasing. ‘If you don’t open the door I will shoot,’ said a man outside. ‘I am not going to open it,’ replied Joe Vanlue. Eliza pulled the curtain aside from the window and looked out on the street in front of her house, full of white men milling around, bright moonlight on drawn pistols and casting the shadows of hat brims halfway across familiar faces. Suddenly, the glass in front of her face exploded at the same time that she heard the gunshot. Most of the whites outside began firing pistols and rifles through the windows and door of the Yellow House, and the young black men inside scrambled upstairs to get the militia rifles kept on the second floor. They returned fire for a moment, someone firing straight through the front door, hitting Dan Smith, a white man who was one of the leaders of the mob. The men outside renewed their pounding on the securely barred door, hollering, ‘Let’s break the door down and get in and kill every God damn one of them.’ Soon, though, the awareness that the black militia members inside were armed and in a strong defensive position overcame their anger, and the crowd melted away into the night. An hour or so later, a pair of white men came back to the house, not the rough mob from earlier in the evening, but respectable men, Laurens Goss and Isaac G. McKissick. They persuaded the black men

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in the house, Joe Vanlue and his brother Alfred, both the sons of Eliza Chalk, along with their friend Major Palmer, to be taken to jail that night. McKissick promised to get them out the next day.23 After violence leaving two white men dead in as many days at the hands of militia members, tensions were high in Unionville in the first week of 1871. On Monday night, fire broke out in a stable downtown that belonged to J. L. Young, the clerk of the board of county commissioners. No one was caught for the arson. Tuesday morning, white leaders got something they had wanted for some time, an arrest warrant for Alex Walker, a trial justice and the leader of the militia company involved in Mat Stevens’s murder. Acknowledging that he was not there on New Year’s Eve, the warrant still claimed that he had given the orders to kill Stevens, a fairly threadbare assertion on the face of it. Walker, though, had already seen enough of what was happening in Union County, and Tuesday morning he had boarded a train for Columbia along with Junius Mobley. The officers caught up with the train before it got out of the county and took Walker off. As they made their way back toward the jail in Unionville, thirty of Walker’s militia met them in the road, hoping to rescue him. Walker’s captors made it clear that if they were attacked, the first man to die would be Walker himself, and they finished the trip a few miles back to Unionville unmolested and placed Walker in jail with several of the men from his miltia company.24 The cold, clear weather that had seen in the New Year on Saturday was still around on Wednesday night when horsemen rode into town, hooves clattering on the frozen mud of the streets. Two policemen were patrolling the town on foot, watching out for any more fires, as fifty or sixty horsemen rode into town from the Spartanburg Road. They wore long gowns and what one witness would later describe as ‘faces’ to disguise their identities. Ku Klux horsemen spread out to patrol the dark streets, and a couple guarded the hotel to keep the people inside at the bar from coming out to investigate. As the Ku Klux moved through securing the town, they ordered all lights extinguished.25 Arriving at the jail, the Ku Klux Klan overcame minor resistance to get access to the prisoners held inside. Sheriff J. Rice Rogers had not anticipated any trouble, so he had not brought in anyone to help him guard the jail, and he was alone when the Ku Klux horsemen rode up. As

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Unionville Jail, c. 1939. Courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

he saw them coming, Rogers quickly locked the jail door and threw the keys over a wall into the garden. When the Ku Klux arrived and demanded the keys, he could honestly say he did not have them to hand over, an answer he stuck to even when a loaded pistol was placed against his head. Undeterred, Klansmen broke open the outer doors of the jail. When they came to the locks and heavy bolts that secured the inner dungeon where the prisoners were held, Buck Allen, a blacksmith, held one sledgehammer under the lock while Charlie Harvey battered it from above with another. The lock gave, and the imprisoned militia members faced the hooded men. A robed Ku Klux stood at the door to the large cell with a list of names in one hand and a pistol in the other. ‘All answer to your names that I call,’ he said. ‘If you don’t, I will shoot you down.’ One by one they came forward: Alex Walker, Sylvanus Wright, Joe Vanlue, Charner Gordon, Andy Thomson. The Ku Klux intended to take Jim Hardy, but A. W. Thompson, a local doctor, told them Hardy had nothing to do with the Stevens killing,

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and the white man’s vouching for him was enough to save Hardy’s life.26 Shivering in the night air, the prisoners were hoisted onto horses and carried out past the edge of town. The group left the road and stopped in a field. The Ku Klux dismounted. Their leader ordered the prisoners to turn around and face away from the six Klansmen, who had their guns ready. One by one, the prisoners’ names were called again, and they were marched in front of the Klansmen. The rifles cracked, and each time a black man fell to the ground. After the first three had been shot down, Andy Thomson and Joe Vanlue decided to take their chances and make a run for it. The Ku Klux gunmen fired at the fleeing figures, certain they had at least wounded them, but the men kept running into the brush at the edge of the field and on into the woods beyond. In front of the Ku Klux firing squad lay the bodies of Alex Walker, Charner Gordon and Sylvanus Wright. A Klansman walked over and prodded Wright’s body with his boot, leaning down and striking a match to see if he was still breathing. ‘They’re all dead,’ said the Klansman to his leader, and he stood up, put away his gun, and swung back up on his horse. The captain of the Ku Klux said, ‘It is done here. Leave it here. Don’t carry it no further.’ The horses moved back onto the road, their grey moonlit forms disappearing eventually into the blackness.27 The lynching of the militia members in Unionville provoked a mixture of rage and impotent frustration among Republicans in Columbia. Two of the leading black politicians in the state legislature, W. J. Whipper and Robert Brown Elliott, considered it an act of war by the Ku Klux and wanted to respond accordingly. While the militia in the upcountry might be outnumbered and weak, there were plenty of other companies in the state, and Whipper and Elliott proposed bringing 3,000 men from the rice fields of the lowcountry to enforce martial law in Union County and the surrounding area, paid for by a special tax on the counties affected. Governor Scott took a calmer approach. No one who followed his career in the Freedmen’s Bureau in the first hard years after the end of the war could have doubted his commitment to protecting the lives and rights of African Americans in South Carolina, but he was too much the political pragmatist to entertain notions of a black army marching into the

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Piedmont. In a public message on 16 January 1871, Scott claimed that the regular processes of law were at work. Besides, he admitted, ‘if there was any part of the State in which violence and disorder were so general as to disarm the power of the civil courts, I must say frankly that I have no such militia force as would be competent to suppress them; and if I had, I have no means to place and maintain such a force in the field’.28 Back in Union County, white leaders asserted their ability to deal with the situation themselves. Isaac G. McKissick chaired a public meeting on Thursday 5 January 1871. His law partner William H. Wallace ‘called upon all order-loving citizens to come forward and aid in preventing and suppressing disorderly and unlawful acts’. One local attorney suggested forming a guard for the jail and the town; Wallace took charge of it, and there were even some black men involved in guarding the town, who were issued some of the very guns seized from the militia members a few days before. A few days later, Governor Scott did send in the military, but not the enraged black militia Whipper and Elliott called for. Instead, General C. L. Anderson, who commanded the state militia, came and met with many of the white leaders of the town and county. According to David Johnson, the son of an antebellum governor who seems to have straddled the political fence in Union County, Anderson ‘was listened to with marked attention and the impression he made in this interview was obviously very favorable’. With the death of Alex Walker, there was an opening for a trial justice, and Johnson was able to report to Governor Scott at the end of January that ‘the appointments without reference to party lines have had the happiest effect on the public mind’. The Ku Klux violence was already paying political dividends to the Democrats.29 Republicans in Union County seem to have gotten the message as well. From their point of view, the militia had been beaten decisively in its struggle to protect Republicans and black political activity from the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan. If there had once been hope that they might look to Columbia from whence they might expect help, those hopes had been dashed with Scott’s refusal to send in real force and his conciliatory policy of appointing ‘unoffensive’ men to political office. W. F. M. Williams, a black minister who had moved from Columbia to Union County not long before the chaos began, wrote to Scott in mid-January to try to secure

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a position as county auditor, noting that he had not slept at home since he came back from Columbia at Christmas. The two rifles Scott had sent to Williams via the express office at Jonesville had gone missing and were most likely in the hands of the Ku Klux. Drury Going, still recovering from the whipping he got at the beginning of December, had lost his taste for politics and decided not to take the job of probate judge to which he had been elected.30 But all was not yet over in Unionville. The end of January also brought the possibility of repercussions for the men who had raided the jail. The prisoners who had escaped into the woods on the night of 4 January had been rearrested soon afterwards and put back into jail. And Sylvanus Wright had been holding his breath when the light of the Klansman’s match shone on his face. Afterwards, though shot through the leg and in the side, he had found help and was also returned to the jail. Wright recognized several of the men present at the field, and Joe Vanlue confirmed the names: Tom Hughes, Dave Gist, Stout Noland, Lunny Hill, Bob Greer, Barby Hawkins, Dan Black, Bob Lamb and, perhaps most surprising of all, Rice Rogers, the sheriff who had thrown away the keys to the jail. Eliza Chalk came down to the jail every morning to bring her son Joe breakfast and to tend to his wounds. One day in early February, when the new jailer, Tom Hughes, was not standing over them, Joe Vanlue told his mother the names of the men he had seen kill his friends. William A. Bolt, a Republican trial justice, visited Wright, Vanlue and Andy Thomson in jail, locking himself into the cell with them to get away from unwanted ears. The men confirmed that they could name names, but they would never do so while still in Unionville. Only when they were safely in Columbia would they say who had attacked the jail and killed Walker and Gordon. Bolt sent a letter to General Anderson alerting him that there was a possibility of identifying and perhaps prosecuting members of the Ku Klux Klan, and Anderson instructed the local sheriff to question the men. But the sheriff got nowhere; the men would remain silent unless moved to Columbia.31 Republican politicians in distant, safe Columbia had few levers they could manipulate in Union County, but one that was available was the legal procedure known as the ‘Great Writ’, the writ of habeas corpus. One of the bedrock principles of English common law, habeas corpus

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allows anyone who is held prisoner the right to come before a judge to determine whether they are being held under lawful authority or whether their imprisonment is arbitrary and unauthorized. William M. Thomas, Judge of the Sixth Circuit, had come through Unionville on his way to Spartanburg the day after the lynching and then had held court in Union County the next week, convinced that things had settled down. On Thursday 6 February, Thomas was at the train station in Columbia, waiting for the Charleston train, when General Anderson came up to ask for a writ of habeas corpus for the three prisoners. Realizing the high political stakes, Thomas wanted to be sure that whatever he did would not further inflame the situation, so he and Anderson met with Governor Scott. After receiving assurances that the prisoners were not simply being spirited away from justice but would go back to Unionville to face trial, Thomas issued the writ. The problem would be getting the writ to Unionville and enforcing it without raising the alarm and bringing down further violence from the Ku Klux Klan. John Tinsley, an African American man from Union County who was travelling there on the train from Columbia, carried the writ inside an express package, delivering it to the sheriff in Unionville late Thursday evening. The sheriff in Union County was no longer Rice Rogers but Philip Dunn. A Republican, Dunn had difficulty getting together the necessary bond to take office, so Major B. H. Rice, a somewhat prominent local Democrat who had been too old for the war, agreed to post his bond in return for serving as deputy sheriff and generally keeping an eye on things. Dunn wanted to consult with Rice about how to proceed, whether because he was genuinely uncertain about the procedure or the authenticity of the writ or because he knew that the removal of the militia prisoners was the sort of thing Rice would expect to be kept apprised of. Since Rice lived four miles out of town, it was Friday morning before Dunn went out to fetch him. Looking at the writ, Rice did not think it was a proper document drawn up in the right legal terms, so he decided to consult with the town’s attorneys, including Isaac G. McKissick, before complying with it. By that time the morning train to Columbia was leaving the station. The next one would be Monday morning. The consensus was that if the prisoners were sent to Columbia, men like Whipper and Elliott in the legislature would find a way to get

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involved and set them free. Nonetheless, one of the attorneys went to instruct the sheriff that the writ was legitimate, and that he should carry the prisoners to Columbia on Monday. A less charitable reading of the situation might be that Dunn, under the thumb of the Democrats in Unionville, tipped off the local attorneys, including two men who were probably the top leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in Union County, that the prisoners who could identify members of the Ku Klux Klan from the first jail raid were about to be moved to a jurisdiction where they would feel safe testifying.32 The clear weather at the beginning of the year had given way to February’s drizzle when the Ku Klux Klan returned to Unionville. They came in groups of five, fifteen, two dozen, from Spartanburg, from Cross Keys, from down near Goshen Hill. A hundred crossed the ferries at the fork of the Broad and Pacolet Rivers from York County, though these may have been coming from as far away as North Carolina. Some had arrived along the clay roads to Newberry County and Laurens County. They rode in dressed in gowns of various colours, faces painted in devilish reds and whites and blacks, horns of red and black rising from their masks, and black tassels hanging off them. Aside from the fancy clothing, the Ku Klux were also carrying pistols and Winchesters. As in the January raid, they posted pickets around the town and ordered all lights extinguished. Anyone who got too curious and came to the window for a look was sternly ordered back by Ku Klux sentinels. The horsemen would tolerate neither opposition, soft-hearted sympathy for the prisoners, nor even simple curiosity.33 A few months later, sitting in a courtroom testifying before three Congressmen investigating the Ku Klux Klan, the jailer Tom Hughes gave his account of what happened next, though, considering he was implicated in the January raid, we should perhaps take his story with a grain of salt. He woke from a sound sleep when the outer doors of the jail came crashing in. Hughes had taken the job of jailer and moved in on 15 January after Dunn took over as sheriff. Deputy Sheriff L. B. Hill was in the jail that night as well, and it was into his room the Ku Klux came first.34 ‘Gentlemen,’ said Hill, ‘the responsibility is on my hands to take care of these prisoners, and you cannot get the keys.’

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‘We will have the keys or your life,’ was the Ku Klux reply. There were a few more minutes of debate on this question, with Hill trying to convince the Ku Klux that he had thrown the keys out the window. When the Ku Klux carried him outside the window to hunt around the muddy ground for the keys, Hill must have known they would find nothing, which led to more abuse and cursing. Hughes had lit a lamp and was reassuring his terrified wife when the Ku Klux gave up on Hill and burst into Hughes’s room to demand the keys. When Hughes said he did not have the keys either, he found six cocked pistols aimed at his chest. ‘Don’t shoot my husband, for God’s sake,’ said Mrs Hughes. Sensing weakness, two of the Ku Klux walked over and pointed their pistols at her instead, saying, ‘Madam, we demand your keys or we will kill every one of you.’35 Mrs Hughes pointed frightenedly at the bureau, and a Klansman opened the drawer and took out the keys. They all went upstairs, calling down orders to tie up Hughes and Hill. Once tied, Hill and Hughes were secured to two stone pillars in front of the house where they could hear what was happening in the jail. This time the Ku Klux took out ten prisoners, starting with the three who had survived the first attack: Andy Thomson, Joe Vanlue, Sylvanus Wright, Barrett Edwards, William Fincher, Ellison Scott, Aaron Thomson, Mac Bobo, Amos McKissick and Tom Byars. Outside, the prisoners were all tied up. Klansmen dragged Hill and Hughes, also tied, in front of them, saying, ‘You black rascals, you, we will introduce your God damned nigger-protectors to you; and, you damned radical sons-of-bitches, get in front.’ A whistle was blown, and in the next few minutes the pickets scattered around Unionville returned to the jail and fell into ranks four deep, riding up the Spartanburg Road. About a half mile from the jail, the Klansmen left Hughes and Hill, still tied to one another, stuffing a written circular in Hughes’s pocket and telling him to see that it was published in the next edition of the local newspaper. For the second time in a month, the Ku Klux Klan carried a coffle of black prisoners, their arms tied behind them, out of Unionville. This time there would be no survivors.36 Monday morning at the old hanging ground at Buffalo, just to the west of Unionville, the bodies were found. From a hickory tree hung the bodies

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of Sylvanus Wright and Andy Thomson, no chance for another lucky escape. Joe Vanlue was bound to a small tree nearby and had been shot to death. Five other men slumped from other small trees nearby, all shot several times. Mac Bobo and Amos McKissick were not among the dead, but they were not seen again either. A copy of the circular given to Tom Hughes was also found posted on the courthouse door. ‘Taken By Habeas Corpus’ it was titled, and it gave a warning of still more violence: ‘We want peace, but this cannot be till Justice returns. We want and will have Justice, but this cannot be till the bleeding fight of freedom is fought.’37 In the two attacks on the jails, the bleeding fight of freedom had cost the lives of a dozen black men. Unionville attorney Robert W. Shand set the tone for the local response to the second lynching in a letter to a Charleston newspaper. Writing five days after the attack, Shand admitted that there were probably at least a thousand Klansmen within a day’s ride of Unionville. The problem was that nobody, certainly not respectable men like him, knew exactly who they were. The deeper dilemma, Shand argued, was that the majority of African Americans in Unionville had been in sympathy with the men who had killed Stevens, complicit even, to the extent of sheltering them and helping some of them get out of town. The only way to control the Ku Klux Klan was to take away the things that were calling it into existence and action, namely, the black militia and the political infrastructure they enabled. If the governor would not do that, then he should not be surprised to see the Ku Klux moving ever closer to Columbia, maybe at the door of the governor’s mansion itself eventually. Later in the year, Shand would testify that around this time a man in Unionville (perhaps Shand himself?) had arranged for livery places and feed for 1,500 horses in Columbia. This information was leaked to Scott and John B. Hubbard, the Chief Constable of the state, who interpreted the news as advance planning for a Ku Klux raid in Columbia. It was surely a great practical joke, but in the charged environment of the winter of 1871 a joke about a Klan attack on the capital could not be laughed off so easily.38 It is more difficult to determine how African Americans in Union County responded to this second lynching. The one immediate effect

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that we can trace is a significant wave of refugees fleeing the county and sometimes the entire state. Fincher Foster, a militia captain from North Pacolet, escaped to Columbia and stayed there.39 Between 100 and 150 African Americans from Union County left and went elsewhere, some travelling as far as Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama to find safety. About thirty or forty stayed in Columbia. We know the identities of some of these – the surviving members of the Vanlue family, for instance, and Samuel Nuckles’s family – but most remain anonymous. It is safe to guess, however, that those who got out were probably those who felt themselves most likely to be targeted by Klan violence, like Fincher Foster. If this hegira took away perhaps forty or fifty politically active black men, then it would have erased only about 3 per cent of the county’s black voters from the rolls, but a very critical percentage: the community leaders who organized political activity and were important in getting their voters to the polls. The ripple effects of such a winnowing of the political ranks in Union County could be significant beyond the immediate numbers.40 For all the federal activity later in 1871, the Democratic political activists had succeeded in their immediate goal, the liquidation of the militia. The militia units in the area had been disbanded by the governor. After the ones in Union County had gone in January, Scott disbanded units in York in February and in Chester in March. Historian Richard Zuczek argues that in making this decision, Scott was merely acknowledging the military superiority of the Ku Klux Klan. ‘Disbanding them merely prevented the bloodshed that would have resulted had the Klan done it instead,’ Zuczek points out, adding that when Scott had declared martial law in the past, it had failed, so disbanding the militia was the only way he saw to stop the bloodshed in the upcountry. Besides, the militia simply could not match the firepower of the Klan. Many of the rifles issued to Union militia, at least thirty, had been handed over to General Anderson when he visited after the first attack on the jail in January. Only four militia companies in Union County had ever received arms, two in Unionville and two in Fish Dam in the lower part of the county. The Ku Klux Klan had made a particular point of seizing militia guns whenever possible. On 22 February 1871, militia weapons were seized in both Rock Hill and Chester County. Even if they had the organization and determination,

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militia companies lacked the weapons to face the Ku Klux Klan effectively. And in a nineteenth-century world where ‘paramilitary organization … remained fundamental to the social and political order’ and violence was a regular feature of election day, a political party without guns was no political party at all.41 With the militia out of the way, there was nothing to stand in the way of a coup d’état carried out under the auspices of the Ku Klux Klan. For two or three days during the March term of court, a notice was posted on the door of the Union County courthouse. ‘Special Orders No. 3, from K.K.K., Headquarters Ninth Division, S.C.’, dated 9 March 1871, announced that ‘we are determined that the members of the legislature, the school commissioner, and the county commissioners of Union shall no longer officiate’. They had fifteen days to resign their offices, though the clerk of the county board of commissioners was ordered to resign immediately, presumably to paralyze the activity of that body. The notice was reprinted in the local newspaper. A meeting of the county commissioners was called for Saturday 11 March, and John Tinsley and H. R. White resigned then. A week later Tinsley sent a letter to the governor officially tendering his resignation. The third county commissioner, Sampson Giles, did not attend the meeting because he had already left the county without waiting to resign his office formally. The school commissioner took off for Mississippi.42 No sooner had Republicans been chased from public office in Union County than Democrats began to complain about the lack of civil government. The County Clerk of Court, A. D. Spears, wrote to Governor Scott to say that they could not hold Court of Common Pleas in May since they could not draw a jury because the Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners is one of the officials who is responsible for drawing a jury. The sheriff, Philip Dunn, complained as well. He and his deputies could not get paid for salaries or for expenses in serving warrants, carrying prisoners to the penitentiary in Columbia or feeding prisoners, because there was no Board of County Commissioners and ‘There is no organization of a civil character that can act.’ By late April, schoolteachers, many with large families to support, had been teaching for four months without pay because there was no school commissioner in office. Scott had been

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reluctant to accept the resignations at first in March. R. M. Stokes, the editor of the Union Times, wrote to Scott in late April, urging him to accept the resignations of the county commissioners. ‘Our county is suffering much for want of commissioners,’ he claimed, ‘but I honestly believe the people would be more willing to suffer on than to see the county interests in the hands of such utterly incompetent and irresponsible hands.’ When county commissioner H. R. White sent Scott an official letter of resignation at the end of May, Scott realized he had no choice but to accept it. In late May or June, Scott began to appoint Democrats to the vacated Union County offices. David Johnson was the new school commissioner, and several new trial justices, all Democrats, took office. In July, a convention was held, and Isaac G. McKissick made a speech calling for a new election for county offices. Only Democrats ran. Republicans in Union County had been, as one described it, ‘whipped out of office’. The Republican party in Union County was defunct, and the Democrats had accomplished what can only be described as a coup d’état, albeit one which took six months to unfold.43 The Ku Klux Klan controlled a substantial and politically critical part of the state, and Republicans in Columbia knew they were outnumbered and outgunned. Their only hope lay in immediate federal military assistance. The South Carolina House of Representatives passed a resolution to send a three-man delegation to see President Grant immediately. W. J. Whipper, the politician from Beaufort who had wanted to use overwhelming force back in January, was one member, along with Warren D. Wilkes, a white man from Anderson County, and Samuel Nuckles, who could give an insider’s perspective on the chaos in Union County. The trio arrived in Washington on the evening of Monday 20 February 1871, and began trying to get an appointment with Grant. Whipper returned to South Carolina on Tuesday evening, but Wilkes and Nuckles met with Senator Thomas J. Robertson and Congressman A. S. Wallace from the South Carolina delegation on Wednesday to explain their visit, and Robertson and Wallace were able to meet with Grant later that day. Although Grant quickly agreed to send ‘three additional companies of the 18th Infantry into the disturbed portions of South Carolina’, it was not until 1 March, after reading a report and documents about the extent of the chaos in the

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South Carolina upcountry that Nuckles and Wilkes had prepared, that Grant ordered three companies of cavalry to the Carolinas. Later in the spring, Congress passed emergency legislation to give the federal government the authority to step in and help control the Ku Klux Klan in the southern states where it was out of control and decided to send a special investigative committee to make a tour through the states taking testimony to get to the bottom of what was widely perceived to be a potential new outbreak of the recently concluded rebellion.44 While it would be a vast oversimplification to claim that the Union County lynchings and coup d’état brought Reconstruction to an end in South Carolina, the events certainly laid some important groundwork for what would happen over the next five years. In the short term, we can see a demoralized African American community shorn of the protection offered by Republican officeholders backed up by militia, and a delayed but initially vigorous response by the federal government later in the year, about six months too late to make any real difference. On Christmas Day 1871, Rev. John Wallace of Jonesville wrote a letter to the American Colonization Society, begging assistance for himself and several of his neighbours to emigrate to Liberia. ‘We beg for help, as we are poor, and unable to move, and are very anxious to get to Liberia,’ Wallace wrote. ‘We are down and can’t rise up here, and it is better for us to go to Africa.’45 When election season came around in 1872, the Democrats had a clear field in Union County. The Republican infrastructure had been gone for nearly eighteen months, meaning no friendly trial justices building up political goodwill by dispensing justice to poor black men and women when they confronted more powerful whites. Republicans no longer controlled the county commission, so if a bridge needed repair, there was no work in it for loyal Republicans. The benefits that had accrued to ordinary African Americans during the brief period of Republican control in Union County – the equal access to the legal system, the opportunity to supplement farming incomes with a little work on public projects, all the glue that held together voters and their political parties on the local level in the nineteenth century – these benefits had evaporated and been replaced by the threat of horrific violence in response to political activism.

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The Republican political leadership that had been developing in Union County for the four years between the passage of the Reconstruction Acts in March 1867 and the coup d’état in March 1871 were dead, fled or cowed. They could not even manage to send a delegation to the party’s state convention in August 1872. They would not be out stumping for votes before the election, and they would not be supervising the polls, with the confidence to challenge improper activity by white voters. Perhaps most important, they would not be represented on the county commission counting the votes after they were cast. The Democrats elected two familiar faces to represent the county in the legislature. The new state senator was B. H. Rice, the man who engineered the second raid on the jail, and the new state representative was William H. Wallace, the Klan leader who had taken charge of policing the town after the first raid in January. The Republicans did manage to elect a man to the House of Representatives: Rev. John Wallace, the preacher who wanted to go to Liberia, who was also described later as ‘a former slave of Mrs. William H. Wallace’.46 The dramatic events of 1871 set the stage for the even more dramatic campaign that drove Republicans from power in South Carolina in 1876. By 1876, Democrats had seen violent resistance to Reconstruction successfully overturn the Republican administration in Mississippi in the 1875 election, and although the Republican governor of South Carolina, Daniel H. Chamberlain, tried to appease the Democrats by pursuing a policy of reform, the Democrats determined not to attempt the kind of compromise that had failed in 1870. This time, they would carry the election without Republican cooperation by ensuring as little Republican participation as possible. A campaign marked by systematic intimidation and economic coercion and episodic violence in events like the Hamburg Massacre and the Ellenton Massacre, which left dozens of African Americans dead, culminated in extensive fraud at the polls. The result was that both the Democrats and the Republicans claimed victory. The Republicans reasonably claimed that the results from Edgefield County and Laurens County should be dismissed since more votes had been recorded for the Democrats than there were registered voters in the county. The Democrats refused to let such trivialities stand between them and power, and one of the ways they asserted their right to govern was by assembling a House of

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Representatives to challenge the legitimacy of the House constituted by the Republicans. The Speaker of the Democratic House was none other than William H. Wallace, elected to that position in part because of his seniority, having served unchallenged since the 1872 election. The functioning of the Wallace House, as it came to be called, helped maintain the resolve of its Democratic members to continue the struggle, and it presented an important face to the public, both in South Carolina and nationally, maintaining the fiction of the Democrats’ political legitimacy until that fiction could be converted to fact with the Compromise of 1877 in April. Had Wallace not been there to take the chair of the Democratic House, some other Democrat would have probably done so; it would certainly be mere mythologizing to say that no one else could have handled the situation. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that the reason Wallace was there to hold his nerve and carry off one of the great coups in the history of American politics, a political stunt that would shape the South and even the nation afterwards, was because he had been elected to the House of Representatives after an earlier coup d’état at the local level. And the coup d’état in Union County was premised on violence and the threat of even more violence. Wallace may have surrendered at Appomattox, but in Columbia in 1877 he won, and what granted him that victory was political skill, but political skill based on violence.47 The Democratic ascendancy in South Carolina after 1877 created the conditions for the lynching era that would last for seventy years in the state. African Americans were not totally excluded from the political process in 1877, but the party in power at the state level was hostile and they could expect no more federal support. In 1882, a new voting law made it harder for African Americans to vote, and the process was completed with the adoption of a new constitution in 1895 that disfranchised the vast majority of South Carolina’s black citizens. Similar processes were occurring at roughly the same time across the South, and as African Americans lost political power they became more vulnerable to violence and found themselves with fewer means of redress. Violence became a determinative factor of African American life in the South, worse in some ways than during slavery, when at least a slave’s economic value and status as a white man’s property could prevent some of the lethal violence. Violence begets

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violence, and the murderous attacks on the militia members in Union County paved the way for a new political disposition of power that would make it possible for such violence to proliferate for more than a lifetime. During Reconstruction, the violence endemic to the system of slavery and to the rough-and-tumble world of poor whites was harnessed to political purposes and used to destroy democracy. Especially in the counties of the broad Piedmont, lying between the majority-white fringe of the mountains and the majority-black areas in the coastal plain, white Democrats desperate to regain the political power that could help them reshape economic and social relations in a way they approved of fought a battle on all fronts against the Republican party and its black supporters. The Ku Klux Klan could never be reduced to a political device, but politicians were happy to use it when they could, and, with the attacks on the Unionville jail in 1871 and the lynching of the militia members, white supremacy scored a tremendous victory that would have long-lasting effects. The Union County lynchings also happened in the Broad River valley, a particularly violence-prone subregion of the Piedmont that will feature in other chapters in this study. The combination of extreme economic transformation immediately after a war, as two major railroad lines cut through the region and opened it up to cotton cultivation with imported fertilizers, and the even racial divide that made political success a matter of mobilizing as many of your supporters as possible and keeping as many of the other side from voting as you could, by whatever means it took, created conditions where violence would become a common way of settling disputes. The notion that all the violence and discord arising during Reconstruction somehow evaporated when the state government changed hands in 1877 is a delusion. Local events cast long shadows in local neighbourhoods, and people remembered who had stood with whom in years gone by. As we cross the Broad River into the Bullocks Creek neighbourhood of southwestern York County in the 1880s, we will see how memories of Reconstruction conflicts could pursue a man for years till that violence finally caught up with him.

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Black Politics and Lynching after Reconstruction: Giles Good, Yorkville, S.C., 1887 On a hot day in the last week of July, I drove my rented Chevy past the deserted mill at Lockhart, South Carolina, and across the bridge, passing the gas station and veering to the right at the fork, heading down towards Chester. As I crested a long hill, I saw a bridge that was probably the one I wanted. When I found the green highway department sign reading ‘Turkey Creek’, I pulled off into the knee-high weeds on the shoulder of the road. As I removed the car key, the stereo and the air conditioning stopped, replaced by the low hum of cicadas. Looking left, I was tempted by the prospect of a cold beer at the low-slung bar that sat in a clearing carved out of the woods on the edge of the steep slope down to the creek, but instead I scanned the edge of the trees a few yards off the right side of the road and found it, a road bed abandoned some decades before when the new bridge was built. Carrying my camera and some papers, I started through the weeds – mostly poison ivy – and entered the cooler hardwood forest. This road was older than the one I had been driving on, hugging the contours of the hillside as it descended towards the creek in the bottom of the valley. It was hot today, but I could imagine how this place might have looked on a March afternoon a century before. In fifteen minutes I had fought my way through blackberry canes and lespedeza and poplar saplings and saw where the road swung sharply to the left, away from the red clay bank rising up the hill, to the site of the old bridge. A wooden structure stood there, not the one from 1871, but probably seventy or eighty years old. I clambered down to the sandy edge of the creek, ferns and mouldering leaves beneath my feet, and looked up and down the stream. With the light breaking through here and there, and deep silence, it was peaceful, the creek maybe fifteen feet across and not more than knee deep in most spots. I walked upstream a little way to get a few pictures, and then downstream, looking round, thinking I might be able somehow

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Turkey Creek.

to see evidence of what I knew had happened here. But a century of floods and droughts and trees growing and falling had covered over the past, and only my imagination and the words recorded in Depression-era typescripts seventy years ago could make me hear the crack of rifles, the splash as bodies landed and drifted downstream to be caught on the tree roots protruding from the bank and the shoals of small rocks, a warning to their families and neighbours. Though the contemporary sources from 1871 are elusive, two separate oral accounts recorded by workers for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) in the years just before World War II tell very similar stories about what happened at this bridge. David A. McCreight, a white man living a couple of counties away by 1937, told of his brother’s participation in the massacre: Robert McCreight, a brother of mine, guarded Turkey Creek Bridge between Chester and Union until they got back. When the Ku Klux from both counties

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got to that bridge, they got all of the negroes they could from both sides and killed them and dammed up the stream with their bodies. Getts Jeter, a cruel blacksmith, was killed at this bridge. A placard with the following words was tied on his chest and he was left lying on top of a pile of the dead for everybody to read it: ‘As a rule, big rails lie on the bottom; now, big rail lies on top.’ Later, his body was put up on a rail fence where all could see it. … Some of the Ku Klux in Union were cleaning up the negroes here. When this trouble was over, there was no more trouble with the negroes in Union and Chester. When my brother got back to Turkey Creek he pitched his gun into the creek and went on to his home nearby. He said that he has no more use for that gun.

Brawley Gilmore, an ex-slave interviewed about the same time, described the killings from the point of view of the victims and their community: Dey would carry de niggers to Turk Creek bridge and make dem set up on de bannisters of de bridge; den dey would shoot ’em offen de bannisters into the water. I ’clare dem was de awfulest days I ever is seed. A darky name Sam Scaife drifted a hundred yards in de water downstream. His folks took and got him outen dat bloody water and buried him on de bank of de creek. De Ku Klux would not let dem take him to no graveyard. Fact is, dey would not let many of de niggers take de dead bodies of de folks no whars. Dey just throwed dem in a big hole right dar and pulled some dirt over dem. Fer weeks atter dat, you could not go near dat place, kaise it stink so fer and bad.

One document from the period hints at the events at the Turkey Creek bridge: an Army captain stationed in Yorkville wrote to Governor Robert K. Scott to say that he had rescued twenty-two African American members of a militia company based in Chester County near the communities of Baton Rouge and Wilksburg as they fled with the Ku Klux Klan hot on their heels. Though he did not mention, and perhaps had not yet heard of, the killings at Turkey Creek, the officer was convinced that ‘judging from the condition of affairs in this county I believe they would have been murdered were there no U.S. Troops in this vicinity’. The militia was fleeing from a battle with the Ku Klux Klan near their home in northwest Chester County, and, to get to Yorkville, they would have had to come past Turkey Creek and across the southwestern corner of York County where some of the militia members were from. It seems entirely plausible that

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Map of York, Chester and Union Counties.

the Ku Klux Klan did manage to catch up with some of the other militia members at Turkey Creek bridge.1 The fight at Wilksburg in Chester County on 7 March 1871 was one of the largest open battles between the Republican state militia and the Ku Klux Klan in any southern state. Coming less than a month after the second assault on the jail in Unionville, it was part of the Ku Klux Klan’s concerted effort to neutralize the militia. An ex-slave named James Wilkes had organized and armed a militia company in the Wilksburg neighbourhood, drawing members from the community of Baton Rouge on the road towards Chester and from the southwest corner of York County between Bullocks Creek and the Chester County border. On Monday 6 March 1871, there was a skirmish between this unit and some Klansmen from the vicinity, and the militia went to Chester. After an agreement with the whites there and consultations with black leaders, the Wilksburg militia company withdrew. As one resident of Unionville described the situation a few months later, ‘the impression prevailed that a war of extermination was about to begin at Chester; that the blacks had risen with arms to take Chester, and that the white people were in danger’. This impression was

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compounded when the militia company encamped at Salem Church, a white church, and barricaded the road with logs and rocks. Putting out pickets, they began to stop all who passed on the road. Blocking the road alarmed whites all the more since that road was the principal route for whites in Union County to get their cotton to Chester and its direct rail links to the North. Without access to this market during the season for marketing cotton, planters would have to ship their cotton down to Columbia and back north, incurring extra freight charges and also having to deal with cotton buyers in the unfamiliar market of Columbia rather than the local market at Chester.2 A call for assistance went out from the white planters who lived near Wilksburg, and whites responded from the local neighbourhood and also from Unionville. The Unionville contingent included twenty-five or thirty young men commanded by Joseph F. Gist, who had gained experience commanding cavalry in the Civil War. They arrived on Monday night about three miles from the militia’s encampment and were met by an equal number of white men from the Wilksburg neighbourhood. A few hours earlier at sunset, there had been a brief skirmish when a delegation of planters tried to approach the militia to order them to disperse. At daybreak the next morning, Gist led his force of fifty or sixty mounted men along the road towards Salem Church. When an advance guard of fifteen men were within a few dozen yards of the church, the militia, sheltered behind ledges of rock on the right side of the road, opened fire, hitting one white man and wounding several horses. Gist felt a rifle ball go through the collar of his coat. Slipping easily back into his military habits, Gist ordered his men to dismount, and they fired four or five rounds towards the militia, but could not dislodge them. At this point, Gist ordered a flanking movement. As the Klansmen swung round on the militia’s exposed flank, the militia began to break and run, despite Wilkes’s command ‘to fight it out and kill the last damned white man on the face of the earth’. Calling up the rest of his men, Gist began pursuing the militia over the hilly ground, their horses dodging the straggling pines and dense cedars. The militia broke formation into groups of ten or fifteen men, who would run for a couple of hundred yards, stop to try to make a defensive stand, fire a round or two, and then continue their flight. Although the

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Klansmen had the upper hand and managed to kill several of the militia members, the terrain favoured the men on foot, and most of the militia escaped.3 One of the militia members fleeing the fight at Wilksburg that day, trying to get across Turkey Creek and back to his home in the Bullocks Creek neighbourhood of York County, was Giles Good. Years later, yet another FWP account by a white man present at the Wilksburg fight named Giles Good and his friend Columbus Crawford as leading members of the militia company. Good survived that day; his wife and friends did not have to go retrieve his corpse from below the bridge. Yet, from at least the date of the Wilksburg fight in March 1871, Giles Good was a marked man. He had challenged white supremacy in the most direct and assertive way imaginable, on a battlefield, and over the next sixteen years he would continue that challenge in an attempt to adapt to the changing circumstances he faced, protecting himself, his family and his community as the restraints on a black man’s ability to do so grew ever tighter. But Giles Good would not live to be an old man like Brawley Gilmore, telling people in the 1930s what the days of slavery had been like.4 This chapter centres around the story of Giles Good and the events that led to him and four other African American men being lynched outside of Yorkville in April 1887. Aside from being an inherently interesting story, I think it makes very clear two important points about lynching and interracial violence in the South in the 1880s, and even beyond. The killings in Unionville described in the first chapter were clearly political, and they had important political effects in the subsequent years. Yet after William H. Wallace became the Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives, after President Rutherford Hayes removed the federal troops that propped up the Republican administration, there is a tendency to assume that ‘politics’ as such disappears and that while violence before that might have been overtly and directly political, violence after that dividing line was somehow less political. If African Americans and the Republican party no longer had a realistic chance of holding power at the state level, then surely things like lynchings could have little political importance, except in the most indirect kind of way. However, the period between the collapse of Reconstruction and the rewriting of

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state constitutions in the South so as to thoroughly disfranchise African Americans was a period of flux and uncertainty, and if we are to understand the struggles for power, for the ability to shape the circumstances in which one lived, then we need to take a broader view of what politics was and how it was conducted. Even as African American men found it harder to take meaningful political action at the polls, and even as they saw support on a state and national level for such activity becoming a distant memory, they still pursued the goals they had once pursued via electoral politics, but now by whatever other means were available. And the violence directed against these other forms of activity was as surely political as attacks by the Ku Klux Klan on the militia in order to break the power of the Republican party during Reconstruction. The lynching of Giles Good had its roots in Reconstruction, and I suspect that as we begin to take a closer look at other lynchings in the forty years following the end of Reconstruction, we will find more lynchings that, while connected to immediate events, were also tied to long-standing antagonisms rooted in Reconstruction. The idea that once whites had the reins of government in their hands they forgot all about the black men living among them who had openly defied their authority for a decade and more is simplistic, and underrates the ability of people, perhaps especially people in relatively stable rural communities, to hold a grudge. White men lynched black men because of conflicts over labour, or because they felt that white women were sexually threatened by black men, but they also lynched black men because they had been out to get them since the days when those black men had had the audacity to call themselves the equals of the white men they lived among. Like most African Americans born into slavery, Giles Good can be hard to catch sight of in the documentary record. Census and local records indicate that he was born in 1835, and for the first several years of his life he belonged to a planter named James Bankhead Good in the Bullocks Creek neighbourhood of southwestern York County. When James Bankhead Good died in 1848, Giles was given to his daughter. Family tradition among Giles Good’s descendants suggests that he was quite politically active during the Civil War and Reconstruction, serving in the Union

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army and the militia and also as a local constable appointed by Governor Scott. The militia enrolment books do include his name along with those of many of his neighbours, and the 1941 FWP account describes him as a leader in the militia. Although clear documentary evidence of Good’s service as a constable has not emerged, it would help explain why Good seems to have been a particular target of his white neighbours’ wrath.5 A conflict a few months after the end of Reconstruction showed Good how things would be now that the political party he had supported no longer had control of the state government. Robert Alexander was an African American farm labourer living on a white woman’s plantation in Bullocks Creek. For some reason, Good came to his house late on the night of 8 December 1877. Alexander’s wife heard a noise outside, and Alexander got up and walked towards the gate into the yard where the noise was coming from. At that point, a man Alexander claimed was Giles Good fired a couple of shots at him with a pistol, but the shots went wide of their mark and hit the side of the house. After Alexander swore out a complaint before the local trial justice, Good found himself arrested, though several friends paid his bond. The case came to trial, but Good was acquitted.6 Seven years later, Good was at the centre of another conflict, and this time the political element was unmistakable. By 1884, the political climate had changed, not just at the local level, but across the country. Many voters were concerned that government was not supporting the efforts of individuals to get ahead by their own hard work but instead had been enslaved by special interests. One such group of special interests were African Americans in the South, who hoped that even though they had lost control of the governments of the states in which they lived that they might hang on to some of the gains they had made during Reconstruction. A large part of these hopes were dashed, however, when the Supreme Court handed down the Civil Rights Cases in 1883, effectively invalidating the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by arguing that the federal government had authority over the discriminatory actions of state governments but was powerless to control discrimination by individuals. African Americans in the South would have to make their way without the protection of a viable political party concerned to retain their support, and now without the

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protection of federal legislation that might moderate the worst forms of discrimination they faced. Nationwide, enough Republicans agreed with these ideas that Grover Cleveland was elected president, the first Democrat to hold that office since before the Civil War.7 In South Carolina, politics was settling into a calmer form after the upheavals that ended Reconstruction. Even after the paramilitary campaign of the 1876 election, South Carolina saw considerable political violence in the elections of 1878 and 1880, and the Democrats looked for ways of removing the violence from politics and also solidifying their power, especially since continued violence could still possibly draw unwanted federal attention. It fell to Charleston lawyer Edward McCrady, Jr, to draft an ingenious piece of legislation to accomplish this. Titled the Election Law of 1882, it was more commonly called the ‘Eight-Box Law’ because at its heart was an arrangement that established separate paper ballots for each of eight offices, which had to be deposited in the correct box. Prior to this, the parties printed up and distributed their own ballots with all the party’s candidates for the various offices listed. Getting out the vote was then just a matter of gathering together your supporters, handing them the appropriate ballot, and leading them en masse to the polling station to drop the ballot in the ballot box. With the new law, any voter who could not read well enough and mistakenly dropped his ballot for Congressman in the box for governor, for instance, would see that vote disqualified. Election managers were required to read the names on the boxes if a voter demanded it, but, in an environment where Democrats held political power and named friendly election managers, the chances of a would-be Republican voter getting meaningful help from a Democratic election manager were slim to none. The election law also instituted a complex system of fees and registration, requiring the voter to write his own name in a registration book, providing another obstacle to voting by those with little education, especially African Americans. After losing control of the state government, the Republicans did not even bother to field a statewide ticket in 1878, 1880 or 1882; the 1884 election was the first time since 1876 that they felt hopeful enough to bother. The 1884 election season was likely to be unruly for other reasons besides the return of the Republicans. Two years earlier, many poor whites were unhappy with a

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stock law that the Democrats had passed that prevented them from letting hogs and cattle roam and forage on land they did not own, and these disgruntled small farmers joined the Greenback-Labor party, which made an alliance with the Republican party. This political insurgency led to an election campaign in 1882 that was the most violent since 1876. Although the days of meaningful federal support for Republicans in the South were a thing of the past, the 1884 campaign suggested to white Democrats that they did not have a firm grasp on power yet and suggested to African Americans that new allies among whites on the basis of new issues might yet be possible.8 These larger issues played themselves out in Bullocks Creek in violence between African Americans who lined up on opposite sides of this political divide. On Friday 29 August 1884, Giles Good was walking down the road when he met Ellison Saunders, an African American man in his early twenties who had lived close to Good a few years previously. Family names in the census suggest that once they had shared similar political views: Giles had named a son born in 1878 ‘Ulysses S. Good’, and Saunders had a younger brother born in 1864 named ‘General Butler Saunders’ – and naming a black child for a Yankee general in that time and place was in itself something of a bold political statement. Nonetheless, by 1884, Ellison Saunders was a Democrat, and it was election season. After a few sharp words, Saunders shot at Good with a pistol, the ball grazing Good’s forehead. Reasonably enough, Good complained to the local trial justice, and Saunders was detained, questioned briefly and then released. A black Democrat shooting at a black Republican in York County in 1884 was not really that much of a crime in the eyes of the white Democrats who controlled the legal system. The local African American community thought otherwise. The following Sunday, Good led a meeting of African Americans at Hopewell Church, where African Americans from the neighbourhood decided that Ellison Saunders was a real problem and that the law obviously was not going to protect them from him. The next day, Good had to go to Chester to face countercharges Saunders had brought for pulling a gun on him. This trial justice considered a black Republican pulling a gun on a black Democrat to be a crime worth pursuing, and Good was put in jail. There he would have remained if it were not for his

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friends Wallace Reid and Ed Tigler who bailed him out. Returning home, Giles Good sent word to his old friend Columbus Crawford, who came to Good’s house that evening. Good wanted to find out from Crawford just where Saunders lived and how much support Saunders might get from the people there if Good or someone else went to settle the score.9 Saunders may not have realized it, but it would appear that his fate was sealed at the meeting at Hopewell Church on 14 September 1884, though he would live for another three weeks before the fatal blow was struck. Wallace Reid came down to Columbus Crawford’s house on 16 September, and the two went down to Saunders’s house, but there were other people there and Saunders himself was nowhere to be found. Reid left the gun he had brought in Crawford’s cotton house, presumably because it was not wise for a friend of Giles Good to be found carrying a gun, especially when the feud between Good and Saunders was a matter of public knowledge. Crawford still hoped to settle the situation without violence, possibly because he was related to Saunders. On 4 October 1884, Crawford sent Giles Good’s son John to visit another trial justice with a memorandum asking for prosecution of Ellison Saunders for shooting at Giles Good and of two of Saunders’s friends for lesser offences related to the late August incident. Apparently unwilling to trample the toes of another trial justice by intervening, this trial justice sent the cases back to the original one for investigation. Rebuffed in their appeal to the legal system, Good and his allies proceeded by other methods. On Sunday 5 October 1884, Ellison Saunders was walking along a road with three friends. He was shot from ambush and died a few minutes later.10 However reluctant the machinery of the law had been to protect Giles Good from Ellison Saunders, it suddenly became very keen to punish the men who killed Saunders. Columbus Crawford, who lived very near to the scene of the shooting, was arrested the next day and jailed in Chester. Less than two weeks later, he was in court in Yorkville. Crawford was quickly convicted and sentenced to hang. Before the sentence was scheduled to be carried out, he was interviewed, and the local newspaper published his full account of what had happened. Even though under sentence of death, Crawford was careful to say that he was not present when Saunders was shot, nor did he know who fired the shots. Good was not out of the woods,

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though. In March 1885, Giles Good, Samuel Good and Quay Tigler were brought to trial as accessories to the murder of Saunders. Samuel Good and Quay Tigler had their cases severed from Giles Good’s, which may have meant they were hoping to avoid what they thought was his probable conviction. Once again, however, Giles Good slipped through, with the jury returning a verdict of not guilty. Columbus Crawford, who had been close to Giles Good since their days in the militia in 1871, was not so lucky. He was hanged on 10 April 1885 in the jail yard at Yorkville.11 After his narrow escape in spring 1885, Giles Good seems to have realized that the old style of politics he had engaged in since Emancipation had come to an end. To appreciate how this reconfiguration of political activity took shape in York County, we need to understand the oldest institution in the county, the Presbyterian churches. The first European settlers in this region in the 1750s were Scotch-Irish, coming down the Great Wagon Road, and they founded the original four churches of what would become Bethel Presbytery. One of those four, Bullocks Creek, was founded in 1765 on the high ground between Bullocks Creek, flowing from the north-east to the south-west into the Broad River, and Turkey Creek to the south, flowing westwards into the same river a few miles further down. One of its earliest ministers, Rev. Joseph Alexander, was an outspoken supporter of the American Revolution, and afterwards he set up a classical school for local boys in 1787 that counted future president Andrew Jackson among its pupils. By 1864, Bullocks Creek Presbyterian Church had a membership of about 235, with around 35 of those being slaves. The Civil War disrupted the life of the congregation severely, and as late as April 1866 the church’s Narrative stated that ‘the bad effects of the war are greatly felt’ in the form of low membership, broken finances and a decline in morality in Bullocks Creek. Although the general decline of Bethel Presbytery began to level off in 1869, indicated partly by the return of some blacks to the white churches, things were still bad in 1871, with only two of thirty-four churches having full-time ministers and many members having fled the area or been arrested for Ku Klux Klan activities. The successful overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, though, coincided with a marked improvement in the fortunes of the church, and a fullfledged revival washed over Bethel Presbytery in October 1878. Bullocks

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Creek was doing better also, and by 1885 they had the resources and could justify building a new manse for their minister, Rev. John R. McAlpin.12 Sometime after the war, African Americans from Bullocks Creek formed their own new church nearby, Blue Branch Presbyterian. If anything, understanding the dynamics of political organization among African Americans in the rural South during the 1880s is even more difficult than getting a clear picture of these ad hoc religious institutions. In this period, perhaps more than at any time before or since, organizations of African Americans tended to be quite fluid in nature, and in a comparatively sparsely populated rural area with considerable stability over time, the various organizations that did exist had layers of overlapping membership. These various organizations were not interchangeable; different types of organizations had different purposes and values and practices, but to some extent they did tend to blend into one another. Significantly, whites looking in from the outside seem to have been genuinely perplexed when trying to sort out the boundaries and determine whether to consider any given organization a threat to their political, economic and social power or not. Since Emancipation, African Americans had taken advantage of their freedom to found various kinds of groups at different times: militia companies, Union Leagues, local Republican groups, churches, fraternal societies, labour unions, and even criminal gangs. Some of these organizations are interchangeable to some degree. We have long understood that, for instance, militia companies often served a dual purpose as political clubs, or that churches provided a platform for the emergence of other groups like fraternal societies. However, as the example of Bullocks Creek shows us, we perhaps need to consider more expansively the possible combinations and intricate relations between these various kinds of organizations in the rural South. In the case discussed here, we can see connections between fraternal societies and labour unions, between churches and labour unions, and even between a labour union and a criminal gang. The particular organization that was at the heart of the whirlwind of events in 1886 and 1887 in Bullocks Creek was one that seems to exist nowhere else in the historical record: the National Laborers Aid and Protective Society of North America. In December 1884, shortly after

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the killing of Ellison Saunders, a group of black community leaders from Bullocks Creek were granted a charter for Rising Star Lodge, No. 24. Among the handful of charter members were Amos and Lewis Tigler. There appear to have been two separate clubs formed, an ‘upper’ club and a ‘lower’ club, though they both seem to have operated under the same charter. There was even a club ‘over the river’, presumably in Union County across the Broad River. The headquarters of the main organization was at Biddlesville, North Carolina. Biddle Institute, just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, was established by the Presbyterian church and the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1867 as an educational institution for African Americans in the region, and over the next decades it continued to play an important role in the region. Given the connection of the Bullocks Creek area with the Presbyterian church, it is hardly surprising that the regional leadership of the National Laborers Aid and Protective Society of North America would be located at Biddlesville.13 From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to figure out exactly what the nature and purposes of the Rising Star Lodge were, though it appears that its members did not necessarily agree either. As with any fraternal society, it had a set of officers: president, chaplain, secretary, vice-president, high officer, outside guard, inside guard, assistant secretary and assistant chaplain. The pair of guards probably served both symbolic and practical functions, as other similar organizations around this time used armed guards to preserve the secrecy of their meetings from prying white eyes. There was an initiation ritual and weekly dues of ten cents. Meetings were held at various churches, including Hopewell and Unity. According to the testimony of its members, the Rising Star Lodge had a variety of purposes. Silas Thompson, a preacher, said it was ‘to keep up morality and sobriety’, while the official pamphlet for the organization said it maintained a fund for sick members and to pay burial expenses. So far, it sounds like any of a score of similar fraternal societies popular among blacks and whites in the late nineteenth century. A couple of members, however, claimed that the organization’s purpose was ‘to secure provisions’. In fact, Jeff Worthy joined because he thought it was ‘a kind of co-operative institution’ and he could buy some good Salem jeans, but he only got ‘some very poor cotton goods for his money and he withdrew his

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membership’. These comments suggest one of the organization’s purposes might have been the establishment of a cooperative purchasing scheme of the sort that was being popularized in other parts of the South at the time by the Farmers’ Alliance. These consumer cooperatives would arrive in upstate South Carolina in 1887 via a freelance labour organizer, but this may have been one of the first attempts to establish such a venture in the region. Still other members of the Rising Star Lodge claimed a more assertive purpose than merely trying to wiggle out of the grasp of the local merchant and his crop lien. John Cole, who was a member ‘over the river’, said ‘The nature of the order is called a strike.’ Farm labourers planned to demand seventy-five cents a day plus board, or $1.25 if they provided their own board. Bill Craig, who did not join, said they were to work for a dollar a day, and if they could not get the wages they would just take the equivalent value in whatever they could steal. On the extreme end of the spectrum, some members openly described the organization as a criminal enterprise. Henry Bailey stated, ‘The object of the club was to make a living by misdemeanors – to take that which don’t belong to you.’ He and William Roberts both specifically mentioned stealing meat, which would be hidden in gullies and caves and distributed to members. Adam Thompson gave the version of this most certain to chill the blood of the white men doing the questioning: to take what they wanted and kill any who detected them, to kill white men.14 The common thread in this confusing tangle of statements is that the Rising Star Lodge was to provide for the material well-being and security of its members and their families. There was a time when this sort of thing could be accomplished by the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau or later by the bargaining power given by participation in the Republican party and the mechanisms of local government. By the mid-1880s, though, these avenues for self-protection and self-advancement had been largely closed to African Americans in most of the rural South, and the pressures of the cotton market and the mechanism of the crop lien and the furnishing merchant meant that African Americans, even more than whites, were being immiserated and having an ever harder time figuring out effective ways to organize themselves to reverse that process. Having a fund to help out in case of sickness was a comfort, just as being able to save a couple

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of dollars on supplies could make the difference between subsistence and starvation. If African American farm labourers could collectively bargain for higher wages, that, too, would keep the wolf from the door. If white employers were not willing to yield on wages, though, a stolen ham here and there would also fill a family’s bellies. Times were particularly hard in late 1886, as a public meeting in neighbouring Chester County while the investigation of the Bullocks Creek situation was going on made clear. A public meeting of white and black citizens was held to figure out what to do about black families who were starving, who had no corn and no money to buy anything. The cotton they had raised had all gone to pay for the supplies they consumed during the year while they were raising it, and the area’s whites complained that they could not help because crops had been poor that year and they, too, had no money and were in debt. The meeting concluded that they would need to call on the state government or maybe even the federal government for assistance.15 The last few months of 1886 saw rising racial tensions within Bullocks Creek and York County generally. In early November, white farmer W. T. Smarr of Bullocks Creek lost a gin house to arson. He lost twelve bales of cotton, fifty bushels of wheat, oats, cotton seed, farming tools, a threshing machine and a wheat fan, $1,500 worth in all and none of it insured. By the time the embers cooled, Smarr had gone from being prosperous to living on the edge, maybe having to mortgage his land to get by. In November 1886, the county court convicted three people in fornication cases involving black men and white women. A final indication of how out of kilter things were getting was the attempted murder of a prominent white farmer, Elias Inman. About September, members of the Rising Star Lodge, led by Giles Good, had decided to waylay Elias Inman one Friday night, after he had been seen at the neighbourhood store with a large amount of cash. The men armed themselves with pistols, hid in the woods alongside the road and waited for Inman to ride along on his roan. When he came riding up, though, the plan went awry. The lookout did not give the proper signal. Another would-be highwayman stepped on a dry stick, scaring Inman’s horse and causing it to break into a canter and carry Inman, suspicious perhaps but safe, out of reach of the men who were waiting to rob him.16

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The trying economic circumstances, the frustrated political ambitions, the racial friction roiling just below the surface of daily life in Bullocks Creek in the 1880s culminated in the brutal death of a young boy in the late fall of 1886. As the sun set on the last day of November, work on William E. Good’s farm went on in the usual way. Good’s ‘plantation’, not necessarily a large place but given that designation more as a comment on the quality of the farm, lay in the hills just north of the confluence of Bullocks Creek and the Broad River, on the western edge of the community known as Hoodtown. His fields lay within a quarter-mile of the Broad River, with house and lot near the road, a wheat field, a patch of pine woods down the hill, and further down the hill on the other side cotton fields. The cotton picking was beginning to wind down, and William E. Good spent the day in the wheat field, ploughing under the stubble for the winter. In the short days of late fall, Good had stopped ploughing about half past four and handed that task off to his hired man, Eli Roberts, a young African American man, so that Good could get down the road to the mill before dark set in. Three of Good’s children were down the hill in the cotton fields, nimble young fingers pulling the cotton fibres from the bolls and dropping it into sacks they emptied into the stout white-oak splint baskets set at the ends of the rows. Eli kept ploughing until the failing light made it hard to keep the furrows straight, and he brought the mare and the plough up to the lot before going in the house to sit down for a spell, eat a potato, and talk to Ed Good, William E. Good’s brother who lived with the family. Mary Jane Good, the children’s mother, busied herself getting supper, and before much longer the two younger children came up to the house from the cotton field. Lee had detoured to a big hickory tree at the edge of the field he had had his eye on all day, chunking sticks and rocks up to knock down the sweet, tough-hulled nuts.17 Just as Lee had been waiting to get at those hickory nuts, others were waiting to get at the cotton he and his siblings had been picking. Seeing Eli finish his ploughing and the children heading for the house, and perhaps wanting to be there and gone before William E. Good returned from the mill, four men – Dan Roberts, Prind Thompson, Bailey Dowdle, Mose Lipscomb – came out of the woods and started to hoist up the cotton baskets. They had not realized Lee was still nearby, and when he challenged

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them with the confidence a twelve-year-old white boy would have in dealing with black men not old enough to have earned the respectful title of ‘Uncle’ and pretty clearly up to no good, they realized that real trouble was at hand. At a minimum, it meant a trip to the local trial justice on charges of cotton theft, probably time in the county jail or a fine, perhaps even a stay in the penitentiary in Columbia, depending on just how bad their luck was. An attempt to make a little money out of someone else’s cotton had gone very wrong very quickly.18 Eli Roberts had finished his potato and gone out to the lot, putting out fodder for the stock, when he heard the cries. He asked Lula, who was helping him, if she heard it and if she thought it sounded like Lee. Eli ran to the edge of the pines at the top of the hill and stopped to listen to where the sounds were coming from. He heard more groans and ran to the other side of the pine thicket, where he saw Lee lying in a water-furrow in a stubbled wheat field. Calling to him, Eli ran over and gently lifted him out of the muddy ditch, noticing the dark red blood oozing into the orangish-yellow clay. Lula, meanwhile, had run back into the house to fetch her mother, and Mary Jane and Lula arrived just as Eli was lifting Lee up. Running, stumbling over rocks and weeds and through pine branches, Eli carried the wounded boy up to the house and laid him down. Out of breath, Eli dashed down the road to fetch Dr J. B. Good.19 When Dr Good examined Lee by lamplight, he could see what the dim twilight and the mud had mercifully spared his mother from seeing in the field. The boy’s head was severely beaten, with blood seeping out at several points. The jaw had been completely smashed, and a number of teeth were knocked out. He was passing in and out of consciousness, and there was not a thing that any doctor could do for him. Surrounded by his family, their desperate prayers and bursts of weeping, unbelieving and confused at what had happened, Lee died about nine o’clock. Word of the tragedy had already begun to spread quickly through the settlement.20 With Lee’s death, the legal machinery of rural York County went into action, as J. P. Blair convened a coroner’s inquest the following day. They met in a log house on Dowdle’s Creek on the Pinckneyville Road, and though a number of witnesses from Hoodtown were interviewed, the jury could not decide on a verdict, so they adjourned to meet again in two days.

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William E. Good, though, had some ideas about who was responsible, and on the basis of his testimony an arrest warrant was drawn up, and by Wednesday evening, Mose Lipscomb, Bailey Dowdle and Dan Roberts were in the Yorkville jail. On Friday 3 December 1886, the coroner’s jury reconvened and began to interview more witnesses. Still they could not agree on who exactly was responsible for Lee Good’s death, but they did issue a warrant for the arrest of Prind Thompson. Partway through the day’s calling of witnesses, William Roberts was the first to mention the Rising Star Lodge. Five more men testified about the organization, giving the names of the officers and many of the members of the organization, and at that point the stage was set for a full-scale panic and inquisition by the whites. As soon as they heard that Giles Good was the leader of one of the clubs, the whites in the coroner’s jury concluded that he and the organization must have had something to do with Lee Good’s death. Giles Good, his son John and thirteen other men were arrested for being members of the Rising Star Lodge and carried to the Yorkville jail. The next day, eight more of the men whose names came up in the testimony found themselves in jail as well.21 A week later, an entirely new jury convened under Trial Justice Blair to investigate the conspiracy. The officers of the organization, some of whom had already been jailed, were made to bring in all the papers they had, including the organization’s rules and charter. Still, there was no direct testimony that would allow the coroner’s jury to come to a conclusion about Lee Good’s death. A newspaper account mentioned that both Dan Roberts and Prind Thompson had confessed to killing the boy to hide their theft of cotton, ‘though not formally before the jury’, a phrase that conjures up all sorts of unpleasant likelihoods.22 Through the afternoon and into the night of 14 December 1886, men hunched into their coats on street corners, holding glasses and leaning against bars, gesturing over the counters of stores, speaking and arguing, statements getting bolder and angrier, until a consensus settled like a fog over the town that the men in jail for the murder of little Lee Good would not be safely in that jail for long. Around seven o’clock, just before daylight, a mob of seventy-five men gathered and moved towards the jail.

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One man had an axe, a few others had sledgehammers, and more had shotguns. As Sheriff Glenn slept in the apartment on the first floor, a dozen of the men entered the jail and went up the stairs to the third floor where the cells were. Glenn awoke suddenly as he heard the sledgehammers and axe battering the wooden shutter that was the first obstacle as the mob tried to get to the iron grate door behind it that protected the cells. Running up the stairs, he ordered the men to stop trying to batter down the door, insisting that it would do no good as the men they were after were no longer in the jail, not even in York County at all. Glenn allowed four of the mob members to look through the entire jail, inspecting the prisoners who were there, but the men from Bullocks Creek were nowhere to be found. Disappointed, the mob dissolved into Yorkville’s streets as dawn lit the town.23 The reason the sheriff had been slow to wake when the mob arrived at the jail was that he had only just gotten to sleep after a busy night. Glenn had heard the conversations around town on Tuesday afternoon as well as anyone and knew what to expect. His years of experience as sheriff, dating back to Reconstruction times, had given him the ability to see trouble brewing and head it off. About seven o’clock on Tuesday night, Glenn went to Judge I. D. Witherspoon and got an order to allow the Bullocks Creek prisoners to be transferred to the Richland County jail in the state capital of Columbia. Quietly bringing three white men he trusted to the jail, Glenn deputized them for the purpose of conveying the five prisoners out of town and getting them safely on a southbound train. The prisoners were abruptly told to gather their clothes, and then they were handcuffed and carried downstairs from the cells to the foyer of the jail. The prisoners, too, were well aware of the mood in the town, and thinking that they were being turned over to a mob, they began protesting and demanding, begging even, for protection from whatever awaited them outside the jail. While Glenn certainly did not want his prisoners lynched, he cared little for their peace of mind, and the prisoners’ misconception that they were about to be handed over to a mob was not corrected. It served them right, Glenn apparently thought, to worry a little. The prisoners were hustled out of the jail and across the lot beyond the gas house to a clump of pines, waiting there for a few minutes to be sure no one had noticed

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them leaving the jail. When the coast was clear, the deputies marched them quickly through the fields until they emerged on the Kings Mountain road about a mile north of the courthouse. Two carriages were waiting, and the prisoners and their minders climbed in. The original plan seems to have been to head east a few miles to Rock Hill and catch the train that ran south through Chester to Columbia, but someone realized that they were too late to catch that evening’s train. Staying overnight in Rock Hill might not be safe, as the mob beginning to take shape in Yorkville could easily discover the ruse and get to Rock Hill before they could get the prisoners out of town. There was a later train leaving from Gastonia, North Carolina, westbound to Greenville, where they could catch the train to Columbia the next morning, so the party set out towards Gastonia, eighteen miles away. The red clay roads were heavy with mud from the winter drizzle, and the carriage wheels moved slowly through the muck, all the more so when a spring on one carriage broke. Damp and muddy and tired, the deputies and their prisoners arrived in Gastonia but discovered that their train had gone to Greenville a half-hour earlier. Exhausted, they stayed in Gastonia overnight, got fresh horses the next morning and set out towards Charlotte to catch the southbound train for Columbia. Covering the twenty miles to Charlotte, they got to the train station at two o’clock in the afternoon only to find that the passenger train for Columbia had just left. The deputies tried to use the importance of their position and their mission to get the train company to allow them to ride on the next available train going south, whatever kind. That, apparently, was against the railroad’s rules, and the men had to cool their heels in Charlotte for a day, finally boarding the passenger service for Columbia just after lunch on Thursday. It was at this point that the deputies finally told the prisoners what was happening, and from there on, the trip was uneventful. The prisoners were duly handed over to the custody of the Richland County jail that evening. And there they stayed until the first week in April 1887, when two deputies from Yorkville came down to fetch them back for their trial, returning them to the third-floor cells in the York County jail they had left in December.24 Shortly after Giles Good and the others returned to Yorkville from Columbia, William E. Good was on his way to Columbia, to Bull Street.

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Any South Carolinian then as now would know what that meant, for, whatever other establishments occupied that thoroughfare, Bull Street was known for the 1828 building designed by South Carolina’s greatest architect, Robert Mills, to house what was called in 1887 the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum. On 4 April 1887, Sheriff Glenn deputized Emet Wylie to carry William E. Good down to the asylum, marking the end of what must have been a painful and sad process for everyone involved. In an era before the confidentiality of patient records, commitment for insanity in nineteenth-century South Carolina was a very public process. Eleven different men from Yorkville and Hoodtown were involved in the legal procedures by which the community formally recognized that William E. Good had crossed the line from manageable grief to madness. Two physicians examined him and made reports, two of Good’s neighbours from Hoodtown described his condition to initiate the commitment process, the county auditor and treasurer attested that Good could not afford to pay the full cost of the treatment he needed and should be cared for by the state, and the York County probate judge oversaw the entire process. The physicians from Yorkville concluded ‘That he has been subjected to great mental excitement for the last four months, in consequence of the murder of his twelve-year-old son. Owing to the above facts and also on the subject of religion he is a confirmed Lunatic and a fit subject for the Asylum.’ Good’s neighbours from Hoodtown who made the statements to initiate Good’s commitment were men he knew well; one was an elder at Bullocks Creek Presbyterian Church with him. They described a man who until the end of November 1886 had always been cheerful, quiet and industrious, the sort of farmer who raised his family, tended his crops, went to church and avoided strong drink. There were no underlying physical or mental problems to account for his derangement before what the forms called ‘the immediate cause of the disease’, ‘the murder of his son’. The scope of Good’s grief for his son can first be glimpsed in his testimony before the coroner’s jury the day after the boy’s death. With his son not yet buried, Good commented that the boy had been twelve years, eight months and twelve days old. ‘Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days,’ wrote the psalmist, and Good could not know that he had thirty more years on the earth, but he

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certainly knew the exact time his beloved first-born child had spent here. By the end of March, Good was not violent or suicidal, but he had clearly lost his mind, subject to ‘wandering’ and ‘religious delusion’.25 The description of William E. Good’s mental state in the commitment papers is terse – he was ‘wandering’ and suffering from ‘religious delusion’ – but if we combine those comments with his Presbyterian faith, we can speculate on how his son’s murder might have driven Good mad. The initial newspaper account of Lee Good’s death mentioned that he ‘had connected himself with the church at Bullocks Creek’ in September 1886, but it would be natural for a father for whom religion was important and who served as an elder and a deacon at the church to worry for the state of his son’s soul. Had the boy really experienced God’s grace and been secure in his salvation? Did he have enough time in his short life for that? Surely the murder of an inoffensive boy, all for a few baskets of cotton, could be nothing but the work of the Devil. How could God permit such things? Thoughts like this could have shaken William E. Good’s own faith. Calvinists like the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of Bullock Creek take a dour view of the world and man’s place in it. Human beings are not meant to understand God’s ways. We must all rely on His grace for salvation, and God knows all about all of us and separates the saved from the damned before we are even born, before the world existed. Those who are saved reveal their status as members of the elect by the righteousness of their actions, but their actions certainly do not have any effect on their salvation. Predestination is a hard creed, and how much harder must it be for a father to believe, to deeply believe, that God in His inscrutable wisdom had decided long before the joyful moment of Lee Good’s birth that before he finished his thirteenth year he would be beaten mercilessly with a couple of rocks, that someone would stomp on his head and his body with their boots and leave him in a muddy ditch to die. Who among us would not want some kind of explanation from God for such cruelty, but the mere desire for such an accounting could be a suggestion to William E. Good that he was not of the elect after all. Surely a religious man like William E. Good must have thought of Job when he heard of the deaths of his children, who said, ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away’. But maybe William E. Good just could not bring himself to say, with Job, the

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rest of that formulation: ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ As if it were not enough to see a respected neighbour committed to the lunatic asylum out of grief for his murdered son, word began to circulate that a slick laywer in Columbia had convinced Prindley Thompson to use the insanity dodge at his trial, a cruel mockery of William E. Good’s pathetic condition.26 Had William E. Good not been carried to the asylum on the very Monday morning that the court was to meet to try the men who killed his son, that trial might have been allowed to proceed. Instead, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, 5 April 1887, between seventy-five and a hundred men, mostly from the western part of York County, assembled four miles from town on Howells Ferry Road. Deciding to hang the prisoners once they had them out of the jail, the mob realized that no one had brought any rope. A couple of men were dispatched to a nearby farm, where they crept into the barn and took several ploughlines, being sure to leave some money for their replacement. The mob rode quietly into town, three abreast. As they got closer, they saw a light near the jail and worried that the sheriff was again prepared for a lynching, but it was only someone’s brush pile burning in the woods south-west of the jail. Around four o’clock in the morning, Sheriff Glenn was awakened by a noise at the door. Rushing up to the crowd, still in his nightclothes, Glenn refused their demand that he surrender the keys. They had expected as much and headed up the stairs to begin battering the wooden shutter at the entrance to the cells. Glenn tried to attract attention outside by firing his gun in the air repeatedly, but it jammed, so he went back in, threw on some clothes, and headed up the street to find help. Soon enough, axes had cut the plate lock out of the wooden door, and the padlocks on the cells had been broken off. The mob used a dark lantern to examine the prisoners, peering into each face to find the five men they wanted: Giles Good, Bailey Dowdle, Mose Lipscomb, Dan Roberts and Prindley Thompson. When the prisoners in the jail realized who the mob wanted, they directed the men to the third cell on the west side of the passage where the five had been placed on their return from Columbia. There was a brief debate about whether or not to take Jack McCluney, too, since he had been a leader in the Rising Star Lodge, but in the end they decided to leave him. Giles Good urged the others to fight, saying, ‘It is death anyhow and you

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might as well die here defending your lives as to be hanged later.’ He and Prindley Thompson fought hard for a few minutes until an axe smashed into Thompson’s mouth and took most of the fight out of him, along with some teeth. The mob tied the prisoners with some of the ropes they had brought and marched them downstairs. As they moved them away from the jail, Bailey Dowdle said the whole thing had been Dan Roberts’s idea and that none of the others had wanted to kill Lee Good. Prindley Thompson and Mose Lipscomb agreed with Dowdle, perhaps hoping the mob might be satisfied with one death. An account later said that ‘Giles Good denied having any connection with the murder, but it is said that he did not deny that he deserved hanging.’27 The mob and the prisoners continued along the road leading northwest out of town for about a mile until they found an oak tree with stout, low-hanging limbs. The men pulled their horses up into a crescent facing the tree on the east side of the road and put a cordon across the road. The sinking moon by this time was obscured by the tops of trees, and despite three houses fairly close by, the mob was not interrupted in its work. One man climbed up a limb that extended out towards the road and fastened three ropes about two feet apart. Bailey Dowdle was the first to be lifted up onto a horse behind its rider and carried beneath the limb, a noose fastened around his neck. While the ropes were being adjusted around the necks of Prindley Thompson and Mose Lipscomb, one of the prisoners said to Giles Good, who was being forced to watch the execution of his friends, ‘Just as I told you, old man; we’ll soon be together in glory.’ The three of them got there first, as on a signal the horses were spurred suddenly forward, leaving the men to drop a couple of feet to the end of the ropes, not far enough to break their necks, and slowly strangle. Giles Good was next, from a new limb a little higher since there was no more room on the first. The horse Giles sat on was restless as the rope was being tied, so when Giles dropped, his feet dragged the ground, instinctively scrabbling for some purchase to relieve the pressure on his neck. Someone rushed forward and drew his knees up and tied them so he could swing free. Dan Roberts was hanged last, and from a tree across the road. The mob botched this hanging, too, having to tie a slipknot into the rope to shorten it because he would not be clear of the ground. When all the five men were

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hanging from the two trees, the mob dispersed, a handful staying a few minutes more to make sure the prisoners were dead.28 Back in town, Sheriff Glenn had found Dr White, and the two rode along in the direction the mob had gone. When they reached the mile post, they found armed guards across the road and turned back to town. Later, the two men and others went back and found the five black men swinging from the trees. They cut them down and laid them out alongside the white oak. A hasty coroner’s jury predictably concluded ‘That the above named persons came to their death by hanging, and by persons unknown to the jury.’ After the inquest, relatives arrived to claim the bodies of Bailey Dowdle and Dan Roberts. Tuesday night, a grave was dug on I. T. Parish’s land, and the bodies of Giles Good, Mose Lipscomb and Prindley Thompson were thrown in. The next day, family for Giles Good and Thompson arrived, digging through the loose clay of the new-filled grave, pulling the stiffened bodies out, brushing off the worst of the mud, and loading them into wagons for the long trip back to Bullocks Creek and a proper burial. No one came for Lipscomb’s body, and it remains there to this day, though no one now could probably point out exactly where.29 In the wake of the lynching, some condemned the mob’s attack on the process of the law and on the state itself. The editor of the Charleston News and Courier expressed this view most strongly, writing, ‘The murder of young Good was bad enough, but the lynching of the murderers was worse. It is a shame to the State that such a tragedy should take place anywhere within her borders. It is an offense against the law and an outrage against the peace and good order of society.’ More, however, agreed that the lynching was a bad thing, but argued that the courts and government were powerless to stop it. The Columbia Register took a pragmatic view of the situation: ‘But, after all, what are you going to do about it? What jury in all South Carolina will convict?’ The problem was less about the deaths of the five men than the messiness and disorder of the means of those deaths. ‘The real trouble is that everybody thinks they ought to have been hung,’ explained the Columbia Record, ‘and few people care much about the style in which the hanging was effected. This is certainly an unfortunate state of public sentiment, but here it is anyhow. This state of feeling, right or wrong, must render futile any efforts to punish the lynchers.’ Most

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Lynching of Giles Good and others, 1887. Courtesy of John Hammond Moore.

outspoken was the judge who was to have presided over the trial of the men lynched, B. C. Pressley. He had been trying to get grand juries to bring charges against lynch mobs in South Carolina for years without success. His public letter on the subject bemoaned this laxness but pointed out that when he had finally convinced a grand jury to go after lynchers in a case in Edgefield in 1885 where a mob had killed a white man, the case ended in ‘acknowledged failure’. Nearly two years after that lynching, legal efforts to prosecute anyone from the mob were slowly winding down. Disgusted, Pressley argued, Now, I am unwilling any longer to use the expensive machinery of the Court to enact a farce. The only remedy is to rouse the people to a proper sense of their danger and their disgrace. My warnings thus far have been poured into deaf ears, and begin to sound like an idle tale even to myself. If pulpit, press, and all good people would persistently unite to make lynching hateful, then the Courts could punish and crush it out. Until that be done we can only play Cassandra – warn in vain.30

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The problem, it seemed, was what many perceived as ‘loopholes’ in the law, that provided the guilty a way to slip free. While they were awaiting trial in Columbia, the prisoners had gotten advice from a lawyer, and it was he who convinced Prindley Thompson to plead insanity. He also suggested that the accused seek a change in venue since it might be difficult to find an unbiased jury in York County. Advice on legal strategy from an actual lawyer was exactly the kind of thing that could thwart the process of justice, according to many whites in South Carolina in 1887. They also disliked the system of peremptory challenges in jury selection, which meant that it was possible to exclude people who might be predisposed to convict poor black men for murdering a white farmer’s son regardless of the strength or weakness of the evidence presented. The rules of evidence were also a source of problems. Although Prindley Thompson and Dan Roberts had apparently made statements of some sort admitting guilt, the fact that they were not made formally before the coroner’s jury, indeed may have been made under the sort of physical coercion that whites in the late nineteenth century thought was necessary to extract anything resembling the truth from recalcitrant African Americans, prevented this valuable information from being used against them in court, another canny ‘loophole’ that kept justice from being meted out. A threat from someone writing to the newspaper under the nom de plume of ‘Judge Lynch’ summed up the popular attitude towards all these loopholes: ‘If you don’t do something with your jury system, your lawyers and your rules of evidence pretty soon, I shall assume jurisdiction in more cases than those with which I have recently been dealing.’ It was no idle threat, as the rising rates of lynching in the 1890s would prove.31

3

Rape and Lynching in the New South: Manse Waldrop, Central, S.C., 1887 This is the story of one of the strangest lynchings in the often strange history of lynching in the South. Yet, it sheds much light on some of the most common features of the phenomenon. Ultimately, I think, it is a story about the changes that are wrapped up in the phrase ‘the New South’, not the story of a lynching to settle old scores in a slow-changing rural community like Bullocks Creek, but a complex and fast-moving account of new people dealing with new situations and testing the limits under changing rules. And if the lynching of Giles Good revealed much about the gradual decline of African American political power in the decade after Reconstruction ended, then the lynching in Central, South Carolina, and its denouement, demonstrates that by the late 1880s, African American political power in much of the Carolinas had dwindled to as close to nothing as makes no difference. Rather than worrying about African Americans holding and using political power, whites and blacks alike had to a large extent begun to accustom themselves to a world where that was not likely to happen, and masculinity, especially the masculinity of black men, was being redefined accordingly. It was also a time when whites were imposing a particular idea of what African American men were like upon the society, the idea that black men represented an ever-present danger to the purity of white women – except the situation in Central would be very different, in some ways the exception that proves the rule. Manse Waldrop was lynched in a town with a name that sounds like the sort of bland pseudonym sociologists use for their study sites: Central, South Carolina. Unionville had been an old courthouse town since the early antebellum period, and Bullocks Creek was part of the earliest European settlement in that part of South Carolina. Early on, both were embedded deeply in the cotton economy. Central was different from either

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of these places. Though still part of the Piedmont, Central lay further to the west, and on a clear day the sudden rise of the Blue Ridge was visible not far to the north. Not really close to a major river like the Broad River that ran between Unionville and Bullocks Creek, Central until the end of the Civil War had been an unremarkable place, a rural area evolving slowly along the very fringe of the cotton-producing Piedmont. Reconstruction, and the railroads it brought to the South, built Central. Tom Scott, the man who ran the Pennsylvania Railroad, got into the scramble to expand the nation’s railroad network into the South with a plan for a new line that would run from Richmond, within striking distance of both rail connections to the North and Virginia’s deepwater ports, all the way to Atlanta, itself an important rail hub and transit point for the rich agricultural lands of Georgia. Such a railroad would be able to bring manufactured goods from the North and Midwest into the smalltown stores of the South, but more importantly, it would make it easier to ship southern cotton and other products out. The Piedmont band skirting the edge of the mountains had been brought into the cotton economy to some extent during the boom years of the 1850s, but the availability of cheaper rail transportation would truly make cotton king in this region. Central lay only a few miles from the route of the Blue Ridge Railroad, built in the 1850s, but that line went only south-east, toward the cotton factors of Charleston, rather than linking this edge of the Piedmont with other states and northern markets. On 28 September 1873 the railroad was completed, and Central went from being a rural backwater to being, well, central.1 A first-time visitor’s usual rejoinder to seeing the town’s name is ‘Central to what?’ One hundred and thirty-three miles in one direction would bring the traveller to Atlanta, while the same distance going northeast would bring him to Charlotte. This meant that Central was the perfect location for a railroad terminal to service the trains that made this run, a place for engines to be taken off and switched out, given a good cleaning, and repaired (so long as it was nothing too serious). A coal chute on the north side of the tracks provided the fuel, and a water tank provided the water for the steam that drove the trains. With all this work to be done, those doing the work needed somewhere to live, so houses for railroad

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employees sprang up, and stores to serve their needs. Since trains stopped frequently at Central, a hotel was built in a grove of trees below the water tank and soon became known up and down the line for its fine food, especially its spoonbread. The hotel was the hub of the town, a place where travellers stopped on their way through. A telegraph office in the building kept the town abreast of important news, and a special room was set aside where drummers could display their wares for the inspection of local merchants.2 Not only was Central centrally located on the Atlanta and Richmond Air-Line Railway, but it could also be considered an exemplar of how the powerful forces creating the ‘New South’ after Reconstruction were shaping the destiny of the region, for the better as it seemed to most. Since the Civil War had wrecked the old financial networks that connected inland cotton plantations to cotton factors in southern coastal cities to buyers in England and replaced it with a system where credit flowed south from New York, and the crops it financed moved back north, the railroad helped this part of the South tap into that new economic system. The railroad also helped make possible a cotton textile industry in the South itself starting in the 1880s. Manufacturers could ship their finished products out, and soon they could also ship in coal with which to run their factories, freeing them from the water power that had until then kept mills and factories tied to the edges of the region’s small rivers, and underpowered. As the railroads of the New South reached more and more places, they changed the way people lived, the things with which they filled their houses and their bellies. Many found it made more sense to buy flour from the Midwest, and beef that had been packed in Chicago, than to raise those things themselves, and all manner of manufactured goods that might once have been only for their betters were now available to nearly everyone. Even more significant perhaps was the movement of people the railroad facilitated. Before the railroad came through Central, it would have been fairly rare for people who lived there to see an unfamiliar face. With the railroad, though, strangers came and went every day, sometimes just faces through a carriage window, other times a quick and anonymous conversation, a connection to a world that suddenly seemed much larger and closer than it had just a few years before. Railroads also facilitated the growth of

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the other marvel of the New South in the Piedmont, cotton mills. While Central did not get its own mill until after the turn of the century, an important mill was built in 1881 at Pelzer on the Saluda River fifteen miles away in Anderson County, providing a nearby market for cotton crops as well as an alternative to following a mule through the fields, at least for white workers in the area.3 According to one optimistic way of looking at things, these new ways of life and new opportunities in the New South had a good chance of eliminating the racial conflict that had characterized the region during Reconstruction. At that time, as the railroads were hiring black men for construction jobs and as the first effects of the railroads were felt, the railroads had been a source of disruption, providing African American men with cash wages and an independent political base outside the control of whites. Many whites objected violently to this, resulting in the wave of Ku Klux Klan terror that found its worst expression along the corridors of the new railroads of the South in the late 1860s and early 1870s. By the 1880s, however, things had settled down. It was clear that the economic changes wrought by the railroads were not going to be reversed, but also that the possibilities for independent African American political action were not as durable as many had thought. The shape of a new accommodation began to emerge, one that would be fleshed out in Booker T. Washington’s 1895 ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech. Black labourers would supply the brawn for the industrial development of the New South, and so long as they did not aspire to more than that, their minimal accomplishments and subservient position would be protected and tolerated by the whites who ran things. In the meantime, though, until that accommodation really took hold, African Americans continued to push against, and often beyond, boundaries that sometimes were as solid as stone and yet other times could be as yielding as a friendly handshake. Even once electoral politics slipped away, African Americans continued to organize and engage in more oblique or even subterranean forms of politics. Until such efforts were slapped down, as happened in Bullocks Creek, they could make the lives of African American men and their families more successful, more secure, and make their place in the New South order one of solid, if limited, respectability.4

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In many ways, Cato Sherman exemplified the hopes many people held for African American men in the post-Reconstruction South. In 1887, Cato Sherman was thirty-seven years old, married to Delia for twelve years, and the father of seven children, the oldest of whom was a thirteenyear-old daughter, Lula. He could hardly have been more different from Giles Good. Cato Sherman certainly never appears in the records as any sort of political leader. To some extent, his circumstances did not call for the kind of bold political actions Good tended towards, if only because with such a comparatively small proportion of African Americans in the upper end of the state, whites there never really felt they were close to losing control. There was political turbulence and some violence, but nothing on the scale of Union County or York County. In fact, Sherman appears to have been pretty well respected by his neighbours, even the white ones, since he was invited to lead a prayer at a Fourth of July picnic at Pickens in 1887.5 Harrison Haywood and William C. Williams were also African American men making the most of the new opportunities available to them and gaining a secure place in the New South. Harrison Haywood was the son of an established member of Pickens County’s African American community, thirty-one years old and married in 1887. His father, Washington Haywood, had been a slave, and when freedom came he took the lead in establishing Abel Baptist Church. Located between Central and the small settlement that clustered around Fort Hill, the plantation of statesman John C. Calhoun, Abel was typical of the black Baptist churches that sprang up like mushrooms after Emancipation. William C. Williams was perhaps an even better example of the New South’s ability to change the lives of African Americans. Not, so far as we know, born into a prominent family, Williams by 1887 was twenty-eight years old, married, and working for the railroad at the Central coal chute. He did not have to worry about pleasing a white landlord so that next year he did not get stuck renting a small, scrubby farm. Rather than drawing rations at inflated credit prices against the crop he was raising, stuck trading with the merchant his landlord had chosen, Williams earned cash, and the Atlanta and Richmond Air-Line Railway did not care where, or how, he spent it. Williams and his colleagues must have been doing something right, because in late 1886 the

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Railway yard and coal chute in Greenville, similar to the one in Central. Courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

railroad decided to dismiss all its white workers and hire only blacks, a move probably designed to cut costs and to prevent any labour problems at the critical Central terminal.6 Part of the apparent success of men like Sherman, Haywood and Williams was how well they fit into models of masculinity that had been evolving swiftly since the Civil War began a quarter-century before. While still under the yoke of slavery, African American men could hardly fulfil the requirements southern society had of men: they were not their own masters, nor masters of their households, nor did they exercise political power. In the 1860s, all this began to change with dizzying speed. In scattered fashion, then all at once with the war’s end, African American men were no longer anyone’s slaves, but their own men, often in charge of their own families, though this was one of the key battlegrounds during the two years of Presidential Reconstruction. In the last couple of years of the war, around 200,000 black men served in the Union Army, and military service has always provided a strong claim to both masculinity and citizenship. And while true economic independence eluded all

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but the most fortunate during Reconstruction, after the beginning of Congressional Reconstruction, African American men even exercised political rights. In many ways, then, they could aspire to the same sorts of masculine ideals that white men did, something that provided ammunition for their enemies with the claim that this new black masculinity might include sexual access to white women. With the erosion of black political power at the end of Reconstruction and the failure of Reconstruction to reconfigure the southern economy in such a way as to make most poor blacks (or poor whites, for that matter) economically self-sufficient, this new model of black masculinity had to trim its sails. As historians Glenda Gilmore, Heather Cox Richardson and Laura Edwards have explained, a new model began to emerge for the successful black man. Rather than seek to exercise political power, with its twin implications of getting something through chicanery rather than old-fashioned hard work, and social equality in public and in private, many African American leaders began to urge their community to aspire not to political office and formal equality with whites, but to hard work, thriftiness, clean living and a secure family life, the sorts of values later urged by Booker T. Washington. Within these limits, a black man might still be head of his household, but he would not try to exert his masculinity in the public sphere in a way that would directly challenge white men’s ideas of their masculinity, which included a sense of racial superiority.7 Christmas fell on a Sunday in 1887, but it was not an entirely joyful occasion in the Shermans’ sharecropper cabin on G. W. Miller’s place south of Central. Someone had died, and the day after Christmas, a Monday, Delia Sherman attended a funeral. Cato Sherman was also away from the house that day. Around mid-morning, a white man stopped by Miller’s house to talk to him about renting a farm for the next year. He was short and stout with a moustache and heavy, stubbly whiskers and blue eyes, wearing a threadbare jeans suit and a sack coat. Miller did not recognize him, but when Manse Waldrop told him his name, Miller recalled that he did know the man. Shortly after noon, Waldrop left to go over to Miller’s father’s place to see if he had a farm available. He asked permission to hunt along the way, and Miller agreed, though he thought it odd that Waldrop had a

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gun with him but no dog, hardly a recipe for successful hunting. Waldrop went over the creek and past the house of one of Miller’s other tenants and headed towards Cato Sherman’s house, which was a half-mile away but out of sight over a hill. Waldrop arrived at Sherman’s house, finding Lula there with at least one of her younger sisters. With no one to protect her and with Waldrop a grown man and armed, Lula had little defence. Waldrop told her not to shout or he would kill her, and stifled her cries with a handkerchief as he raped her. Afterwards, Waldrop seems to have been alarmed at the effect his attack had on the girl, forcing her to drink some medicine that she vomited back up and staunching her bleeding with a lump of raw cotton the size of a fist that he forced into her. Perhaps no one would find out what had happened, or who had done it.8 When Delia returned from the funeral, she could see immediately that something was very wrong with Lula. She was unable to walk and clearly distressed, but despite Delia’s increasingly insistent questioning, Lula would not say a word about what had happened. Tuesday evening, Delia sent for Hamp Forrester, an older man in the neighbourhood who may have been a relative or a church leader. Lula confided to Forrester that she was going to die and asked for a particular church member to preach her funeral. By Wednesday, Lula was very ill, no doubt from infection because of the cotton still lodged inside her. Finally on Thursday, Lula broke down and told her parents all that had happened on Monday, describing the white man who had raped her. Not long after, the shock and infection took their toll, and she began to go into convulsions. They sent for Dr T. W. Folger, but he was in Central, and Lula died about fifteen minutes before he arrived – there was probably nothing he could have done at that point anyway.9 The local trial justice, Ben Garvin, was also serving as coroner, and he called together a jury of local men, white and black, to meet at J. C. Watkins’s store to investigate Lula Sherman’s death. Garvin was the older of two brothers who were both sons of one of the farmers who had been in the area since well before Central was a town. Holding the inquest at J. C. ‘Pet’ Watkins’s store made good sense as he was one of the larger landowners on the south side of Central and also had helped African Americans organize Baptist churches during Reconstruction, including

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Abel Baptist Church. His presence would have reassured Cato Sherman and his African American neighbours that Garvin intended to deal fairly with them and bring Lula’s killer to account. Yet despite Garvin’s good intentions, that would be a difficult task. He took evidence from Lula’s parents, from H. C. Miller (G. W. Miller’s father, who was a physician as well as a farmer and had been there as Lula was dying), and from T. W. Folger. As Folger explained, the physical evidence of Lula’s body made it clear that she had been raped and that the rape had led to her death. Aside from the second-hand descriptions of the attacker, though, it was not clear where to look next for the suspect.10 Only the truly extraordinary events recounted in this chapter preserved this detailed record of an African American rape victim in the 1880s. The rape of black women, especially in the period after Reconstruction, is a classic historical iceberg – we can see a bit of it above the surface of the documentary record, but there is almost certainly much more in the murky waters of the past that we cannot make out so clearly. In the days of slavery, a slave woman had no laws to protect her from rape. At most, the rape of a slave woman by someone other than her own master might be considered a violation of property rights, just as if someone were to beat another man’s mule. This left black women incredibly vulnerable to sexual assaults by other slaves and black men, and obviously to white men who owned them and other white men in their households such as sons and nephews. To some extent, this danger was mitigated by the slave’s financial value to her owner and by the idea that as the patriarchal protector of his household, a slaveowner might consider an assault on one of his slaves an attack on his own honour. Or he might not care.11 The Civil War and Reconstruction wrenched antebellum social structures and categories all out of shape and precipitated what one historian called a ‘crisis in gender’, and the widespread rape of black women during the political struggles of Reconstruction was one dimension of that crisis. The first years of Reconstruction saw a number of sexual assaults on black women, especially in the wild riots of the first couple of years, and later as part of the Ku Klux Klan’s terror campaign. Ku Kluxers could not necessarily recreate all of the status quo antebellum, but they could succeed in limiting the freedom blacks had gained and at least reassert traditional

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white male access to black women. Many of the same stereotypes about the promiscuity of black women that had been used to excuse rape before the Civil War persisted afterwards, helping to explain the almost non-existent rate of convictions for white men charged with raping black women. Nonetheless, just having access to the courts as a recourse was a significant step forward for black women and probably dissuaded at least some would-be rapists, white and black.12 The rape of black women in the post-Reconstruction South can also be thought of as a battleground in the conflict between black and white notions of masculinity. Military service in the Civil War, Emancipation and taking on a new role as heads of households, and holding and exercising political power itself in Reconstruction all helped craft a new masculinity for African American men, more in line with that held by other men across the country. To a great extent, this new black masculinity was part of a broader southern masculinity and culture of honour, where a man’s standing was wrapped up in his control over and protection of women in his household. Within this context, historian Peter W. Bardaglio explains that ‘rape challenged the power of the male household head to protect the women, children, and other dependents in his family, and damaged his standing in the community. By violently gaining access to another woman’s sexuality, the rapist not only exercised control over the woman but also undercut the public authority of her husband or father.’13 White men in the South at this time also found themselves in a difficult position. They had the same role as patriarchal protectors of their women, but antebellum experience had ingrained the idea that they should have easy access to black women’s sexuality. In addition to this antebellum holdover, the use of sexual violence as a political weapon during Reconstruction had accustomed some white men to having their way, and now that black women did not have white patriarchal protectors in the form of slaveowners, it must have seemed like open season to some white men. When the coroner’s inquest reconvened near Central on Friday 30 December 1887, new evidence quickly pointed towards a suspect. One of the first witnesses called was G. W. Miller. He told about Manse Waldrop’s visit, and other witnesses confirmed that they had seen someone matching Waldrop’s description. Waldrop, who worked on Ashtabula Plantation

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outside of Pendleton a few miles away, was sent for, arriving later in the day. Waldrop claimed that he had been at Hunter’s Mill in Pendleton all day on Monday with two friends, but when Mandy Lu Sherman, Lula’s eight-year-old sister who had been in the house during the attack, was brought from her sister’s funeral to identify the attacker, she unhesitatingly pointed out Waldrop as the man who had raped her sister. Around ten o’clock that night, the coroner’s jury found Lula’s death to have been caused by a rape committed by Manse Waldrop, and Garvin told Waldrop that he would have to be committed to jail.14 Waldrop might have suspected that the plans that would end his life a few hours later were being formed in Pet Watkins’s store. Harrison Haywood may have been the first person to exclaim that Waldrop deserved hanging. Agreeing with him was Gaylord Eaton, who said he would do it himself if he could get two or three black men to help him. What gave this statement some weight was that Eaton was the local constable and white, though all witnesses were quick to point out that he had been drinking most of the day. Emboldened by the idea that a white man would encourage black men to kill a white man, William C. Williams asked Watkins what would happen if they hanged Waldrop. When Watkins recounted the incident, he claimed that he told the black men in his store to let the law take its course, that Waldrop was sure to be hanged at any rate, and that if they killed him it would be murder. Harrison Haywood remembered things differently. He remembered Watkins saying whatever they did, not to have any white men involved in it, maybe meaning that if white men were involved, then only the blacks would get the blame. As it turned out, this was not such bad advice. Some of those at Watkins’s store could sense trouble, knew that Waldrop could not remain there much longer. By the time Lula Sherman’s inquest concluded, serious unrest was developing, and one white railroad worker said he thought there would be a lynching if Waldrop was not taken from the store. Waldrop was tied up and entrusted to Gaylord Eaton, who marched him into town.15 Had Manse Waldrop never raped Lula Sherman, the men who lynched him would probably have spent that night laughing, eating, drinking a bit of whiskey, and dancing to the sounds of a local string band. Uncle Ed Crooks had a hot supper planned for that Friday night. Some of the

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African American men who had attended the Lula Sherman inquest headed over to it afterwards, but the ‘festival’ seems to have been cancelled. The tragic death of Lula Sherman must have taken the heart out of those who had intended to celebrate the close of the year. The cancellation of the hot supper provided a good alibi, as there was a confusing movement of people arriving, seeing nothing was going on, and moving along to something else. The men who made up the mob later claimed they had arrived at Crooks’s place and then gone on home.16 The leading white citizens of Central spent the early part of the evening trying to figure out a way to save the life of the scruffy man sitting tied up in the hotel’s waiting room. Some thought the hotel was the safest place for him, proposing to keep him there till daylight with a guard of ten men to protect him from the anticipated attack. Dr T. W. Folger disagreed strongly, sure that if Waldrop were kept in Central, a mob would kill him before daylight. The prisoner’s best chance, Folger argued, was to get to the jail in Pickens. But there was already a mob forming along the road to Pickens, he had heard, so Folger advised David Garvin, Ben’s younger brother who was given the job of getting Waldrop safely jailed, to take an alternate route.17 The debate was settled by Gaylord Eaton, who finally announced that he was going to walk the prisoner all the way to the Pickens jail if he had to. Since Waldrop had been officially committed to jail and Eaton was the constable, drunk or sober, this may have actually been within Eaton’s prerogative to decide, ill-advised as such a course might have been. Witnesses heard Eaton say that he was going to start out walking to Pickens with Waldrop but that he knew he would never get there. How such a statement must have affected Waldrop can be imagined. Trying to fend off a disaster once he saw Eaton was leaving one way or another, David Garvin rushed to the livery stable to get a buggy. He came back in a few minutes with a white mule hitched up to one of the livery’s buggies, and he, Eaton and Waldrop set off into the darkness around midnight.18 They did not get far, as Eaton must have known that they would not. With Garvin driving and Waldrop sitting tied on the bench next to him, they travelled about three-eighths of a mile out of town on the main road to Pickens, with Eaton standing on the back axle. At this point, Garvin saw

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two or three men in the shadows along the edge of the road. Driving on, Garvin soon saw twenty-five or thirty men filling the road ahead of him, so he pulled the buggy around and began driving back towards Central as fast as the mule would go. As the buggy reached the point where the first of the mob had been seen, men came from the roadside and grabbed the mule’s bridle and, as Garvin explained, ‘stopped the mule although I was beating it with all my power’. With the mule held fast and Garvin shouting a mix of threats and pleas, the mob dragged Waldrop off the seat of the buggy. Once the buggy stopped, Eaton jumped off the back and ran back towards town, maybe to get help. The mob closed in around Waldrop and dragged and pushed him off down the road about 300 yards to a spot in front of Dr S. A. Clayton’s house. Everyone present heard three pistol shots.19 At this point, some of Central’s white citizens intervened, attempting to stop what had started before it went any further. T. W. Folger and William Payne had started towards the scene from the hotel as they realized something was amiss, and the two of them along with Clayton, still pulling on his clothes, came into the road to confront the mob. The group of black men retreated a bit when they saw the three white men, leaving Waldrop lying beside the road, moaning that he had been shot and was surely dying. The two doctors examined him and found that the bullets had just grazed his head, but aside from a bad fright and a few bruises, Waldrop was all right. The prisoner stood up and asked Folger and the others to take him back to Central. He was particularly concerned to see his people again before he died. The three white men, with Waldrop in front of them, started back up the road to Central.20 With the grief, rage and frustration that had been building since the horrible details of Lula’s death became known, reason, justice and mercy did not stand a chance. Just as Waldrop might have been starting to count his blessings, the mob surged past Folger, Clayton and Payne and seized Waldrop again, hauling him off into the woods beside the road and over the edge of a hill. Threats and brandished guns convinced Folger and the others not to attempt a second rescue, and reluctantly they left Waldrop to his fate. The next morning, Waldrop was found a little way off the road. Someone had run a rope through the fork of a tree and tied it to a sapling

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behind. At the other end of the rope, Waldrop’s cold corpse was hanging with his feet brushing the ground, his hands no longer tied but limp at his sides.21 On the morning of the last day of 1887, Ben Garvin empanelled the second coroner’s jury in three days. He quickly got word, however, that larger forces would be brought to bear against those who lynched a white man, and the inquest was adjourned until Tuesday. On Tuesday morning, the solicitor, J. L. Orr, Jr, arrived to take charge and reconvened the inquest that morning. Many of the same witnesses who were at Lula Sherman’s inquest a few days earlier were back, and by Thursday 5 January 1888 William C. Williams, Cato Sherman, Harrison Haywood, Henry Bolton and John Reese were all arrested and safely in jail in Pickens. One other suspect, Foster Knox, had fled the area before the inquest got started. All six of these suspects were African American, but Gaylord Eaton was also arrested as an accessory before the fact. Hiring the best law firm in Pickens, Eaton applied for a writ of habeas corpus the day after he was jailed.22 Dr T. W. Folger’s response to the lynching he had been powerless to prevent was perhaps too provocative in its attempt to find some small good thing that could come out of the tragedies that concluded the year just past. Folger was a controversial figure in Central already because of his family background. Thirty-seven years old in 1887, he was the son of Rufus Folger, a prosperous merchant in Spartanburg County in the 1860s who had moved to Pickens County by 1870. The Folgers became the leading Republicans in Pickens County during Reconstruction, something hardly calculated to win friends in a place where memories were long. T. W. Folger graduated from medical college in Atlanta and went into practice in Central with Dr S. A. Clayton in 1876. In a letter dated 2 January 1888 and published in the Pickens Sentinel a few days later, Folger took great pains to explain how Waldrop was identified conclusively as the suspect behind the attack on Lula Sherman and to lay out clear evidence of his guilt that emerged in the coroner’s inquest. Folger also attempted to portray the citizens of Central as being in favour of this lynching. ‘While they [the citizens of Central] cannot but condemn violence,’ Folger wrote, ‘still they think that if ever a case of lynching was justifiable, this was one.’ Folger’s family’s tradition of support for racial egalitarianism crops up in

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his summary of the significance of the lynching: ‘But to all thinking men, it seems to me, that this will show the “bloody shirt” men of New England that the negro can lynch the white perpetrator of crime with as much impunity as can his Caucassian [sic] brother lynch the negro.’23 Local citizens and newspapers lost no time in pointing out that Folger did not speak for everyone and in placing an entirely different interpretation on the events at Central. On 6 January 1888, a group of Central citizens met to object to Folger’s characterization of the events, claiming that there was only ‘weak circumstantial testimony’ against Waldrop in the first place and passing resolutions signed by ‘eighty-three of the best citizens of Central and surrounding community’. The newspaper in neighbouring Oconee County published a lengthy editorial a week later giving its own explanation of the lynching, one that at the same time managed to justify the practice of lynching (when whites did it) and condemn this particular lynching (because it was carried out by African Americans against a white man). Assaults on virtuous women, the editorial began, are the most serious kind of attack on the very fabric of society. Thus, white men are justified in ignoring laws, whether secular or even divine, and lynching in response to such attacks. Although it may seem disruptive, lynching in this sort of case actually supports the stability of society because it is carried out by the responsible, property-owning, civilized members of society. Since African Americans were none of those things, if they lynched it would lead not to greater social stability but directly to anarchy. Besides, the editorial argued, just as African American communities themselves were neither moral nor virtuous, African American women lacked the virtue that justified lynching. ‘We do not deny but every citizen, male and female, white and black, are entitled to and should receive equal and impartial protection under the law,’ claimed the Keowee Courier, ‘but we deny, or strongly doubt whether a criminal assault on a black woman can or should, under the character of the race, arouse that just feeling of indignation, that firm and noble resolve, coupled with genuine excitement, which a like assault on a white woman by a black or white man necessarily does from habit and education, and which alone, if any excuse be allowed, stands as an excuse for past acts of lynch law by white men.’ As a result, the mob that lynched Waldrop must have done so for other, ulterior motives, probably some sort of attempt to

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change the social structure for the worse, and an investigation was needed to get to the bottom of those reasons. The idea that a father’s grief and a community’s rage might work the same whatever the colour skin seems never to have been seriously entertained by the writer of the editorial.24 The men charged with Waldrop’s death began their slow journey through the courts a few days later. They first went to court on 17 January 1888, but the defence was granted a delay in order to find witnesses and prepare its case. At this point, Eaton was released on $5,000 bail, but the five African American men were returned to the jail. In the upstairs cell of the wooden building, fires were not permitted, so the men paced up and down to stay warm and kept their spirits up by singing hymns. Black men charged with lynching a white rapist could easily have become a cause célèbre across the South, but efforts in this direction were stillborn. The case did draw attention across the state, especially in Charleston, always a stronghold of African American political power. From Charleston in January came a delegation of three prominent African Americans. John M. Freeman was a tradesman who had represented Charleston in the state House of Representatives from 1874 to 1876. Also along was Samuel J. Lee, a former slave from the upcountry who had made his way to Charleston after freedom and served in the state House of Representatives from 1868 to 1874, two of those years as Speaker. In the 1880s, he was reckoned one of the best African American lawyers in the state. They offered their assistance. However, they were told in no uncertain terms by the local counsel that their assistance was not needed. The Charleston lawyers did promise to provide whatever funds were needed for the defence of the lynchers, and then they returned to the lowcountry. Fundraising activities in Charleston later in spring 1888 were led by both members of the Republican party and church leaders.25 The most surprising thing about the January 1888 term of court in Pickens was the grand jury’s presentment. After some routine matters about fixing the windows in the jail and indicting someone for adultery, the grand jury launched into an attack on alcohol-fuelled disorder in Pickens County, especially Central. To some people in Central, liquor, and controlling who drank it and when, had been a problem for a quarter of a century. In the antebellum period, many small distilleries supplied

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plenty of spirits for home consumption, but the federal excise tax after the war began to get rid of these, especially after a crackdown in 1877–8. At the same time, liquor became easier to get after the South Carolina legislature eased the licensing laws in 1874 and barrooms began popping up everywhere. Even though saloons followed de facto racial segregation in towns and cities, local elites did not approve of them since they tended to draw workingmen and farmers. These barrooms became important sites of political mobilization and the hub of networks of employment and patronage, especially for African Americans who lacked the deep network of social institutions available to whites. By 1880, Central had 184 people and four saloons. However, the temperance movement in that part of South Carolina had reasserted itself in the late 1870s, and after local temperance supporters lost a municipal election they simply drew on the support of the local state senator and got the legislature to do the work for them. In 1880, a law was passed banning the sale of alcohol in all three of the Pickens County towns that had sprung up along the new railroad: Easley, Liberty and Central. The grand jury indicted several people around the county for selling whiskey, including two in Central. One of these was William F. Gary, who had previously been a United States deputy marshal when he lived in Liberty and who in 1889 served briefly as Central’s postmaster. Both of these positions, federal appointments, suggest that Gary was a Republican, which might have contributed to his unpopularity with his fellow citizens. The grand jury went on to blame physicians in Central for being too liberal with the prescriptions they wrote for spirits, blaming a lot of crime in Central on that practice and threatening to bring charges later. With this as prelude, the grand jury turned its attention to the Waldrop lynching. They began by initiating charges against D. E. Garvin, T. W. Folger, and three other men as accessories. The lynching was all the worse since, according to the grand jury, Lula died from ‘diseases peculiar to females and a severe whipping’ from her mother, not from any rape. The subtext of this would seem to be that Lula had caught a venereal disease and that her mother had beaten her in response. Any conclusions T. W. Folger had reached when he examined the girl’s body were dismissed since the grand jury claimed he was stinking drunk at the time. Arrest warrants were issued for those

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charged as accessories, but Garvin and Folger both posted bond to appear before the court in July 1888.26 The trial of the lynchers got underway in early July 1888 with the Honorable William H. Wallace presiding. The handful of men being held as accessories were not indicted by the grand jury, and the trial of the five African American men charged with lynching was held on 10 July 1888. Witnesses were heard, and the jury retired. Surprisingly, though, for a time and place where we are accustomed to thinking that a black man could never get a fair trial, the jury failed to agree on a verdict, and Judge Wallace was forced to declare a mistrial.27 When the case came up in November 1888, Gaylord Eaton was sick, so it was continued until March 1889, by which time the defendants had spent over a year in the Pickens jail. This time, a relatively new judge, J. J. Norton from Walhalla, was on the bench. After a two-day trial, the jury acquitted Gaylord Eaton, John Reese and Cato Sherman, but they found Henry Bolton, William C. Williams and Harrison Haywood guilty, recommending them to the mercy of the court. Immediately a motion was made for a new trial for the convicted men, and Bolton was able to get this request and to be granted bail, so he walked out of the Pickens courthouse a free man, for the time being. Williams and Haywood were not so fortunate. Norton refused their motion for a new trial and sentenced them to ‘be hanged by the neck until their and each of their bodies be dead’ on 5 April 1889. Norton’s role in the trial, especially the sentencing, is a little confusing but suggests that he placed the highest priority on upholding the law and the law’s authority. In a notorious 1867 case, he had served as the defence attorney for several African American men charged with murdering a white teenager at a political meeting. He even regretted having to sentence Haywood and Williams to death, but he felt he was bound to do so by the law. He explained a few days later to Governor Richardson that the jury probably thought their recommendation to mercy would spare the men’s lives, and they might well have returned a different verdict had they realized a guilty verdict would mean death.28 As strong as the evidence was and notwithstanding that the defendants were black men charged with killing a white man, the guilty verdict seems to have caught many observers by surprise, and a groundswell of

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support for the lynchers spread quickly across South Carolina. Several dozen petitions with thousands of signatures from across South Carolina found their way to Governor Richardson’s office. A group of over fifty white citizens of Central, including most of the ones directly involved in the events, sent a petition to the governor for a pardon, or at least a commutation for Haywood and Williams. ‘We are opposed to lynch law,’ the petitioners wrote, ‘but it is a recognized fact that no white man has ever been convicted in South Carolina for this offence, and it would seem to us to be unfair and unjust to hang these poor negroes, even if guilty, for simply following the advice & example of their white fellow citizens’. An even larger group of citizens, from across Pickens County, sent a more elaborate petition. This group of petitioners (whites and blacks, and also prominent political figures and most of the jurors in the case) claimed Waldrop was a bad man, widely believed to have been guilty of rape and attempted rape in the past. They asserted very strongly that Lula Sherman died because Manse Waldrop raped her, and claimed most whites in Central acquiesced in his lynching. Besides, they argued, it would hardly be fair to punish these two lynchers when hundreds of others had gotten away with the same crime over the past few years.29 Some petitions that came to Richardson had clearly been coordinated from around the state, using identical language and structure. Finally, a group of African American ministers and educators held a meeting with the governor on 30 March 1889. They described themselves as a ‘committee representing petitioners in all parts of the state’, and they brought more petitions from around South Carolina to hand over to Richardson. The group included nine ministers, from Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) churches, including J. J. Durham, a physician who was also the leading black Baptist in the state. The president from Allen University in Columbia, affiliated with the A.M.E. church, and a professor from the institution were also present. The ministers’ petition claimed Haywood and Williams were led by others, presumably the unindicted whites, but it also emphasized the hardship their imprisonment had wrought on their families. In fact, one of Haywood’s children had died while he was in jail. Since the fifteen months they had served was by far the severest punishment for lynching ever in South Carolina, the

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ministers asked for a pardon. The terms in which this appeal was couched are significant. Whereas the older political leadership in Charleston had offered their assistance in the defence as equals, still harkening back to a day ten years past when African Americans had political standing, the ministers appealed to the governor on the basis of the men’s roles as fathers and providers for their families, but they avoided any sort of claim to political equality. This outpouring of support and the unique circumstances convinced Governor John P. Richardson. On 15 April 1889, he did not simply commute the death sentences; he pardoned both men in full. The lives of the lynchers seem to have settled back into the patterns they would probably have followed anyway, though we can never know the details of how the events of December 1887 affected those involved. Cato and Delia Sherman went on to have two more children, and they lived in Central until they died, Delia in 1922 and Cato in 1925. Harrison Haywood continued to be a pillar of the community, taking a leading role at Abel Baptist Church for decades, and living well into the 1930s.30 Although the lynching of Manse Waldrop is an anomaly in the history of lynching (one of only four cases of a predominantly black mob killing a white man, according to the best statistics available), it can tell us much about the phenomenon as a whole at a particularly significant historical moment. The phenomenon of lynching was beginning to shift decisively into the patterns it would keep for the next several decades, where fear of black men raping white women provided ideological cover for all sorts of things often completely unrelated to such fears. The Waldrop case confused the issue since the racial identities were reversed, sparking a set of discussions over just what it was that justified lynching, if it were to be justified, and how race played into those questions. Had the Waldrop case happened ten or even five years later, it is not likely those kinds of debates would have occurred. The lynching in Central happened on the cusp of another, related change, as African Americans began to relocate their hope for assistance in difficult situations, away from the political leaders of the Reconstruction era, whose notions of black masculinity included an assertion of civic and social equality, and towards religious

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leaders, whose ideas about black masculinity were better able to fit into the lowered horizons of the late 1880s and the 1890s. If it had been left to the black politicians of Charleston, Haywood and Williams would have hanged; it was the preachers who saved their lives.31 The next chapter also takes up the case of a white man killed by a mob, and again alcohol plays a prominent role, as does the prosecution of the lynchers. This time, though, the mob was white. Again, a long-running conflict resulted in violence, though this time the conflict was more about class than race. When the mob members in this case came to trial, the context for the state’s crackdown was entirely different and proved not an anomaly, but the beginning of a long, steady push to eradicate lynching in the Carolinas.

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North Carolina’s Turn Against Lynching: J. V. Johnson, Wadesboro, N.C., 1906 The death of J. V. Johnson was my introduction to lynching. In the fall of 1993, I had just started studying for a master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I needed a topic for a term paper for Professor Daniel Patterson’s class on British and American folksong. Sitting in his office in Greenlaw Hall (possibly the ugliest building on campus), I speculated vaguely about studying the cultural complexities of the local string band revival of the 1970s. With characteristic wisdom, Dan suggested something more concrete, more specific and grounded in the lived experience of everyday people in the South. From one of his filing cabinets, he retrieved a folder with the transcription of a ballad. One of Dan’s students had recorded it in his home community in Anson County, North Carolina, a few years before I was born. Dan had transcribed the ballad from the tape and filed it away, thinking that someday he might track down the story behind the ballad. That would be my paper, then, figuring out who J. V. Johnson was and why he died, and why someone would write a ballad about it. Fortunately, I was in the best possible place to find the answers to those questions, with the resources of the Southern Folklife Collection, the Southern Historical Collection and the North Carolina Collection at my fingertips, all housed in the domed splendour of Wilson Library, a few dozen yards from Greenlaw Hall. I soon read an old M.A. thesis about lynchings in North Carolina and learned that unlike the vast majority of lynching victims, Johnson was a white man. He was lynched in Wadesboro, the county seat of Anson County, in 1906 for killing his brother-in-law. When I had found out all I could in Wilson Library, I drove south, out of Chapel Hill, through the small courthouse town of Pittsboro, leaving the Piedmont behind, crossing the Deep River, skirting across the sandy hills around Southern Pines, and onto the flat land of Anson County. I spent a

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day looking up people in the genealogy section of the local library, piecing together any scraps of information I could find on the names I had culled from old newspaper articles. A walk across the square to the courthouse and the magical words of ‘Chapel Hill’ and ‘student’ brought me to a back room full of dusty volumes with cracked leather bindings, the kind that took two hands to lift from high shelves. Their pages told me of property bought and sold, happy occasions such as weddings, crises later. The retired postmaster of the town, Eddie Gathings, met me at the library and told me who was who in Wadesboro and southern Anson County where Johnson had lived, alongside the Pee Dee River and the South Carolina border. Gathings told about his own father, a young lodger in 1906 in Wadesboro whose boarding house overlooked the back of the jail. He had seen the men take Johnson out, walk him double-quick along the alley, but he always claimed he recognized no one, even those with no disguises. As another local historian told me over the telephone, ‘It was a terrible thing to happen in a small place … Everyone was wondering who was into it.’1 What I eventually put together was a story that can make a good claim on the label of tragedy, a flawed man trying to move up in a time and place where powerful forces were pushing his sort further down. A man who married far above his station, who took to drink, but who seems to have kept the loyalty of his wife through ten years of marriage, few of which could have been easy. A moment of bad judgement followed by remorse, then a community turned in revenge against one never quite its own. And, sixty years later, the few lonely words of one neighbour’s sympathy, wrapped around the familiar framework of an older ballad, sung by few and eventually, the song and the man it remembers lost, silenced, existing only in archives and history, but dead to memory. The idea that lynching is something that only happened in the South is itself an idea with a particular history of its own. An earlier generation of historians argued that the South was more violent because its history had given it a different attitude towards violence from the rest of the country. This could have emerged from the frontier conditions of the early South, the unrestrained brutality at the heart of the plantation system, or the opposition to outside political forces during the sectional crisis, Civil

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War and Reconstruction. In a broader sense, suggested one historian, a distinctively southern propensity to violence could be the result of a sense of persecution in a region where all major changes were forced from the outside. Or maybe, as at least one southerner is supposed to have said, ‘there were just more folks in the South who needed killing’. More recently, though, historian Christopher Waldrep has concluded that ‘the evidence now available does not allow us to say absolutely and conclusively that Southern culture nurtured some peculiar instinct to violence that Southerners could not control’. To put lynching in a fully national context, historian Michael Pfeifer compared the history of lynching in seven different states in all regions of the country, looking for a way to explain lynching as a whole that did not begin with the assumption that the South was somehow inherently exceptional. Pfeifer presents a framework for the history of lynching that sees lynching as the natural by-product of a simpler, less sophisticated time when the forces that dominated people’s lives were primarily local, and outside forces – even the state – rarely impinged on individuals directly. This is, broadly, how historians have understood the transformation of the United States from a place where most production was geared towards self-sufficiency at the community level to a more complex society where production was governed by market imperatives, a transformation called the ‘Market Revolution’, revolutionary because as it changed economic relations, it also changed the social structure with the emergence of a middle class. The market-oriented middle class, Pfeifer argues, does not lynch, because lynching is bad for business. Lynching plays to the interests of localism, of weakness of institutional structures, of a legal system that is partial and winks at actions which challenge its writ, and a state unable to exercise its power throughout its domain. Rural folk and the working class lynch, Pfeifer asserts, because they oppose the values represented by the relentless march of the middle class and the powerful state that protects them. Workers and country people instead insist on perpetuating local, ‘rough justice’. The fundamental reason why lynching remained stronger in some regions of the country than others is that the market revolution, the development of a middle class and the growth of the state came quickly to some areas, such as New England, and slowly to others, such as the South.2

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North Carolina and South Carolina have long been, despite their names, rather different places, and that difference becomes clearer when we consider the role of the state in the half-century after the Civil War. After Reconstruction, whites in South Carolina remained mostly united, offering few cracks in their political solidarity where the wedge of African American political power could get a purchase. South Carolina’s Republican party was always embattled. It is probably fair to say that most of its members spent much of Reconstruction in fear of their lives. Crucially, while there was a slim base of old Unionists and whites who accepted the changes to the racial hierarchy Reconstruction proposed, this group was never numerous enough to contend with the opposition it faced, especially violence, and coalesce into a party that could reproduce itself over time. With the political support and opportunities provided by federally protected control of state government removed at the end of Reconstruction, white Republicans in South Carolina were, with a handful of notable exceptions, gone with the winds that blew them in. As we saw in the case of Giles Good earlier, some limited challenges to the Democratic party arose in the early 1880s, but it was not long before the Election Law of 1882 eliminated those. As economic conditions for farmers deteriorated in the 1880s, the organization and activism of the Farmers’ Alliance shifted into the political realm in the form of the Populist party. Except in South Carolina, it never really did. The credit for this agrarian uprising that wasn’t goes to Ben Tillman, a one-eyed, rabble-rousing politician from Edgefield County. Leading the charge of the state’s poor farmers against the Redeemer Democrats like Wade Hampton who took control after Reconstruction, Tillman was positioned to lead a vigorous Populist challenge to the Redeemers, but he was alarmed at the radical directions in which Populists in other states were going. Most disturbing was their openness to an alliance with Republicans, including African Americans. This proud Red Shirt who loaned his pistol for the execution of black militia men at the Hamburg Massacre in 1876 was not about to go into political alliance with blacks. So instead, Tillman managed to seize control of the Democratic party itself in 1890, making some significant changes, but forestalling the kinds of radicalism being tried elsewhere in the South. With the machinery of the state simply shifting hands from one set of

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Democrats to another in 1890, the state could get by remaining a relatively weak institution because it had no strong enemies to contend with.3 With a different demographic basis and a different political history, North Carolina’s experience was unlike that of South Carolina, especially in the 1890s. Even in antebellum times, North Carolina maintained a lively two-party political system, and the interests of large plantation owners in the coastal plain were a world away from the opinions of small subsistence farmers in Appalachian mountain coves 400 miles to the west. During the Civil War, Unionist sentiment flourished in parts of the mountains and also in Piedmont areas such as Randolph County, and Reconstruction saw a Republican party that could draw on both the strength of the black-majority counties in the east and the mountain Republicans of the western mountains. Although the Democrats regained control of the state legislature in 1870, persistent political insurgencies kept them off-balance for much of the next two decades. In 1886, for instance, a candidate representing the Knights of Labor was elected to Congress from the district encompassing the state capital of Raleigh. North Carolina was susceptible to the same economic pressures that faced small farmers across the rest of the South, and as small farmers felt themselves squeezed off their land and into tenancy in the 1880s, they responded by joining the Farmers’ Alliance as it spread rapidly across the state starting in 1887. At a national level, it soon became clear to members of the Farmers’ Alliance that their combined power to reconfigure the economic system that put them at such a disadvantage could never accomplish much unless they were able to gain political power to implement the needed changes.4 In the 1890s, Tarheels who opposed the Democrats, whether as old Unionist white Republicans, African American Republicans, or disaffected white farmers alienated from the old planter elite, came to power through a Fusion coalition. Though the Democrats barely hung onto power in the 1892 elections, neither the Republicans nor the Populists were strong enough to come to power on their own. In the 1894 election, however, they agreed to join forces, or ‘fuse’, realizing that although they were not in agreement on all issues, the Democrats were standing in the way of everything both parties were trying to accomplish. A concerted campaign brought success and a Populist-Republican majority in the state

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legislature. Since North Carolina’s governors served four-year terms, it was another two years before the Fusion coalition could elect Daniel Russell to the governorship. The same year they also established sound majorities on the benches of both the state Supreme Court and its superior courts.5 Although 1896 marked the death knell of Populism on a national level, it ushered in the period of its greatest power in North Carolina. We generally remember that election for William Jennings Bryan’s ‘Cross of Gold’ speech and the electoral beating inflicted by William McKinley and the Republicans, but in North Carolina the Fusion government was in the midst of making real changes. New legislation increased the funding for schools dramatically, and cut the exemption that corporations had enjoyed from property taxes. In support of hard-pressed farmers who were close to losing their land to debt, the legislature restricted interest rates to no more than 6 per cent. The other great bugbear of the farmer, the railroads that charged exorbitant rates and seemed to have the government in their pocket, found themselves under greater scrutiny from a state government that began to actually exercise some regulatory controls over them. As important as these economic policies were, even more significant were the changes the Fusion government made to local government and elections. Older election laws had been incredibly strict, yet amenable to manipulation by those in power; changes made it much harder to arbitrarily prevent men from voting. And whereas the Democrats put control of county and municipal government in the hands of the legislature in Raleigh after Reconstruction (just in case local voters in the mountains or black-majority counties considered electing Republican county commissioners or mayors), the Fusion legislature handed that democratic power back to local government.6 White supremacy was the tool that broke Fusion. The overturning of Fusion was not some broad-based grassroots movement. A cabal of leading Democrats, with the advantage of deep pockets and control of one of the leading newspapers, Josephus Daniels’s Raleigh News and Observer, got together and mapped out a strategy for regaining control. The secret, they knew, was to split the white Populists away from the Republicans, and the way they did this was by whipping up racial hysteria, aided by the drum-thumping leading up to the Spanish–American War. Prominent

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Democrats, including Robert B. Glenn, crossed the state, complaining about ‘nigger rule’ and the corruption and disaster it was bringing to the Old North State. They fabricated from whole cloth the idea that political power had created a wave of rapes by emboldened black men. Borrowing Ben Tillman as a speaker, the North Carolina Democrats followed the example of their South Carolina brothers and organized Red Shirt clubs across the state to disrupt Fusion campaign events and intimidate potential voters. It worked. In the 1898 election, Fusion power was almost completely wiped out, and the Democrats gained almost uncontested power over the state government.7 In the years following 1898, Democrats in North Carolina found that seizing power was not enough – now they had to wield power effectively. First, they set out to secure their hold on that power by reversing the changes the Fusionists had made to electoral law and to the structure of county government. But in addition to returning things to how they had been five years earlier, the Democrats proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would disfranchise black and poor voters by a combination of an understanding clause, poll taxes and a grandfather clause. The amendment passed in a referendum in 1900, the same year that the Democrats also regained the governor’s office. Now, with the party of white supremacy in full control of the machinery of the state, there was no room for challenges to the power of the state; such a challenge was, ipso facto, a challenge to the principle of white supremacy that put the Democrats in power in 1898 and cut African Americans out of the political system in 1900. The problem was that lynching was a hard habit to break, and surly local mobs might refuse to accept the slow, but pretty sure, pace of the law. That was one thing when the government being defied was put in power by poor whites and African Americans, but it would never do when it was the ‘best white men’ who held the reins of power. As a result, and with considerable irony, disfranchisement and the end of African Americans’ involvement in southern politics sometimes coincided with a more aggressive campaign to stop lynching than had been seen during the politically fractious 1890s. For example, four years after South Carolina disfranchised African Americans with the 1895 constitution, the governor urged legislators to act against lynching and punish sheriffs who allowed

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prisoners in their custody to be lynched, because the sheriff was ‘the representative of the state’s power and sovereignty’. And if using the might of the state to defend the life of an unpopular African American might have some unpleasant political consequences, then using that power to prevent or punish the lynching of white men was a good way to entrench the power of the state since it made the claim to be the representative of all white men (‘white man’ being understood to exclude anyone who would deign to consider African Americans his political equals).8 J. V. Johnson came from people who worked hard but did not manage to accomplish much, a contrast to the comfortable circles he would later move uncomfortably in. His father, Daniel P. Johnson, was a white man born in Anson County, North Carolina, but he spent the first few decades of his life moving amongst the counties where the Pee Dee River crosses the South Carolina state line. He married Margrett A. McRae, from one of the best families in Anson County, in 1845 and lived in Anson County near her people until 1850, when they moved a little way south to Chesterfield County, South Carolina. On the eve of the Civil War he was doing fairly well, with almost $1,000 worth of land, $2,000 in personal property, and six children. Johnson joined the Confederate army, and when he returned to his home at the end of the war Sherman and his army had been through the area a few months earlier, laying waste to large plantations and small farms alike. The end of the war did bring one gain for the Johnson family, a son born in February 1866 they named John Virgil Johnson. The fortunes of war wiped out what Johnson had managed to accumulate, and by 1870 he was back in North Carolina with no land, starting over again when he was almost fifty years old. By 1880, the family had settled permanently in Morven Township, Anson County, probably to be closer to Margrett’s family and the support they could provide in what were becoming hard times for small farmers such as Daniel Johnson.9 Morven was much like the rest of the cotton-dominated coastal plain that covered the eastern part of both Carolinas, but it had some idiosyncrasies as well that set it apart. An older settlement nearby, Old Sneedsborough, sat on the flat, broad Pee Dee River, its black water perfect for shipping cotton downstream. Laid out in 1795 to take advantage of the

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river, navigation was never developed as extensively as the town’s pioneers had hoped, and within thirty years the town was in decline, though eventually a small town on the new railroad would be established, McFarlan, and this was where the Johnsons lived, rich and poor alike. The town of Morven itself sits low-slung on the upper edge of the excruciatingly flat Pee Dee section of the coastal plain, where rain has nowhere to go when it falls and sits in shallow puddles across dirt roads and fields stretching to distant verges of tall pines on the horizon. And when it does not rain, the sandy, rich soil turns powdery and hot under bare feet in the unrelenting summer sun. It is a place almost completely opposite, in terrain and climate, to the Scottish Highlands, but in the perverse logic of emigration and exile it became the region of the largest settlement of Highlanders in the South. Starting in the 1730s, Highlanders began settling along the watershed of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, centred around the modern-day city of Fayetteville. After the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and the economic and social changes it brought to Scotland, the number of emigrants increased, so that by the late eighteenth century the common people of this part of North Carolina, including some of their slaves, spoke Gaelic on a daily basis. Still, no one looking out at the flat fields of Morven could confuse it with the rugged mountains of its namesake near the Isle of Skye on Scotland’s west coast, and the blackwater Pee Dee River was a far cry from the salty tang of Loch Linnhe.10 J. V. Johnson was not the ‘desperado’ one of his killers would later describe him as, but he was no model of success and good living either. Allegations made by citizens of Morven afterwards to justify his lynching – not the most reliable of testimony – claimed that in fall 1890 Johnson, then in his mid-twenties, had fallen in love with a schoolteacher in McFarlan. She rejected his advances, but he would not take no for an answer and charged into her home, into her room itself, to confront her, assaulting her father or brother in the process. After being held overnight in the guardhouse at Morven, Johnson paid a fine for his conduct, burnt the guardhouse down and fled to Florida. Two newspaper articles from November 1890 suggest the story may have some truth. One tells of the burning of a cotton house on J. L. Pratt’s plantation; arson was suspected, but no one had yet been arrested. A second article a week later does not

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mention the reason but does note that ‘Mr. J. V. Johnson has gone to Florida to spend the winter’, so something like this could have happened. At the same time, Johnson was acquiring the land he would need to become a settled and solid member of the community, receiving a gift of 100 acres from his father in 1887 and buying a further 100 acres from him in 1891. J. V.’s father died in 1892, however, and the next year J. V. reappears in the local records guilty of fighting with a neighbour and resisting arrest.11 With such an unsettled past and rather unpromising future, J. V. Johnson was probably not the husband the richest farmer in that part of Anson County would have chosen for his daughter. Hugh Johnson had been a well-established planter by the time he was in his twenties, with considerably more land than most of his neighbours and a complement of slaves to work it. More significantly, he seems to have come through the war in good shape, his plantation actually becoming more valuable (and perhaps larger) during the 1860s. When his first wife died in the late 1870s (after bearing nine children), he soon remarried, and the first child of this new marriage was Marcia, born in the fall of 1879. In May 1896, J. V. Johnson married Marcia Johnson. He was almost thirty, she barely eighteen. Claims after J. V.’s death that the marriage was against the family’s wishes seem plausible, even understandable.12 J. V. Johnson, like so many other small farmers in the South in the 1890s, had a hard time making ends meet and holding onto ownership of enough land to support his family, a situation that must have been exacerbated by constant comparisons to his well-heeled in-laws. At the death of his father, J. V. had acquired sixty-five acres and a half-interest in a cotton gin, but sometime soon after, perhaps during the depression that began in 1893, he mortgaged much of his property. Unable to come up with $450 to pay his creditors in 1896, J. V. Johnson appears to have lost much, if not all, of his land. His fortunes were up and down over the next decade, buying some more land and then losing half of it. All in all, this was hardly the level of success Hugh Johnson must have expected from a man who married his daughter.13 After the turn of the century, J. V. Johnson’s problems with his in-laws intensified. It does seem clear that by 1905, if not earlier, he was drinking

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heavily, and this may help account for the violence visited upon all those in his household: his wife, his children and even his elderly mother. Of course, this allegation of violence comes again from the letter Morven’s best citizens wrote to justify the actions of the men who killed Johnson, so we cannot know how much credit to give it. Certainly wife-beating was not the sort of thing that tended to be unusual enough to make much of an impression in contemporary records. What does seem to be more solid is a dispute that arose with Hugh Johnson, and his sons, in 1905. That year, Hugh gave his daughter Marcia a plantation, probably to provide for her and his grandchildren in light of J. V.’s ongoing problems doing so. To make sure that he retained control, though, Hugh did not register the transfer of deed. It takes little imagination how this would have felt to J. V., who had been dealing with this sort of cut from his father-in-law for nearly ten years, always ready to control and criticize. J. V. pressed Hugh on transferring the deed, eager, no doubt, to be out from under the old man’s thumb. Hugh refused, and in May 1905 J. V. threatened Hugh and his son Tom with a pistol during an argument over the land. Hugh had the warrants against J. V. for this assault suppressed, but only on the condition that he go to a private hospital to take care of his drink problem. He was formally committed ‘to Broadoak Sanitorium until such time as he can be admitted to the state Hospital at Morganton.’ J. V. spent two months at the sanatorium, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, trying to dry out, but it would appear that no place opened up in the state hospital before his in-laws’ money or patience ran out. Things between J. V. and his in-laws do not appear to have improved. When he got back, Tom Johnson took out a peace bond against him.14 The final rift between J. V. and Hugh and Tom came when J. V. agreed to leave the state (presumably without his wife and children) but then did not do so. After this, neither Hugh nor Tom would even speak to J. V. Hugh’s youngest son, Guinn, eventually wound up helping his father on J. V.’s farm so that Marcia and her children would be provided for, and twenty-three-year-old Guinn deeply resented seeing J. V. sit on the porch reading a newspaper while he was out in the fields. A few weeks after this, Hugh became very ill, and J. V. asked if he had made a will, probably worried that the informal arrangements by which Marcia held

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her plantation would dissolve when Hugh’s estate was probated. Around this time, J. V. began threatening Guinn and frequently carrying a gun. Of course, this is the account of events from Hugh’s point of view, and we can imagine that J. V. would tell a somewhat different story. But he never got the chance.15 Reading through the testimony given at J. V. Johnson’s trial, we can see broad agreement about some things that happened on 27 December 1905 in McFarlan. On that day just after Christmas, Guinn was hauling brick from Hugh Johnson’s tobacco barn to build a new house on the Whortleberry place. Sharecropping arrangements commonly began and ended at the first of the year, so this may have been work to get a tenant’s house ready for occupancy. An African American teenager was helping him with a smaller wagon, and Guinn was driving a two-horse, or rather a two-mule, wagon. There was some sort of initial confrontation in the early afternoon as Guinn drove past J. V.’s house on the way to load up the brick. Strong words were exchanged. Late in the day, after hauling the last load of brick, Guinn came back by the tobacco barn to get a load of stove wood for the house from the supply there used to heat the barn to cure the brightleaf tobacco inside.16 When it comes to the confrontation that left Guinn Johnson dead, however, two mutually irreconcilable versions of events emerged. The story told by some of J. V.’s white neighbours and some African Americans who worked for Hugh Johnson fit the pattern of J. V.’s alleged violence and drunkenness. In this account, J. V. came out on his front porch as Guinn was going past his house with the load of stove wood. J. V. had his shotgun in his hands, and Marcia struggled with him to get the gun, but J. V. pushed past her and fired at Guinn as he drove past. The mules ran a short distance and stopped, as J. V. went across the yard to cut the wagon off. When the wagon stopped, J. V. fired the second barrel, the load of buckshot hitting Guinn in the chest and knocking him off the seat and down into the bottom of the wagon.17 The story J. V. and Marcia and their son, eight-year-old Virgil, told was quite different. Marcia had been out back washing, and J. V. was sitting on the back steps the first time Guinn came past. J. V. went out front to speak to Guinn, asking why they couldn’t be friends. Guinn’s response was to

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curse him and say, as he headed off, ‘If you want anything out of me come up the road and you can get it.’ J. V. went back inside to read the Bible, as he did every evening, and later he heard Guinn coming back up the road, cursing and hollering. Driving his team up to J. V.’s house at full speed, Guinn hauled back on the reins to bring the wagon to a halt, shouting for J. V. to come outside. As J. V. was coming out onto the porch, Guinn threw a fist-sized rock that hit the front steps. J. V. grabbed his double-barrelled shotgun and fired one barrel in the air. As J. V. would later admit, he was very angry and did not try very hard to get out of the way. Guinn kept throwing rocks, one hitting J. V. in the side and another brushing his hat. When Guinn reached down behind him into the wagon, he might have been reaching for another rock. J. V. thought he was reaching for his pistol, so he fired the second barrel of the shotgun, catching Guinn across the middle of his body and knocking him into the bottom of the wagon.18 Several neighbours had been within about a quarter-mile of J. V. Johnson’s house and came running at the sound of the shotgun blasts. John Jones and Lewis Adams both jumped into Guinn’s wagon and drove as hard as they could to Tom Johnson’s house, but by the time they arrived fifteen minutes later, Guinn was already dead. J. V., on the other hand, telephoned W. E. Pennington, the local justice of the peace and mayor of McFarlan, and said that he had just killed Guinn and wanted to turn himself in. After waiting a couple of hours for someone to come and arrest him, J. V. set off for Wadesboro himself, arriving about ten o’clock. He turned himself in to Sheriff John A. Boggan and was lodged in jail, and on 18 January 1906 the Anson County grand jury indicted J. V. Johnson on a count of first-degree murder. His trial was continued to the next term so his defence team could prepare the case.19 The dogwood trees were covered in creamy blossoms when J. V. Johnson, making ‘a rather good appearance’ in a dark suit, stood before Judge Thomas J. Shaw in the courthouse in Wadesboro. If one were looking for the archetype of the stern Presbyterian from the Carolina Piedmont, it would be hard to do better than Shaw. Born a month before the Civil War, in Montgomery County, Shaw was, like the people of Morven, the descendant of Scotch immigrants. His father was an elder in his Presbyterian church for almost half a century, and the Presbyterian love of learning carried

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Judge Thomas J. Shaw. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Shaw’s father to a career teaching in the small classical academies in the south-eastern part of North Carolina. Shaw himself picked up his father’s scholarly habits and studied at the University of North Carolina before preparing for the bar with a Greensboro law firm. After being admitted to the bar in 1884, Shaw remained in Montgomery County for a few years before moving to Greensboro in 1893. In the midst of the 1898 political campaign, Shaw was one of the candidates put forward for the bench of the Superior Court, and winning the election, he took up his post in the Fifth District in 1899. Handling the Johnson case for the state of North Carolina were Solicitor L. D. Robinson and two assisting attorneys, H. H. McLendon of Wadesboro and John A. McRae of Charlotte. Defending J. V. Johnson were four local attorneys, John T. Bennett and his partner T. L. Caudle, along with James A. Lockhart and H. S. Boggan. After a number of challenges from the defence, a jury was seated, and testimony began on Tuesday 18 April 1906, continuing all week. Early in the trial, one of the jurors, M. S. Thomas of Peachland, received a message that his father had died the night before. While Judge Shaw allowed Thomas to speak to his family by telephone, he refused to excuse the juror, in case this should provide the grounds for an appeal. (Shaw had a reputation for taking a hard line. A few months into his judicial career, he jailed a juror for being drunk during a trial and jailed the officer in charge of the jury for allowing the juror to get the whiskey in the first place.) As it turned out, Shaw’s rigidity not only jeopardized the prosecution of J. V. Johnson but also contributed indirectly to his death. After two days of deliberation, eleven members of the jury wanted to convict on a charge of second-degree murder, but one – M. S. Thomas – insisted on acquittal. Judge Shaw had no choice but to declare a mistrial. The county commissioners immediately requested a special term of court to retry the case, and the governor scheduled the special term to begin on 16 July 1906. J. V. Johnson returned to his cell on the top floor of the jail.20 J. V. shot Guinn out of a transient burst of rage, but the mob that lynched J. V. Johnson had coolly premeditated it for weeks. Most of what we know about the mob comes from testimony from one of its members, H. D. Kendall of Morven, who turned state’s evidence. A month after the mistrial in Johnson’s case, Kendall attended services on a Sunday morning

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at Morven Presbyterian Church. After dinner with Hugh Johnson, Kendall went to visit Tom Johnson and made plans to go into Wadesboro that night to lynch J. V. Johnson. At ten o’clock, two and a half hours after sunset, Kendall and Tom Johnson rode up to the forks of the road near Jones Creek and met a number of other people there. Kednall did not know all the people in the mob, but several were familiar. John Jones, J. V. Johnson’s neighbour who had leapt into Guinn’s wagon when he was shot, was there. Ira and Lester Johnson, sons of one of Hugh Johnson’s older sons, and in their early twenties, were there as well. Brothers W. C. and Fred Dunn were about a decade older than the Johnson brothers and were close neighbours of Hugh Johnson. Another near neighbour of Hugh Johnson was W. A. Niven, a forty-four-year-old justice of the peace. Together, they constituted what historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage has termed a ‘private mob’, the sort ‘comprised of relatives, friends, and neighbors of the victim of the alleged crime, … bound together by a shared sense of personal injury’. The men who would kill J. V. Johnson were those who had known Guinn Johnson personally and felt the sudden death of the young man closely. They were men who had known J. V. Johnson all of his life.21 Sometime not long after the lynching, a Wadesboro merchant who had once lived near J. V. Johnson at McFarlan wrote a ballad about the event. Unlike most other ballads about lynchings, which celebrated gruesome killings, ‘Song About J. V. Johnson’ took a strong stance against lynching. Its verses do a good job of speeding along the story of what happened once the mob arrived at the jail.22 ’Twas on a gloomy Sunday night When Johnson thought he was alright, A hundred hearts of an angry mob Did disobey the laws of God.

The mob drove their buggies and rode their horses the eight miles from Morven to the outskirts of Wadesboro, through what was, as the ballad describes, a cloudy and dark night. To further obscure themselves, some

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had handkerchiefs over their faces, and others had partially blackened their skin. When they were about a mile and a half from the centre of town, they left the buggies and walked the rest of the way in.23 ’Twas on land at half past two. The great steel doors the men broke through. They scarcely waited for this poor man. The cell was opened at their command.

The mob used trickery, violence and main force to get into the jail where J. V. Johnson was being held. Sheriff Boggan heard a knock at the door of the jail, and when he answered, a man claimed to be a justice of the peace delivering a prisoner, no unusual occurrence. Reaching out to take the papers committing the prisoner to jail, Boggan saw a number of men and realized immediately what was happening. A struggle ensued, and the mob dragged Boggan out the door. Boggan’s son and daughter managed to get the door closed and barred, and then the shooting started, a load of buckshot coming through the door, a few pellets striking Henry Boggan in the forehead. Outside, the mob demanded the sheriff ’s keys, but he refused. Hardly slowed, the mob went to work with planks and sledgehammers, breaking open the outer doors in about ten minutes, rushing in and up the stairs until they encountered the steel door guarding the cells. This took them nearly a half-hour, with crowbars, chisels and sledgehammers. Once they got through this barrier, they told Boggan they would shoot J. V. Johnson in his cell if they had to, so Boggan surrendered the keys.24 ‘Don’t hurt me boys,’ he sadly said. ‘Hush, hush your mouth – you’ll soon be dead.’ ‘Oh, just give me one moment to pray, And do not kill a man who prays.’

Once the mob had the keys, J. V. Johnson knew he was soon going to die. Men grabbed him and pushed and dragged him down the stairs, out of the jail, and through the alley behind the building. Johnson prayed, called out for help, and cursed his attackers as the men on either side of him dragged him along. The whole way, Johnson struggled, and blows rained down on him for it, with fists and with knives, leaving a long, shallow gash across

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his chest and a cut over one eye dripping blood down his white face. At one point, Johnson made a desperate attempt to hang onto something, maybe hoping that if he could hold on for a few moments, help might arrive. Someone in the mob hacked at Johnson’s hand hard enough to nearly sever it, the blood soaking the sleeve of his white shirt. That was a sad and awful time. Just as they reached the fatal pine, A rope around his neck they tied And hung the man until he died.

Three-quarters of a mile out of town on the road towards Morven, the mob stopped next to a large pine tree. One man tied a rope around Johnson’s neck. Another threw the end of the rope over a sturdy limb about twenty feet off the ground. Several men grabbed onto the rope and pulled, the rope sliding over the limb, tightening around Johnson’s neck, then jerking him up, his feet leaving the earth and scrambling for something else to stand on, finding nothing, swinging and kicking. Mercifully, Johnson probably did not die of strangulation, which would generally take two or three minutes. Once his body was a foot or two clear of the ground, the members of the mob who were not hauling Johnson up opened fire with pistols and rifles and a couple of shotguns. As the coroner later observed, ‘there is not a square inch of space above his knees not penetrated by bullets’. Someone struck a match and held it to Johnson’s flesh to see if he was dead, but the mob appears to have done its work well. They walked the rest of the way to where horses and buggies had been left. Then they rode home.25 ‘Farewell, this world, my friends, my wife. This mob will surely take my life. It is so dark I cannot see. My soul, what will become of thee?’

Someone found Johnson’s body the next morning, and the mundane business of dealing with the fact of his death began. Johnson’s body was photographed where it hung, then cut down and brought to town to be prepared for burial. The body was sent to the home of J. V. Johnson’s

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J. V. Johnson.

brother-in-law, J. S. Jones. Marcia, their children and J. V.’s mother gathered there, but the usual round of visits that death in a rural community brought, the comforting words and plates of food, none of that was there for the death of an often drunken, sometimes violent troublemaker. The town fathers in McFarlan refused to have J. V. Johnson in their cemetery, so his final resting place was in a field on his sister and brother-in-law’s

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place. A hundred years later, it has probably been decades since anyone living could remember exactly where the spot was.26 Initial reactions by the press condemned the killing. The local newspaper, the Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, opposed lynching in general and, in contrast to the practice of many newspapers, condemned the lynching that had happened almost literally on its doorstep, urging the appropriate officials to investigate the lynching and prosecute the mob as vigorously as possible. The Biblical Recorder, a statewide Baptist newspaper published in Raleigh, also loudly objected to the lynching, praising the authorities for their response.27 Governor Robert B. Glenn immediately took a strong stand against the lynching and backed it up with serious action. Born in 1854 in Rockingham County, not far east from Anson County, he lost his father in the Civil War. By 1885, though, Glenn was an attorney practising in Winston and representing the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Southern Railway. He entered the legislature in 1880, and by 1886 was the state solicitor. When the Democrats put together their 1898 campaign and needed powerful stump speakers, Bob Glenn was one of the stalwarts they called upon to hammer home the message of white supremacy with loud shouts and violent gestures. He was the second governor the Democrats elected afterwards, taking office in 1905. Glenn is generally remembered as a progressive leader, putting the state’s finances in order, increasing spending on education and health, and supporting statewide prohibition of alcohol. In his inaugural address, Glenn said, ‘every effort will be made to discourage mob law, and lynching will never be permitted if it is possible for the strong arm of the law, with all the powers at its command, to prevent it.’ Hearing about the lynching on Monday, Glenn arrived in Wadesboro late on Tuesday night at the request of Solicitor Robinson to jumpstart the investigation. While in town on Wednesday, Glenn wrote a letter to Sheriff Boggan for republication in the local newspaper, trying to make a strong impression on the local readers. ‘There is no use mincing words,’ Glenn wrote. ‘We must call things by their right names. This act was deliberate, cold-blooded, wilful murder, and it is a blot on Anson county and the entire State.’ Promising assistance in the investigation and further

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Governor Robert B. Glenn. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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assistance for the prosecution of mob members, Glenn insisted ‘Neither time nor expense should be considered in prosecuting the perpetrators of this horrible crime, for thus only can law and order be maintained, and private persons taught that they cannot take the law into their own hands and then hope to escape.’28 Glenn was armed with more than just good intentions when it came to putting a stop to lynching. A law had been on the books for more than a decade that gave the government considerable powers to try to overcome the insularity and the wall of silence that usually stymied lynching prosecutions. In the wake of the first spectacle lynching in Paris, Texas, in 1893, the North Carolina state legislature passed a law to control lynching by making conspiring to break into a jail to kill a prisoner, or actually doing so, a felony punishable by a $500 fine and two to fifteen years in prison. To facilitate the prosecution of such cases, the legislature also provided that an adjoining county would automatically have jurisdiction over lynching cases, in an attempt to secure a jury untainted by local allegiances.29 An extensive investigation into the Johnson lynching began swiftly. On Monday, Solicitor Robinson began the investigation when he took over from the coroner’s investigation, and by Tuesday morning Judge Walter H. Neal had arrived from Laurinburg to take the lead. That day, a number of witnesses were examined behind closed doors, and by the time the governor was making his statement on Wednesday, arrest warrants for seventeen people had been sworn. That morning, Sheriff Boggan deputized several dozen men, and in a convoy of seven buggies, four carriages and one three-seated hack, they set out for Morven to bring in the suspects. By Thursday morning, five of them had already surrendered.30 The sheriff was able to make arrests because the men conducting the investigation had persuaded H. D. Kendall, Sr, his fifteen-year-old son Henry D. Kendall, Jr and Walter Meeks to turn state’s evidence. Kendall was born and raised in Morven and was in his early thirties at the time of the lynching. Immediately after the lynching, Kendall seems to have regretted his actions. He carried Marcia Johnson to her husband’s burial, and as Kendall stood over J. V. Johnson’s grave he prayed with the others that the killers would be found out. When the investigators came calling,

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Walter Meeks, H. D. Kendall, Sr, and H. D. Kendall, Jr.

Kendall agreed to testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution for himself, his son and Meeks. What makes H. D. Kendall’s experience significant is not that he felt remorse for having lynched a man. It would be nice to think, and perhaps not too optimistic, that of the tens of thousands of men, and not a few women, who took an active part in murdering and often torturing their fellow citizens during the decades between the Civil War and World War II, many may have regretted their actions, either immediately or years later. Kendall’s remorse accomplished something towards ending the phenomenon of lynching because there was in place a legal framework for exploiting that remorse, and a governor and other leaders bold enough to use that framework. Kendall paid a high price for his testimony. He and his family had to move to Union County, and a newspaper article during the trial described him as ‘the lonesomest looking man in Monroe’, who burst into tears when his old Anson County neighbours refused to speak to him. He and his family later returned to

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Morven, though Kendall’s son eventually moved to Charlotte and worked as an insurance agent.31 When the trial of the lynch mob began in Monroe in the middle of July 1906 before Judge Shaw, many on the prosecution side had high hopes that their determined work and the substantial evidence they had managed to acquire would overcome the reluctance of a jury to convict mob members. Earlier in June, attorney John T. Bennett, who was assisting with the investigation, had concluded that Judge Neal was more interested in politics than in catching the mob members since he had so readily permitted them bail. A week at the beach seems to have raised Bennett’s spirits, though, because by the first week of July he was back at work, planning the prosecution’s strategy for the trial, and just before the trial began he and the rest of the prosecutorial team went over the evidence and felt confident it was enough to convict. They had an ally in the fight against lynching in Judge Shaw, and one who had been working for several years from the bench to stop lynching in North Carolina. Shaw was lauded when he died as ‘fearless, yet cautious, gentle, and firm’ on the bench. He certainly never seems to have let concern for public opinion stop him from doing what he considered his duty, which was protecting the integrity and majesty of the judicial system. In 1900, when a black man was lynched and the grand jury was going to look the other way, Shaw issued bench warrants for ‘five of the best citizens of Rutherford county’, doing something similar in Salisbury in 1902. In 1901, he authorized a sheriff to mobilize 500 men to protect prisoners in Asheville (and promised to hold the sheriff personally responsible if the prisoners were lynched), and he went out of his way to safeguard another prisoner in 1903. Bennett, Robinson and others were disappointed, however, when it turned out that a technical detail in the 1905 codification of the 1893 statute meant that there was no legal authority to bring to trial in a Union County court a crime committed in Anson County. Judge Shaw had no choice but to quash the indictments and hope that the North Carolina Supreme Court would overrule him and let the trial proceed later.32 Just as the lynching trial was starting in Monroe, events were underway in Rowan County, North Carolina, between Charlotte and Greensboro, that would put the trial of the mob that lynched J. V. Johnson in a new

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light. In the early hours of 14 July 1906, a white farmer, his wife and three of their children were murdered as they slept, their heads crushed in by axes and the bodies set afire to cover up the crime. Very quickly, six African Americans, tenants on the white farmer’s place, were arrested and placed in jail at Salisbury, the county seat. A special term of court was called to try the African Americans charged with the murder, but on the night of 6 August 1906 a mob of 3,000 people stormed the jail and hanged three of the suspects from a large oak tree north of town. As the mob was gathering in the evening, the mayor called out the local militia, but they had only blanks in their rifles and did not have orders to shoot to kill. Governor Glenn had previously offered the sheriff of Rowan County assistance from the militia, but the sheriff had assured him it was not necessary. The special term of court called to try the alleged killers now turned its attention to the lynchers, and by the end of the week the leader of the mob, an ex-convict and textile worker named George Hall, had been sentenced to fifteen years in the state penitentiary.33 As the investigation and trial in Johnson’s case and the swift response to the Salisbury lynching indicated, the government of North Carolina now stood in a very different relation to the practice of lynching. It was established now that a jury could and would convict for lynching in North Carolina, even when the victim was African American, but the problem remained of taking more effective action to prevent lynchings in the first place. On 15 August 1906, Governor Glenn issued a proclamation to the people of North Carolina. Beginning with orders to the sheriffs, Glenn told them to notify him directly if they heard of plans for an attack on a jail. They were also to notify the commander of the nearest unit of the state guard and to order out the guard and also a posse comitatus of citizens armed for duty. With this armed force at their disposal, the sheriffs were told to order the crowd to disperse. But Glenn intended the words to be followed up with action, instructing, ‘Use every peaceful means in your power to disperse the crowds, without using force, but if they still refuse to leave, and continue their threats and unlawful acts, use force sufficient to disperse them, even if killing be necessary.’ Afterwards, sheriffs were to arrest and jail anyone involved in the mob. To make things clear, Glenn also directed commands to the captains of state guard units. If they heard

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of attempts to storm jails, they were to report it to both the local sheriff and the governor, and they were ordered to obey the sheriff ’s lawful commands. ‘If the sheriff, after ordering the crowd to disperse, and they refuse, orders you to fire,’ Glenn wrote, ‘do so.’ Glenn concluded by pointing out to citizens that even these orders would not stop lynching unless they themselves assisted him.34 A new trial for the Wadesboro lynchers began in July 1907. In light of the lynching conviction in Salisbury the previous summer, hopes were high that the men who killed J. V. Johnson would face justice. As Judge Shaw had hoped, the North Carolina Supreme Court overruled his judgement and allowed the indictments to be reinstated in November 1906. The case went back on the docket for the January 1907 term of court in Union County, but for some reason it was continued until July 1907. Starting on Monday, 5 July 1907 after dispensing with routine business, the state decided to try the case of John Jones first, and a jury was seated. John A. Boggan, now the ex-sheriff, testified that when the mob dragged him out of the jail, John Jones was one of the men there, with a gun in his hand. Henry D. Kendall testified that Jones was one of the men he had met at the forks of the road before the mob went in to Wadesboro. Other witnesses testified that Kendall and Boggan had said it was too dark to recognize anyone. For Jones’s part, he claimed to have been at home the whole evening. The case went to the jury late Friday afternoon. The jury retired from the courtroom, but they did not even bother to sit down to discuss the case. They voted immediately and unanimously for acquittal. Zeke Lewis’s trial began Saturday morning. Given the heat of the July morning, the judge gave permission for everyone to take off their coats. Lewis was a tall man, thirty-five years old, clean-shaven, and in addition to running a barber shop in Morven, he farmed. He told a story about trying to keep his drunken brother Battle Lewis from riding in to join the mob in Wadesboro by locking up his horse. After Battle set out along the railroad, Zeke did not see him until Tuesday morning after the lynching. Zeke, he claimed, had not been in the mob as Boggan and Kendall testified, but had been in Morven tending to a mule with the colic. Others from Morven, some also under indictment for lynching, backed him up. The jury got the case on Thursday and took nearly two hours to decide to acquit Lewis.

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Disgusted, the judge said he did not intend to waste the remaining two days of the special term of court on lynching cases, suggesting that the solicitor remove the cases to another county. That may have helped a bit, but the judge pointed out the heart of the problem, that while resolute action against lynching by the state was necessary for ending the practice, it could never be sufficient by itself: ‘Lynching will never cease in North Carolina until there is a strong, healthy sentiment against it.’ Developing that sentiment would take time and new strategies.35 When we consider the history of lynching, we naturally focus on the victim, partly for obvious reasons and partly because by its very nature, lynching tends to obscure the identities of the other key players, the mob. Yet the victim who was cut down the next morning and unceremoniously buried in a soon forgotten grave was seldom the only victim of a lynching. In the case of J. V. Johnson, more than in the vast majority of cases, we get a glimpse of the collateral victims of lynching, the victim’s family. As precarious as Marcia Johnson’s existence had been, losing a husband could hardly have made it easier. And frightening as it may have been for Virgil Johnson to be a child in a house where his father drank too much and argued with his mother’s family, knowing how horribly his father died and standing beside his grave in a lonely field of broken cotton stalks and broomsedge was probably the more lasting trauma. We simply cannot know, beyond the bare facts of their lives that flicker into view in the historical record. Marcia Johnson remarried in November 1907, and she and her new husband and their children and stepchildren continued to live in Morven into the 1920s. Sometime that same decade, Virgil Johnson moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he worked as a carpenter.36 Despite the failure to secure a conviction, North Carolina’s response to the lynching of J. V. Johnson in 1906 marked a turning point in the Carolinas. Not counting the strange anomaly of the Manse Waldrop lynching, never before had the state in the Carolinas combined so effectively both the means and the will to prosecute lynching. When a small mob lynched a black man and his aged mother at Broxton Bridge in Colleton County,

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South Carolina, in December 1895, stripping them both naked and flogging them to death with a buggy trace, the outrage generated did bring the lynchers to trial, but, in the absence of an effective statute such as North Carolina’s 1893 law, the local prejudices of the jury guaranteed the men’s acquittal. But with the swift investigation and dogged prosecution after J. V. Johnson’s lynching, North Carolina mobs were on notice that they could no longer expect to act with impunity. The decline of lynching in North Carolina would become a battle of attrition between the everincreasing power of the state and slowly decreasing habits of rough justice at the local level.37

5

Lies and Lynching: Richard Puckett, Laurens, S.C., 1913 The lynchings described in the first half of this book illustrate the range of forms the practice took in the late nineteenth century, but each was, in its way, exceptional, not quite following the classic storyline our culture has come to associate with the term. The 1871 Unionville lynching was wrapped up with the politics of Reconstruction, and the 1887 York County lynching was part of the fallout of that same period. Manse Waldrop and J. V. Johnson were both among the 10 per cent of victims of mob violence who were white men. The lynching in Laurens, South Carolina, in 1913, on the other hand, is simple and straightforward, fitting comfortably into the narrative of the black man who sexually assaults a white woman and pays the ultimate, terrifying price. Unlike the tormented political struggles in Union County and York County, or the escalating family tensions amongst the Johnsons in Anson County, this Laurens County lynching seems to have had no complex antecedents, and that is how people tended to remember it. A white man who was born a few years after the lynching happened recalled hearing ‘This colored man raped a white woman. And the lynching took place up there in town. On a railroad trestle.’1 Laurens County was long a violent place, never more so than in the years when Reconstruction was losing its grip on the state. Situated between the Enoree River and the Saluda River in the upper Piedmont of South Carolina, Laurens County was created just after the Revolutionary War, when a courthouse settlement was located near the junction of several roads. Even at this early point, Laurens’s history was bloody. It was on the edge of the territory affected by the Regulator movement in the late 1760s, when backcountry settlers impatient with the lack of a local judicial system took the law into their own hands to punish horse thieves and other miscreants. One of the critics of the Regulators who found himself attacked by them was Edward Musgrove, whose mill on the Enoree River

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would be the site of a battle in the Revolutionary War a few years later. The Revolutionary War in the southern backcountry was a brutal experience fought out not between serried ranks of professional soldiers but by ragged bands of partisans fuelled more by vengeance and petty rivalries than by Enlightenment ideologies. One of the more gruesome examples of this partisan warfare happened at Hayes Station in Laurens County in 1781 right at the end of the war. A Tory band commanded by Bloody Bill Cunningham surprised a group of Patriots. Setting their fortified log house on fire, Cunningham promised the men inside quarter if they surrendered. When they came out, he killed all but three. He hanged some from the pole in a fodder stack, and, when that broke from the weight of the bodies, he hacked the half-strangled men into pieces with his sword. By the early nineteenth century, things had settled down and Laurensville was the kind of market centre and outpost of commerce and government typical across much of the region.2 During Reconstruction, Laurens County was similar to Union County in that it had a close balance of blacks and whites, making the political situation particularly volatile as both sides struggled for dominance. The county was one of the strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan, which remained fairly vigorous there even after the suspension of habeas corpus and the arrest of some of its members. The Congressional inquiry took some testimony in the county, but it seems to have only scratched the surface, as a folklorist conducting interviews decades later documented scores of incidents of violence never mentioned in the relatively brief Congressional inquiry interviews from Laurens County. In September 1870, near the beginning of the wave of politicized terror that swept across South Carolina that autumn and winter, whites took over the Laurens County town of Clinton and disarmed the black militia there. The day after the 1870 election, a riot in Laurensville that began as a conflict between whites (almost certainly including if not coordinated by Ku Kluxers) and a militia detachment turned into something more closely resembling a pogrom, with Republicans hunted down in the town and across the countryside. The next morning, fifteen Republicans lay dead, and the whites had taken all the guns out of the hands of the militia. The violence culminated six years later with the 1876 election. While not seeing the kind of large-scale

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violence that marked the campaign in Hamburg or Ellenton, Laurens County had some of the worst violence nonetheless, with several men killed by ones and twos and others terrorized out of the county. The result was that Laurens County, along with Edgefield County, had disputed election returns, which directly triggered the electoral crisis in the state and played a significant part in the electoral crisis at the national level as well.3 Laurens County sat on the edge of the region of South Carolina transformed by the textile industry in the late nineteenth century. In 1880, Laurens County had only a couple of dozen grist mills and a handful of sawmills for industry, employing altogether well under a hundred people. Not a lot of progress had been made by 1890, but by 1900 Laurens County had over a thousand people earning a living in manufacturing, a ten-fold increase in a decade. By 1910, there were around 1,600 people working in textile manufacturing, not counting other things such as sawmills. These mill-hands were concentrated in the two towns of Laurens and Clinton, while the rest of the county remained very much dominated by agriculture. In the 1890s, as these mills were being established, the population of Laurens grew from 2,245 to 4,095. Unusually, Laurens also found itself the site of a glass factory that opened early in 1913, bringing a small number of highly skilled workers into what was otherwise a lowskill, low-wage manufacturing sector. In many ways, then, the particular path of economic development could have contributed to tensions in Laurens. The town had grown very quickly and gained a large population of industrial workers who were often cut off from and looked down upon by the older residents.4 At the same time, the town with its industrial growth was at odds with the overwhelmingly agricultural county, where farms operated by tenants outnumbered farms operated by owners three to one. In terms of the factors we associate with social tension in the early twentieth-century South, it was the worst of both worlds. While never as crucial as counties such as Edgefield or Beaufort, Laurens County had a history of providing important political henchmen for whatever regime happened to hold power in South Carolina at the time. While the Republicans dominated the state during Reconstruction, Joe Crews, a slave trader before the war, was the all-powerful Republican boss of the county, and an important power broker in the state, until he was

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Laurens Cotton Mill store. Courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

assassinated in 1875. When Wade Hampton and the Democrats swept the Republicans from power in 1876, it was William D. Simpson of Laurens who was elected as his lieutenant governor, holding the office in his own right in 1879 when Hampton was elected to the Senate. With the next political revolution and the rise of Ben Tillman, Laurens again provided an important figure, J. L. M. Irby. It was Irby who helped convince Tillman to lead the agrarian movement in its political challenge to the Redeemers, and Irby’s political savvy helped secure the gubernatorial nomination for Tillman in 1890. His reward was a term in the U.S. Senate seat previously occupied by Wade Hampton. By the early twentieth century, then, Laurens County was in the midst of economic transformation, at the centre of the political storms of the day, and a place familiar with violence. Indeed, six African American men had been lynched in the county between the end of Reconstruction and 1910.5 The lynching of Richard Puckett happened in the hell-hot days of the middle of August 1913. A white woman, a widow from a prominent family

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that lived about twelve miles southwest of Laurens, was driving a buggy into Laurens to visit her sister, who was in the hospital. About eleven o’clock, just after she passed Madden’s Station, a railroad stop three and a half miles south-west of Laurens, a black man leapt out from the side of the road, grabbing the bridle of her horse and stopping the buggy. The woman was surprised, and even more surprised when the man grabbed her and pulled her out of the buggy and into the dense brush alongside the road. He could have had only one intention. The woman began screaming and, fortunately, her brothers, who were following behind in another buggy, heard her. The attacker, realizing that rescuers were on the way, released the woman and ran off. The woman got back in her buggy and rode on into town to the home of John A. Hicks on Farley Avenue. Hicks telephoned the police and Sheriff John D. Owings, and the woman then went to the home of R. A. Cooper, the solicitor of the Eighth Judicial District.6 Word of the assault sparked a manhunt for the predator who had attempted it. Law officers, some citizens and Cooper all went to the scene of the attack and began searching for the black man who tried to rape the white woman. Around noon, some of the searchers went a few hundred yards past the site of the assault to the yard of a farm belonging to M. L. Owings to get some water. There they struck up a casual conversation with some black farmhands, and one of them began acting suspiciously. As the man began to walk away, one of the searchers suggested he be arrested. Rich Puckett was arrested and taken into Laurens to the jail. There the woman who had been assaulted was asked if he was the man. She could not be sure. Her attacker had been wearing overalls, and Puckett had on a suit of clothes. It was established, however, that the difference in clothing was because Puckett had gone to his brother’s house after the attack to change out of his muddy overalls. With that troubling detail sorted out, Puckett was placed in jail under heavy guard.7 In a small town such as Laurens, news like this could not be kept secret, and as word of the assault and manhunt spread, a mob gradually coagulated by early afternoon outside the jail where Rich Puckett was being held. The numbers grew when the day shift at the mills ended, and the millhands drifted towards the excitement. Realizing that trouble might be coming, Sheriff Owings swore in about ten deputies to help guard the jail.

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Sometime during the afternoon, Puckett quietly confessed to Owings that he had indeed been the one who tried to rape the woman that morning, but Owings, knowing how explosive this information would be, did not tell anyone else. As soon as Puckett had been jailed, Owings had called to Columbia to get some bloodhounds sent up to follow the trail to verify that Puckett was the assailant. The car bringing them broke down along the way, though, so the dogs only arrived around seven o’clock, but when they did arrive, they traced Puckett’s scent from the house where he was arrested back to the scene of the attack. It was as much proof as anyone in Laurens needed in 1913.8 By nightfall, the heat of the long afternoon and reckless talk and no doubt some whiskey had done their work, and the mob was ready for action. By this time, several hundred people, perhaps over a thousand, were already there. A rumour had gone around that the governor was sending troops to protect the prisoner, but most in the crowd laughed off that possibility. Shouts arose around nine o’clock: ‘Bring him out!’ A short time later, a large group of men began to attack the gates enclosing the south side of the jail yard. Owings and his ad hoc deputies climbed up and shouted over the battered gates for the mob to stop attacking, to disperse and let the law take its course. R. A. Cooper, who was also at the jail, made a speech to the mob, promising to request a special term of court from Governor Cole Blease in order to try Puckett without delay, a promise that effectively meant that Puckett could be dead, in proper legal fashion, in about a month. But the mob did not want promises, and it had no patience. Around ten o’clock, thirty men broke through the outer gates. They pushed past Owings and his guard of ten deputies and went to the rear of the jail. They rushed up the stairs to the back door to the cells, breaking through with crowbars and sledgehammers. Other prisoners in the jail helpfully pointed out Puckett to the mob, and men dragged him out of the cell and across the town square to the Charleston and Western Carolina railroad trestle just south of the Laurens depot. With Puckett frantically proclaiming his innocence before the mob of 2,000, he was hanged off the side of the trestle with a twelve-foot length of rope, and his body riddled with bullets. After the climax, the mob dispersed quickly. An hour and a half later, people from outlying areas who had heard there

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was to be a lynching that night were still arriving, only to find they had missed it.9 Rich Puckett’s lifeless body dangling from the railroad trestle was the most exciting thing going on in Laurens the next day. In the morning, hundreds of people came to view the corpse by the light of day. At some point as Puckett’s body dangled above the creek, a photographer set up his camera and took a photograph, with white and black bystanders, including small children, in the background. The coroner was on hand, but he decided there was no need for a formal inquest. It was pretty clear what had happened, and they were not going to charge all 2,000 people in the mob with murder anyway. Puckett was buried in the coloured graveyard in Laurens. The county picked up the bill for the burial. It was the least they could do, under the circumstances. As we have seen, by this point in the twentieth century, when lynchings happened in North Carolina the governor sent special investigators, the best judges and maybe even a military company. Cole Blease sent his congratulations: ‘the good white people of Laurens county [never] fail to perform their full duty at all times under all circumstances, and they are ever ready with life or property to defend the honor and virtue of the women of their county and state’.10 That’s the story the newspapers told. The citizens of Laurens and the surrounding countryside believed it, enough to mob together and kill a man. But I don’t believe that story, and after thinking about it a bit, I hope you won’t either.11 What is the problem with this story? Let’s start with the sources, the newspaper articles describing the events, which constitute nearly the entire extant documentary evidence. Local and statewide newspapers each seem to have written their own accounts of the events in Laurens. The structure of the stories and the wording is significantly different between the seven newspaper accounts printed by South Carolina newspapers immediately after the lynching. It seems reasonably clear, then, that different reporters for different newspapers gathered information and wrote their stories independently. Nonetheless, some of the same phrases and even sentences appear in otherwise disparate articles; in two articles, the paragraph

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Richard Puckett.

describing the assault is identical. Yet some significant details of these stories just do not match up. The most obvious discrepancy involves the identification of Puckett by his victim. The victim herself is never named,

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Governor Coleman L. Blease. Courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

a fairly unusual thing considering that she was not raped and that even rape victims commonly were named in such accounts. All the accounts mention that the woman had trouble identifying Puckett as her attacker.

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According to one, this was because ‘In the meantime he had changed his trousers for a pair of overalls, which caused the young woman to fail to establish his identity when she confronted him at jail.’ The Greenville Daily News, however, told the story exactly the opposite: ‘It is reported that the woman was not positive whether Puckett was the negro who attacked her, as the one before her was dressed in an ordinary suit of clothes whereas, she thought the negro who attacked her wore overalls.’ One of the Laurens newspapers left it more ambiguous: ‘She was almost certain that this was the negro, but she could not recognize the clothes he was wearing. It later turned out that he had to change to cleaner clothes after working in the mud or possibly to avoid detection,’ while the other Laurens newspaper claimed the identification took place before Puckett was taken to jail. With the combination of vagueness where we would expect specificity, stock descriptions of some scenes, and utter confusion about others, we are left in the dark about the events that preceded the mob’s formation outside the jail. But the problems with the official account go well beyond a few conflicting details, which might be written off as the confusion that faces any journalist trying to report on a chaotic situation.12 Put simply, what do we have to believe about the world and about how human beings behave in it in order to believe this story? If we put the story in the context of its times and try to understand it as it was understood at the time, what can we learn about the beliefs that filled people’s heads and made this story credible? Away from that context, away from the heat of the moment, some of those beliefs seem ridiculous to us now, but as the White Queen said to Alice, ‘Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ People in the South in the early twentieth century had conditioned themselves to believe any number of things that we would now think of as impossible, or at the least wildly unlikely, but those beliefs were not random or out of place in their context. They fit in all too well with a political and social system that kept some people in power and kept others in line.13 Most importantly, we must believe that a black man would attempt to rape a white woman he did not know for no apparent reason. The woman was riding in a buggy, so she was obviously a woman of some means, not the sort of lower-class white woman whose story might not be believed

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or reacted to. The attack happened not in the dark of night in a secluded place, but in the middle of the day at the edge of one of the busiest roads in the county. Why would anyone believe any black man would be foolish enough to attempt something like this? Since the end of slavery, whites in the South had been getting more and more worried about black men and white women. According to the ideas that began to take hold in the 1880s, slavery had restrained the natural animalistic inclinations of African Americans, but now there was a generation of ‘new Negroes’ growing up who had never been exposed to the beneficial effects of slavery. They were degenerating into the African savagery from which their ancestors had been rescued, and they were no longer able to control their urges, for liquor, for vice of all sorts and especially for white women. This notion had been recently reinforced for people in Laurens when Thomas Dixon, Jr’s successful novel The Leopard’s Spots was serialized in the local newspaper in August 1913. Dixon wrote it in 1902 as the first of a trilogy of novels about race in the South. As historian Joel Williamson observes, the theme of this novel, and all the rest that Dixon wrote after it, was that ‘American national unity, ultimately, depended upon a full recognition of the rising bestiality of the Negro, first by the South and especially the young men of the South, and then by the North.’ This bestiality is reinforced throughout the story, as it ranges from the end of the Civil War to the dawn of the twentieth century. Black male characters are continually threatening and assaulting white women, but the climax of the novel is when a black man rapes a young white girl and is immediately lynched. Perhaps Richard Puckett should count himself lucky, though: the black man in Dixon’s novel was burned alive.14 We then must believe that a man who had just attempted rape would do what Richard Puckett is alleged to have done immediately afterwards. First, he fled to his brother’s house. On the face of it, this seems a reasonable enough thing for someone in trouble to do. But when we begin to consider the geography, it makes less and less sense. Madden’s Station is south-west of Laurens. Puckett’s brother, James Malachi Puckett, lived on the west side of Laurens, not in Jersey or one of the other predominantly black neighbourhoods, but almost a mile from the centre of town on West Main Street. We are asked to believe that Puckett, after attempting to rape

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a white woman and being interrupted and forced to let her escape, would flee in exactly the direction she (and her brothers) had gone, right towards town. Not to mention the likelihood of running into his victim on the way to his brother’s house, Puckett would have been heading right towards the greatest concentration of law enforcement for miles. Not only were the Laurens police in that direction, but so was the sheriff. If the alarm had been raised, Puckett would have been heading right into the hornet’s nest. Even if we believed, as whites at the time did, that African Americans were not very intelligent, we would really have to stretch to think that Puckett was this foolish. Yet there is more. Once he got to his brother’s house, Puckett changed clothes. So far, so sensible. In a time when to many whites, as a popular song put it, ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’, changing into different clothes might just be enough to divert suspicion. The next sensible thing to do would be to get to the depot and take the first train out of town, or hitch a ride in someone’s automobile or wagon, or even to set out, casually, on foot towards the big city of Greenville, to get lost for a few days until things blew over in Laurens. Maybe just hiding out in his brother’s house would have been a good decision, or with a friend or relative in Jersey. But, no, instead, after making his way into the heart of Laurens to change clothes at his brother’s house, avoiding his victim, her brothers and the gathering swarms of angry white men with guns, Puckett turned right around and went back the three miles to the farm where he worked just down the road from the site of the attack.15 Even if we believe Richard Puckett would have done all that, we have to also believe that it was possible for him to have done so. Look again at the places and the times and consider the schedule he had to keep to do all this. At eleven o’clock, he assaults the woman near Madden’s Station. By noon, he is arrested near the same site, having been to his brother’s house and back to change clothes in the meantime. He had to go three miles there, down a substantial hill and back up, and then three miles back. Even at a quick walk, and changing clothes very quickly, it seems impossible that Puckett could have covered this distance. Perhaps if he was running. But if a white woman had just been attacked by a black man, and someone saw a black man running in the vicinity of the attack, that might just have raised suspicions. The logistics of the story just do not add up.

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Finally, we have to believe that Puckett would have confessed to his crime in the afternoon and then, when all hope was gone and the mob was about to hang him, denied it all. He might have confessed the attack to the sheriff sometime during the afternoon. People under pressure will do lots of things. It would not have been very smart, since he would have to know that the confession would certainly have been enough to put him in the electric chair, but he may have done it. What is puzzling here is why he would confess in the afternoon, and then retract the confession that evening. By the time the mob in their thousands had him in their grip, had been shouting for his blood for the whole afternoon and evening, as he was hustled through the streets and onto the fatal train trestle, what would be the point of changing his tune? All kinds of things happen, but the standard pattern for lynchings is very different. Throughout the nineteenth century, going back to at least the beginning of the eighteenth century in America, there had been a long tradition of the condemned confessing their crimes just before their public execution. Not only was this good for their soul, getting them right with God just before meeting their own judgement, but it was thought to have a beneficial effect on those watching the execution. It drove home the point that crime doesn’t pay from one who really knew that first-hand. This same practice held for lynchings. So much about the official story of this lynching just does not make sense.16 Richard Puckett’s family tell a different story. Laurens County was in the region of South Carolina where black men were in the greatest danger of being lynched, and these were dangerous times. The western Piedmont counties of South Carolina – Laurens, Abbeville, Greenwood, Newberry, McCormick, Saluda and Edgefield – saw a total of twenty-two lynchings between 1896 and 1910. In fact, dividing the state’s forty-six counties into eight regions, this western Piedmont region was the most lynch-prone in these years for a couple of reasons. African Americans in this region had virtually no political power, in contrast to parts of the lowcountry that managed to elect African Americans to the legislature or local offices from time to time, at least before the new constitution in 1895 disfranchised nearly all African Americans in the state. Also, the economic

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structure of this region led to greater friction between blacks and whites. While the eastern Piedmont region and the area along the Atlanta and Charlotte Air-Line Railway (later the Southern Railway) was developing more manufacturing jobs, this area was still much more rural, meaning that rather than the kind of residential segregation enforced in towns and especially mill villages, blacks and whites in rural communities were living close together. More African Americans were working as tenants for white landowners, a situation full of opportunities for conflict. For instance, fifteen years before in Laurens County, a dispute over the settling of accounts at the end of a year between a sharecropper and his landlord had left the sharecropper beaten to death by a small mob of white men, all over a few dollars.17 The political climate in 1913 also made things dangerous for Richard Puckett and others like him. When Ben Tillman had taken control of the state government in the 1890s, he did so in the name of the small white farmers whose interests were ignored by the elitist Redeemers, but Tillman scorned the poor whites who toiled in South Carolina’s textile mills in ever-increasing numbers in the early twentieth century. A new politician, Cole Blease, who had started as one of Tillman’s lieutenants, saw the political capital to be made in appealing to these voters; by insisting to these downtrodden but stiff-necked lintheads that they, too, were white men and deserved the respect that status commanded, he was elected governor in 1910 and again in 1912. The rock-bottom white supremacy Blease trumpeted appealed to these mill workers’ sense of powerlessness – over their workplace, over their families (the female members of which were usually wage earners as well) and over their government. The one arena where white millhands could exercise their power as white men was in their dealings with African Americans, and part of Blease’s appeal was his full-throated support for lynching. At a national conference of governors in December 1912, Blease had set the country spinning, saying during a session devoted to ‘Modern Penology’: I have said all over the State of South Carolina, and I say it again now, that I will never order out the militia to shoot down their neighbors to protect a black brute who commits a crime against a white woman. Therefore, in South Carolina, let

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it be understood that when a negro assaults a white woman all that is needed is that they get the right man, and they who get him will neither need nor receive a trial.

On the local level, solicitor R. A. Cooper had been hinting since February that he would run for governor in 1914. The first week of August 1913, he announced he was definitely running, hopeful that his nine years as solicitor of the Eighth Circuit would push him ahead of other candidates. Thwarting the will of a mob was seldom the way to voters’ hearts in the New South.18 Richard Puckett’s brother told his daughters that he was lynched for a white man’s misdeeds, and that it was not rape but adultery that was involved. According to the story James Malachi Puckett told, his brother Richard worked for a white man. That man was having an affair with someone else’s wife in Laurens, and to avoid arousing suspicion he would have Richard Puckett carry messages to the woman to arrange trysts. One day, the woman’s husband was home when Richard arrived, and he was not pleased. After a confrontation of some sort, Richard Puckett took refuge at his brother’s home, and when white men came to take him away, James Puckett defended his brother on the front porch with a shotgun until he got assurances that Richard would be taken directly to jail and protected. He was taken to jail, but he was not protected. Enough details of this story can be pieced together to provide some corroboration. According to a 1912 city directory, Mancil J. Owings ran Owings and Owings Groceries at the corner of East Main Street and Sullivan Street in partnership with his aunt, Mattie Owings. Single and forty-seven years old, M. J. Owings lived on the other side of town with his Aunt Mattie, who was in her sixties, and another elderly aunt. James Puckett lived in a small house at the back of Owings’s large lot. Puckett had lived there and worked for Owings since at least 1910 as a drayman, which would have involved hauling goods from the train station to the store, but probably also delivering groceries. (This was still the era when the customer came in, asked the clerk behind the counter for what she wanted, put it on her husband’s account and had the groceries delivered to her home later that day.) It seems likely that James Puckett got his brother Richard a job,

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since by 1912 they were both living behind Owings’s house and working for him. Obviously, a black deliveryman for a grocery store would arouse no suspicion going to a white woman’s house, and if his boss told him to give a woman a message, he could do that, too. There is even a hint that Richard Puckett may have found himself in similar circumstances before. In January 1913, he pled guilty to burglarizing the home of W. R. Richey, an attorney – an attorney with a young wife – who lived right next door to John D. Owings, the sheriff. Richard Puckett was sentenced to the chain gang, but on appeal the conviction was overturned because ‘entering a porch or other uninclosed [sic] part of one’s house does not constitute burglary under the law’. Anyone delivering groceries would have to go onto the porch of a house. It certainly sounds as though Richey may have objected to the deliveryman’s visits to his house, perhaps concerned that his wife was getting more than just groceries from Owings.19 What do we have to believe in order to believe this story? First, we have to believe that a forty-seven year-old merchant who lived with his mother and his aunt might have an affair with a married woman in town. We have to believe that the merchant might use his employee as a messenger to arrange trysts. Especially since Richard Puckett had just come off the chain gang, he would have had little choice but to obey; defying a white man’s orders was always a dangerous business. We have to believe that when the adultery was discovered a black deliveryman took the fall rather than a prominent white merchant. Perhaps the cuckolded husband was of much lower status and could not dare to take his revenge on the merchant himself, and displaced his revenge onto the lackey instead. Cooking up the story that Richard Puckett had assaulted a white woman, with its inevitable consequences, might have been an unsubtle way of warning Owings to stay out of married women’s beds. If the sheriff was behind it, perhaps he preferred to keep the affair quiet, all the more so if M. L. Owings were kin to him. All in all, this story, or something like it, seems much more credible than the other one. White men tied a rope around Richard Puckett’s neck and threw him off that railroad trestle, but you could say it was narrative that killed him. What put Richard Puckett in the Laurens County jail in the first place

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and what gathered the angry mob was a story, a familiar plot given a local twist. Sheriff Owings spread the story that Puckett had tried to rape a white woman, a story he must have known was a complete fabrication. It would hardly be the only time whites had conjured a black rapist out of thin air to avoid telling more difficult, more painful truths. The crusading anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett gathered examples of such stories and disseminated them in books, articles and lectures in order to try to crack the myth of the black beast rapist. In her 1895 pamphlet A Red Record, Wells-Barnett listed case after case where white women caught in intimate relationships with black men had, out of panic or coercion, charged rape and thus brought about the lynchings of their lovers. As she wrote then, ‘It is certain that lynching mobs have not only refused to give the Negro a chance to defend himself, but have killed their victim with a full knowledge that the relationship of the alleged assailant with the woman who accused him, was voluntary and clandestine.’ A few years after Puckett’s lynching, a white wife in the Florida sawmill town of Rosewood covered up a beating her lover gave her with a story about a fictitious African American assailant. Six black people, or maybe many more, died. More than just sparking the lynching itself, Owings’s nasty little story stood in the way of ever getting a clear idea of exactly what happened on 11 August 1913. Since his story fitted so well with the culture’s expectations, the coroner saw no need to waste time just to reach a foregone conclusion. Who knows what contradictions and embarrassing facts about the better class of white folks in Laurens might have found their way into the documentary record had the coroner done his job.20 The narrative that killed Richard Puckett crept into the history of the event, rotting out the core of our understanding of it and giving us cause to wonder what intellectual rot lies within our entire history of what lynching was and how it worked. The history of lynching has evolved directly out of the anti-lynching movement itself. As far back as 1882, the Chicago Tribune began compiling lists of lynchings, and later the Tuskegee Institute and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) did the same, all with the idea that putting the facts of lynching before the public would help end it. Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the 1890s worked tirelessly to show that rape or allegations of rape were

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involved in only a fraction of lynchings, that the practice was not about punishing crime but about oppressing African Americans. To a very large extent, these compilations of lynchings, and the multitude of sociological and later historical studies built around them, relied on newspaper coverage, which we have seen, and common sense could tell us, is often incomplete or biased or even an outright fabrication. If we really question the sources at the heart of lynching scholarship, how much can we really know?21 Finally, nearly a century later, the story of Richard Puckett’s death his family tells emerged into public, and its power contributed to reshaping how Americans think about that part of their nation’s past. One of James Malachi Puckett’s granddaughters came to Washington in June 2005 to be part of a historic moment: the first apology by the Congress to African Americans for racial violence. Her story of her great-uncle appeared in newspaper coverage of the Senate’s apology for standing idly by during the lynching era. As the U.S. Congress began issuing apologies, to Japanese-Americans for wartime internment, for instance, a group called the Committee for a Formal Apology began to demand an apology for the failure to pass anti-lynching legislation. Since such legislation was usually blocked in the Senate by powerful southern politicians, it was appropriate that the resolution of apology come from the Senate. Two southern senators, Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, and George Allen, a Republican from Virginia, proposed a resolution ‘apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of those victims for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation’. The resolution passed on 13 June 2005 and expressed ‘the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States’. This historic, if somewhat belated, apology from the U.S. Senate is part of a much broader resurgence of interest in lynching over the last decade or so. The new interest is recent enough to make it difficult for historians to find a good vantage point from which to view its development with any real confidence, but there do seem to be several distinct forces and trends converging here.22

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While the eventual involvement of the U.S. Senate might suggest that this new awareness of lynching was a top-down affair, it is probably more accurate to see it as arising organically out of many local efforts, some the result of many years. The best known of these was the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its founder was James Cameron, who narrowly survived a lynching that killed two of his friends in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. As a lynching survivor, and with his dedication to raising public awareness of the history of lynching, Cameron brought the topic into the public eye throughout the 1990s. Other local groups worked to bring new attention to events which had faded from public consciousness, especially after the impetus of the civil rights movement no longer gave the history of lynching an obvious relevance to the contemporary world. When historian Laura Wexler began researching the 1946 lynching at Moore’s Ford, Georgia, in 1997, she found two people in the community who had been working for decades to keep the event from being forgotten, and a larger community group that had recently come together to memorialize the four victims. Similarly, in the 1990s a group of citizens and academics at the local university in Wilmington, North Carolina, began planning ways to commemorate the centenary of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. The result was a series of events including a symposium that brought together academics and local historians and activists.23 At the same time, the 1990s were a time when new demands were made for officially holding people to account for past racial violence. Crimes from the civil rights era began to be prosecuted, and Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in 1994 for the assassination of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers more than three decades earlier. Two of the men who bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963 were sent to prison in 2001 and 2002. In some cases where guilt for racial violence could not be pinned on individuals, states have accepted responsibility for their failures to protect their citizens in the past. Leading the way here was the state of Florida’s acknowledgement of its responsibility to the survivors of the 1923 massacre at Rosewood. In 1994, the state paid compensation to survivors and their descendants. A commission was established in 1997 to study the race riot that destroyed Tulsa’s black business district in 1921, and in 2001 the Oklahoma legislature provided

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college scholarships to some of the descendants of victims. Over a century after the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, the state of North Carolina, like Florida and Oklahoma, commissioned an official report on the events, published in 2006.24 There were other, darker reasons why lynching rose to the surface of the American consciousness (and conscience) in the late 1990s. On the morning of 7 June 1998, people across the country heard about a Texas Piney Woods town called Jasper. Three young white men with links to white supremacist organizations had stopped for a hitchhiker, a fortynine-year-old African American man named James Byrd. They beat him and tied him, still alive, behind their truck and dragged him to his death. Parts of his body were found for a couple of miles along the road. The three white men were arrested and convicted of the murder in 1999. The case sparked intense discussion in the media about racial violence in the South and across America, and to what extent it could be consigned to the past.25 As much as the lynching of James Byrd, the investigations and prosecutions of old crimes, and the scattered commemorative activities did to remind Americans of the importance of lynching, it fell to something else to quite literally open their eyes to that history. In 1985, an antiques collector named James Allen came across a postcard of the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta. Intrigued, he began seeking out other photographs of lynchings. By 1997, he had amassed around 150 photographs and postcards, by some way the largest collection ever put together of images of lynchings. When a book of ninety-eight photographs from the collection was published along with accompanying essays, it prompted interest in New York in presenting some of the images to the public. In January 2000, sixty images from the collection were exhibited under the title ‘Witness’ at the Ruth Horowitz Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. After drawing several thousand visitors in the month it was there, the exhibit was picked up by the New York Historical Society, where as many as 50,000 people saw it between March and July 2000. At this venue, the exhibition, now titled ‘Without Sanctuary’ to reflect the title of the book, included more historical context and also material about the anti-lynching movement. The press coverage of the responses to the exhibition suggests

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that the photographs made the phenomenon of lynching tangible for the general public in a way it had never been before. The photographs were now, as one editorial writer observed, ‘an outcry against racism rather than a reinforcement of it’. To help visitors deal with such powerful material, the New York Historical Society sponsored educational programmes and group discussions of the images. The following year, the exhibit moved to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and in 2002, it was hosted in the South for the first time at the Martin Luther King, Jr Historic Site in Atlanta. The Atlanta show ran for nine months, with more than 170,000 visitors in that time.26 The ‘Without Sanctuary’ phenomenon seems to have accelerated the movement of lynching into the popular consciousness, in some cases sparking new activity and in other cases simply adding a level of legitimacy to activities already underway. This new interest was manifested in a number of commemorations and apologies for lynchings. In 2003, a group of pastors in Harrison, Arkansas, issued an apology for a race riot and lynching nearly a century ago that turned the town all-white. Historians in Statesboro, Georgia, writing a local history brochure for the chamber of commerce included a discussion of that town’s most famous event, the 1904 burning of two black men accused of murder. Historians going against the grain to present uncomfortable truths is not that surprising, but what is perhaps surprising, and encouraging, is the response from the president of the Chamber of Commerce: ‘I guess we were a little bit shocked. But it was very much a part of the history of Bulloch County – it’s not something anybody can be proud of – but you can’t change history.’ In July 2005, an interracial church service in Abbeville, South Carolina, sought reconciliation and forgiveness for the 1916 lynching of Anthony Crawford; participants included both Crawford’s descendants and the descendants of those who killed him. Even locations far from the usual places we think of being associated with lynchings have recognized the significance of racial violence in their pasts. Duluth, Minnesota, on the cold shore of Lake Superior, put up a plaque in 2003 memorializing the lynching of three African American men in 1920.27 The early years of the twenty-first century also saw a handful of successful books on lynching that brought the topic to a wide public. The

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first and most comprehensive of these was Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. Dray’s book was the kind of sweeping history of the entire phenomenon of lynching and its eventual suppression that academic writers had not attempted for several decades. Other books focused on particular lynchings in great detail. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory owner in Atlanta, had been the subject of a number of books and even a play over the years, and in 2003 Steve Oney published a new and comprehensive history of the case. One of the handful of post-World War II lynchings, the killing of four sharecroppers at Moore’s Ford in Walton County, Georgia, was the subject of Laura Wexler’s 2003 book Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, a book that has reawakened interest in possibly prosecuting surviving members of the mob.28 This new awareness of lynching within the culture generally, and the horrific shock of James Byrd’s death in 1998, has led to a number of events in the last decade we might call ‘crypto-lynchings’, events which seem at first to be lynchings and which many believe to be lynchings despite strong evidence to the contrary. One of the first of these was the death of Raynard Johnson in Kokomo, Mississippi, in June 2000. The black honours student was found hanging in a pecan tree, and in the absence of any evidence of foul play – no one had been seen near the location and Johnson’s body had no marks of other trauma – the police ruled the death a suicide. African Americans in the area, though, claimed that whites in Kokomo had harassed him because he dated white girls, an uneasy reminder of the 1959 lynching of Mack Charles Parker in Mississippi on charges of raping a white woman. Two years later, a young black man in Springfield, Missouri, was found hanging from a radio tower, and though his death was ruled a suicide, his family and other observers were not so sure. In Belle Glade, Florida, an African American man who had been having problems and had spoken to people about his wish to die was found hanging in a tree in his grandmother’s yard, sparking rumours that he had been lynched for dating a white police officer’s daughter. Although quickly countered, the rumours took on a life of their own, and a public inquest into the death was held two months later to reassure Palm Beach County’s black residents that the death had indeed been a suicide. Another suicide of a

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black man in southwest Mississippi in 2004 sparked nationwide media interest, primarily because he had hanged himself outside, despite the fact that the county’s African American sheriff publicized details of the death that made it clear it was no lynching.29 Lynching was always entangled in lies. Lies about black men and white women, lies about the supposed limitations of the legal system, the lies politicians tell that they know voters want to believe – all these created a climate where many people could convince themselves of terrible things and convince themselves they were justified in doing terrible things. Yet, in contrast to many of the other atrocities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the awakening from the nightmare of lynching has been slow and halting rather than clear-eyed and abrupt. For a great many people, seeing James Allen’s photographs of lynchings has had something of the effect that the first images of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen had, leaving no last place of refuge for the falsehoods lynching relied upon and promulgated. The challenge for the historian is in bringing some kind of accurate understanding to bear when, as in the case of Richard Puckett, even the few, bare facts we have to go on may likely be yet more lies. A few years after Puckett’s death, lies just as coldly calculating and cynical prompted another lynching in South Carolina, but these lies were told by African Americans against one of their own.

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A Wartime Lynching: Rev. Watson T. Sims, Sharon, S.C., 1917 One inherent dilemma in history’s retrospective glance is that in looking back over a number of years, centuries sometimes, the past can flatten out, and we can miss the sense of immediacy that the actors in the stories we examine felt. Lynching probably suffers from this dilemma as much as any historical topic, more perhaps since it is something that, with its casual acceptance of ugly racist ideas and frightening violence, we would like to think of as very distant from our present, a dusty relic of another time, something always old and out of date and foreordained to pass away in the march of time and progress. Of course, people living when lynching was happening saw it as a present problem, and in many ways the phenomenon of lynching was itself anything but a relic of the past, but rather a product of the very processes of modernization that turned the world into something we can recognize today. The periods when the South was modernizing most quickly were often those when lynching was at its worst. World War I was a watershed of change for the South, in many important ways sitting at the cusp of a past that would strike us as thoroughly foreign and a period when we can begin to see the outlines of a familiar, modern life take shape. Some aspects of the progressive movement had begun to take hold, and the state was a more common presence in people’s lives than it had been before. The need for labour in northern cities intensified the migration of African Americans out of the region that had been going on since the 1890s, marking the beginning of what is known as the Great Migration. Cotton, so long the cornerstone around which life had been built in much of the South, was beginning to falter with the instability of prices in the years before the war and the voracious appetite of the boll weevil. As automobiles became more common, those who drove them pushed for a Good Roads programme to replace muddy, rutted tracks

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with modern surfaces, the biggest change in transportation to hit the South since the railroad building boom of the 1870s and 1880s, and one that had the potential to make previously isolated communities accessible as they had never been. By the 1910s, the Jim Crow system had reached a certain kind of maturity and became a part of the fabric of southern life. Most of its mechanisms were in place. Constitutions had been tinkered with to scrub black voters off the election rolls in a dozen devious ways. Legislators had looked around at public life and put up ‘Colored’ and ‘White’ signs wherever black and white might meet. As we have seen, racial violence, including lynching, had become an expected part of the southern landscape. There were still some challenges to Jim Crow in this period, and the beginnings of an interracial movement to ameliorate its worst features, but in many ways this period between the Populist challenge and the dislocations of World War I can be seen as the high-water mark of the Jim Crow world. A sign of this is how African Americans themselves could sometimes use Jim Crow in contests over other issues. As historian Brian Kelly has argued, many middle-class blacks accepted Jim Crow partly as a bulwark against class-based challenges from black workers. African American community leaders could be, in Booker T. Washington’s words, ‘sentinels in every negro community in the South’ who could keep ‘a steady hand on the masses of the colored people’, developing the South’s economy by guaranteeing its competitive advantage in cheap labour.1 At times, the rules and structures of Jim Crow could become weapons in petty things such as the factional squabble in a South Carolina church at the heart of the lynching in York County in 1917. In this chapter, as in others, the power of narrative played an important part in sparking a lynching. As the nation mobilized for war, the question of what could be said, and who could say certain things, became increasingly important. Not only was the government paying closer attention to what people were saying, but it had enlisted the assistance of all patriotic citizens to monitor what their neighbours were saying as well. As we saw in the Laurens lynching of 1913, the very nature of Jim Crow had a profound effect on the kinds of narratives people were willing to believe, and the war hysteria of 1917 accentuated this effect.

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Some of the changes in the South by the mid-1910s were not so directly tied to the coming of World War I. Even without the turmoil in Europe, the cotton on which much of the South’s economy depended was in trouble. The boll weevil, which had entered the United States in Texas back in 1892, was eating its way through harvests further and further northwards and eastwards, consuming as much as half the yield in the areas it came to. By 1916 it was in Georgia, and 1917 saw it hit South Carolina for the first time. The outbreak of war in 1914 disrupted the international cotton marketing system, and on 3 August 1914 the cotton exchanges simply did not open; they remained closed for three months as mortgages came due, tenants’ store accounts had to be settled up and wholesalers wanted to be paid. The cotton market did eventually stabilize, and by 1916, wartime demand was pushing prices higher.2 Besides these indirect effects, World War I changed the South in powerful ways, making it a much more frightening place to be for many people, especially anyone who spoke out against the way things had always been. Part of what made this attack on dissent so powerful was the way it was combined with the thorough mobilization of the population for the war effort. Across the South, opinion had generally run against Germany and in favour of mobilization from the time the war broke out in 1914. At the same time, the South was also the home of some of the most outspoken opposition to the idea of American involvement in the war. Claude Kitchin of North Carolina was the Democratic majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives and the leading voice of the political movement against militarism. In South Carolina, Cole Blease was also a vocal opponent of the war, drawing cheers from his ragged voters with the argument that like the Civil War had been, this was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. The declaration of war on 6 April 1917 changed the climate overnight, however, and across the country many who had opposed a hypothetical war suddenly favoured the real war. This change of heart was essential, since the entire war effort Woodrow Wilson had set up depended on voluntary effort to mobilize resources; unless everyone believed in the war, it could not be fought. As a result, the federal government began passing legislation to stifle dissent. A February 1917 law making it a crime to threaten harm to the President was later very broadly construed to jail

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or fine people who criticized Wilson or his policies. The Espionage Act of June 1917 made criminals of anyone who ‘shall wilfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces … [or] shall wilfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall wilfully obstruct the recruiting or enlisting service of the United States’, providing for ‘a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years or both’. Both of these measures were widely used to stifle dissent about the war. A young millworker from Eureka, a mill village on the outskirts of Chester, South Carolina, found this out the hard way in August 1917 when he was arrested and haled before a United States Commissioner for criticizing the president. The mechanisms by which dissent was monitored overlapped with those designed to mobilize resources. State councils of defence were created to organize the war effort but also to watch out for ‘slackers’ or anti-war statements. South Carolina’s State Council of Defense put the matter plainly: ‘There is no middle ground. Our citizens who are not pro-American are pro-German. Those who are not for us are against us.’ Citizens organized themselves into groups tightly linked to the government in order to look out for opposition to the war. The American Protective League formed in spring 1917 as an auxiliary to the Bureau of Investigation to root out spies. The Committee on Public Information, sponsored by the government, sent out ‘Four Minute Men’ to make brief speeches in favour of the war; two hundred crisscrossed South Carolina in 1917.3 The war effort even reached to the dinner table. The Lever Food Control Act of 1917 (named for its South Carolina sponsor, Congressman Asbury F. Lever) controlled the production and prices of food in order to keep grain and meat available to send to U.S. troops and the Allies in Europe. Herbert Hoover, the head of the federal Food Administration, tied everyday life directly to the war, saying, ‘Every man, woman, and child left here at home must stand back of every soldier “over there” and help in the daily service of conservation [of food].’ As one southern publication suggested, this meant saving wheat and meat by eating more vegetables and cornbread. In the middle of August, a food conservation group formed in

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western York County, with its leader going house to house to get women to sign a pledge to conserve food. This sort of close monitoring of people’s day-to-day activities had the potential to spark many minor conflicts, and those conflicts could easily escalate.4 Although the war effort was built on voluntary mobilization, when it came time for sending soldiers overseas, the government relied upon conscription. A draft law passed a month after the United States joined the war, and 5 June 1917 was set as the date for all eligible men to register. Despite the broad support for the war, opposition to the draft was significant across the South. For one thing, the draft quotas fell more heavily on the South than on other regions. The draft boards that administered the system were usually drawn from the middle-class town residents, increasing tensions with the poorer rural dwellers who made up the bulk of those drafted. In light of this, it is not that surprising that as many as 12 per cent of those drafted simply never showed up or deserted from their training camps. Opposing the draft, however, could be dangerous. Around the country, a number of mobs attacked people for opposing the draft. If mobs did not get draft opponents, the government would with a capacious definition of what constituted a violation. As historians H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite explain, ‘In order to be guilty of obstructing the war effort it was not necessary to prove that, as a result of certain statements or actions, any particular individual had refused military service. A man was liable for prosecution even if he only wrote or spoke against conscription or the war.’ South Carolina saw a significant crackdown on ‘slackers’ in the counties around Orangeburg in the second week of August 1917.5 One of the biggest controversies of the war in the South involved the Department of War’s plans to train African American soldiers in camps across the South. The South hosted six of the fifteen Army training camps and thirteen of the sixteen for the National Guard because the warmer weather meant troops could more easily train through the winter. South Carolina saw the expansion of training facilities for the Marines on Parris Island and new activity at the Charleston Navy Yard, as well as three Army training camps: Camp Sevier in Greenville, Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, and Camp Jackson in Columbia. Had it been only white soldiers from the rest of the country coming to train, white

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South Carolinians would probably have welcomed them, but the draft brought in thousands of African American soldiers as well, and many white southerners found much to be afraid of in that. Since many of the black soldiers would be from the North, white southerners worried that they would not know how to follow the intricate codes of Jim Crow, or might simply be unwilling to do so. On 20 August 1917, Governor Richard I. Manning and a group of other South Carolina leaders, including D. R. Coker of Hartsville, the chairman of the State Council of Defense, went to Washington to meet with Secretary of War Newton Baker to protest against black soldiers coming to Camp Jackson on the eastern edge of Columbia. Fred H. Dominick, a first-term Congressman from South Carolina, said, ‘Such action on the part of the government and the placing of negro troops by the side of white troops in our armies will undo the half century efforts of our people to prevent social equality of the races.’ In addition to bringing African American soldiers in to Camp Jackson, the Army planned to send soldiers from Puerto Rico, and if African American troops from the North might stumble over the finer points of segregation, the Puerto Ricans would be, as the South Carolina delegation put it, even more ‘unused to the Southern view of the negro question’. Eventually, Baker agreed to send the Puerto Ricans elsewhere. Black soldiers from the rest of country, however, would train at Camp Jackson, though measures would be taken to prevent them from mixing with white soldiers while they were there, hopefully averting racial tension.6 The South Carolina delegation had good reason to worry about racial tension, as it had proven to be a self-fulfilling prophecy elsewhere in the country. In July, East St Louis had erupted in rioting between blacks and whites, leaving several dead. The complaints of Governor Manning and his group must have seemed prescient, for two days later, exactly what they warned about happened in Houston. The Third Battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, a black unit, had arrived at the end of July after a period of service on the Mexican border. The soldiers were accustomed to patrolling in the desert, not following the rules of Jim Crow in an urban environment. Setting up camp on the western edge of the city, conflicts soon began to break out between black soldiers on guard duty and white workmen from the city coming and going to build the camp. Houston’s

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Camp Jackson near Columbia, South Carolina, 1917. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [DLC/PP-1918:45879].

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police had a bad reputation for brutal treatment of African Americans, and they did not make an exception for soldiers. On 23 August 1917, two Houston policemen beat and arrested two black soldiers from the Third Battalion. That night, the soldiers picked up their rifles and ammunition and marched on the city, sparking a riot that left fourteen whites dead and eight more injured.7 Despite the fears of a ‘race war’ in the South, the increased pressures of wartime proved to be the catalyst needed to turn the nascent interracial movement into something that could actually change the South for the better. Southerners had made limited efforts before to deal with the region’s racial problems. In some ways, we can see these attempts as part of the broader Progressive Era project of bringing order to a society dislocated by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. While most white southerners wanted to use disfranchisement and segregation to control the disruptive element of race, others saw this as merely adding to the disorder in society and sought another way. That is not to say that they wanted anything we would recognize as racial equality, but they did want a society without the strident racism of someone like Cole Blease and certainly without the violence he encouraged. For example, in 1900, the Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South was formed, though it did not go on to be a significant factor in the region’s history. A few years later, in April 1908, a meeting in Atlanta organized by Willis D. Weatherford, a white YMCA worker, saw both blacks and whites gather to discuss race problems. A larger and more durable organization was the Southern Sociological Congress, which set itself the task of addressing the South’s many social ills. It held its first meeting in Nashville in May 1912, with around 700 delegates from across the region attending. Prominent among them was Willis D. Weatherford.8 In a very long career, Willis D. Weatherford helped bring the ideas of the Social Gospel to bear on the problems of the South, especially race relations. He was born in Texas in 1875 and raised as a Methodist. Weatherford went to Vanderbilt University in 1897 to study theology, but he soon changed his mind and instead earned a Ph.D. in literature. As he was finishing his degree in 1902, Weatherford was offered a position

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as International YMCA Student Secretary for the Colleges of the South and Southwest, a position he held until 1919. In this capacity, he travelled around to visit approximately two hundred student YMCA chapters across fourteen states, addressing questions about religion and also about the range of social work that YMCA groups were involved with. The job also provided Weatherford with an unparalleled familiarity with the region and its problems and built a network of southerners interested in improving the South. In 1906, he established a permanent conference centre in Black Mountain, North Carolina, just east of Asheville, and in 1912, he held the first in a long series of summer conferences there.9 Weatherford’s ideas about race emerged organically from his strong religious beliefs, as did those of many religious reformers grouped under the heading of the ‘Social Gospel’. As he explained, ‘Is it not worth while to try to find Jesus’s attitude toward human life and then constructively apply that attitude in our relation to others in business, in manufacturing, in race relations, everywhere?’ He also believed that violence increased the general level of lawlessness in society because of the degrading effects it had on the souls of the white men who committed it. Nonetheless, he held back from supporting full racial equality. Much like Booker T. Washington and others, Weatherford believed in a programme of social uplift for African Americans inspired by racial pride, but he thought that African Americans would not want social equality, preferring to mix only with their own race. Weatherford ultimately wanted to keep segregation, but a kinder, gentler segregation. The meeting he organized in Atlanta in 1908 was unusual in that it was interracial, but also because it refrained from making sweeping judgements about comprehensive ‘solutions’ to the race problem; instead, it made specific recommendations for incremental improvements, a method Weatherford would continue and that would become central to the subsequent incarnations of the interracial movement. In 1910, Weatherford wrote Negro Life in the South to publicize the terrible conditions in which many African Americans lived. While not challenging segregation as a basis on which to order southern society, Weatherford did sometimes chip away at its edges. For instance, when the Southern Sociological Congress met in Memphis in 1914, it directly challenged local segregation practices.10

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The law and order conference at the Blue Ridge Association in the summer of 1917 sought to ease the racial tensions that had been increasing across the South as a result of the war. When the United States entered World War I and began building an army, the YMCA took on the task of supporting the soldiers in the training camps and eventually in Europe as well. YMCA workers soon realized that one of the war’s effects had been to increase racial tension, so the YMCA’s work to improve race relations in the South took on new urgency. The meeting in Black Mountain from 4 to 6 August 1917 brought together whites and blacks, men and women, YMCA workers, ministers, educators and social service providers to try to head off what seemed to be an imminent disaster. Getting control of lynchings was an essential part of this strategy. One of the conference’s speakers was Gilbert T. Stephenson, a prominent white lawyer from Winston-Salem who was chairman of the Forsyth County Democratic Executive Committee and had also run North Carolina’s war bonds campaign. His presentation looked at the criminal court procedures for lynching trials in North Carolina. Perhaps thinking in part of Thomas J. Shaw, Stephenson argued that much could be accomplished by encouraging judges to speak out more strongly against lynching when they instructed grand juries. Kate Herndon Trawick, the General Secretary of the YWCA in Nashville, challenged the cultural myths that supported lynching, much as Ida B. Wells-Barnett had and, as a white woman herself, anticipating the tactic that the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching would use in the 1930s. She rejected the idea that lynching was necessary as part of the system of chivalry designed to protect the white women of the South. In fact, far from portraying southern white men as gallant protectors of white women, Trawick argued that much lynching resulted from white men’s sexual assaults on black women. An African American professor from Paine College in Georgia, John Wesley Gilbert, discussed the effects of mob violence on African American life, something most whites in the audience had probably never had the opportunity to consider from an inside perspective before. Gilbert portrayed lynching as part of a larger social and cultural malady and criticized ministers, politicians and fiction that supported mob violence. Weatherford’s closing address looked at one of the serious consequences

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of the lynchings in the South: the exodus of African Americans to the North.11 In addition to the interracial movement epitomized by Weatherford’s 1917 conference, African Americans were themselves working to improve their position, and while the war made that more difficult in some ways, paradoxically it made it easier in others. The war itself provided opportunities for African Americans to demonstrate their patriotism and thus their worthiness for full citizenship. African Americans gave financial support to the war effort by purchasing Liberty Bonds and taking part in other mobilization efforts. They also were eager to support the war as soldiers, knowing that military service gave them a rock-solid moral claim on the civil rights they had been denied. In South Carolina, more blacks registered for the draft than whites, and the black 371st Regiment from South Carolina earned a good record in combat. African Americans in the South also began to involve themselves in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). With the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915, the accommodationist racial philosophy he had supported began to lose its grip in the South and opportunities for new approaches emerged. The NAACP appointed James Weldon Johnson to the post of field secretary in December 1916, and in January 1917 he began a two-month tour through the South organizing local branches of the NAACP in Virginia, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The first branch in South Carolina was formed in Columbia, based on earlier African American civic organizations, and at the end of February 1917 a Charleston branch was formed. Yet these positive developments in southern race relations would be too little to keep the rising crescendo of paranoia and racism from having tragic consequences in York County, South Carolina, in August 1917.12 Rev. Watson T. Sims was lynched because of a long-running feud in the Baptist church he pastored. St John’s Baptist Church was, and is today, a small African American church in the town of Sharon, which sits on the railroad in the western side of York County, a few miles east of the Broad River and not far north of where Giles Good once lived. Sims arrived to pastor the church around 1903, though he lived in Chester,

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coming up on the weekends by train. In 1911, the church owed a debt of $327.28, probably for construction of a building, and Bill Sanders was the treasurer. Without the consent of the church, Sanders made arrangements to pay off the debt. Something must have gone awry, however, because in 1915 Sanders and Sam MacNeal were expelled from the church for the misappropriation of $150 of church funds. The conflict simmered along for the next couple of years, and in April 1917 Sims held a church meeting and Sanders insisted on coming along. When Sanders’s presence was challenged, some of his supporters turned the tables and told Sims that they would not let him continue to preach at St John’s. In June, Sanders began making threats against Sims, who had refused to vacate the pulpit. One problem for Sanders, though, was that he was hardly in a position to do anything about the situation by himself; at six feet and four inches tall and weighing around two hundred fifty pounds, Sims had more than just the righteousness of the Lord on his side if it came to a fair fight.13 The conflict between Sanders and Sims intensified in late June 1917 with a shouting match during the Sunday service. Sanders defiantly took his seat in church on the third Sunday in June, but Sims would not let the challenge pass. He told Sanders from the pulpit that he was no longer a member of the church and should leave. Sanders stood up and began cursing Sims, and though it looked like violence was imminent, Sanders was convinced to take his seat again. A couple of weeks later, it looked like the factional dispute might end with Sims leaving the church. He had been offered a church in Clover, further north in York County, but St John’s either could not or would not pay him his back salary before leaving, so the deal fell through and Sims remained at St John’s instead. In July 1917, Sanders and some of his friends took the conflict one stage further by involving white folks. They began spreading rumours to whites in Sharon that Sims had been preaching to his congregation that they should not show respect for whites and making ‘improper remarks about white women and of conditions that would prevail between the two races if the war continued’. By mid-July, Sanders had begun to actively recruit a group of people to get rid of Sims, one way or another. Plans were laid, and on the third weekend in July, Sims’s enemies were waiting for him to

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get off the train at the Sharon depot, but they missed him. Around this time, a white doctor from Sharon, J. H. Saye, wrote Sims a letter warning him to stay away from Sharon. This appears to have been the first Sims realized about the lies Sanders and his other enemies had been spreading about him in Sharon’s white community, and Sims asked for a chance to meet with the leading white citizens to explain the situation. The meeting was held, and Sims explained the origins of the church feud and reassured Sharon’s leading white citizens that he had never made the sort of remarks attributed to him. Everything seemed to be settled.14 As many Baptist churches in the South did, St John’s took advantage of the lull in the farming calendar known as ‘lay-by’ to hold a protracted meeting in the third week of August 1917. With cotton and corn just waiting in the fields to ripen, without the need for further cultivation or application of fertilizer, farmers had a few weeks in July and August where they could relax a bit before the hard work of harvest began towards the end of September. It was a time for social activities of all kinds, such as family reunions and church revivals. By Monday night, a rumour was going around that a group was planning to whip Sims and Isaiah Williams, one of his supporters. That night, Tom Baily, the son-in-law of Tom Sanders, was hanging around the church grounds after the services, probably looking out for an opportunity to get Sims. Wednesday evening after the preaching finished, two visiting ministers went with Isaiah Williams to stay the night, and Sims went to Bob Burris’s house, not far from Williams’s, all travelling by wagon. Sims and Burris arrived just after midnight, and Sims, saying he was worried about the brewing trouble and exhausted, went directly to bed. Burris remained outside a few minutes getting his mules put away.15 After Bob Burris had finished a late supper, he heard his dogs barking at something outside. Going out the front door to the gate, he heard heavy footsteps and thought it was just cattle. His wife, Mary, and daughter, Pearl, had also heard the dogs, and Pearl went to the front door. Outside, someone suddenly grabbed Bob Burris and threatened to blow his brains out if he did not tell where the preacher was. The person, along with others, took Burris back in the house and shoved him into the first room, but Sims was not there. In the confusion, Mary Burris rushed out the

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front door onto the porch, right into the arms of Frank Twitty, a young African American man. Members of the mob told her to go back in the house if she did not want to get shot. Men coming into the house pointed a pistol in Pearl Burris’s face and put out the light. In the house, the men took Bob Burris upstairs, along with his son Clarence Burris and another young man named Fred Sanders, and soon found the room where Sims was staying. Sims called out, ‘Here I am. Don’t bother Brother Burris and his family. Gentlemen, I am as innocent as a dove. I am in your hands, do as you please.’ At this point, shooting broke out, as Sims had apparently gone armed to bed, and he and members of the mob both inside and outside the house began firing. Amazingly, no one seems to have been seriously injured in the brief exchange of fire.16 One armed man was no match for several, and the mob was soon able to drag Sims down the stairs and out of the house. Mary Burris had finally gotten away and ran the 500 yards over to Isaiah Williams’s house. Williams’s wife had heard the shooting and woke him before Mary Burris arrived. Distraught, Mary Burris pleaded with Williams to come help her family and Sims, but Williams’s wife insisted that he stay out of it, physically holding her husband back. Williams eventually promised his wife that he would do the smart thing and stay at home, so she let go of him. He immediately went out the door towards Bob Burris’s house.17 The mob carried Sims and young Fred Sanders down the road a ways. They wrestled Sims to the ground and made Sanders sit on him to keep him under control. Next they stretched Sanders out flat on the ground, cut his clothes off him, and began whipping him. Eventually, they stopped and told Sanders to get up. He did so and ran into the woods, hiding there until daylight. Isaiah Williams by this time had crept up to a point in a pine thicket a hundred yards away from the mob, where he could hear all that was going on. The mob started beating Sims, and Williams could hear the blows fall and hear Sims hollering, ‘Lord have mercy!’ and the mob shouting at him to hush. They stopped for a while, then started again, hitting Sims around a hundred times, by Williams’s estimate. Next the mob forced the bruised and bleeding Sims to his feet and ordered him to start running across the cotton field. As he ran, the mob fired a half dozen shots at him, and when he fell, beat him for another four or five minutes.

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This procedure was repeated three more times, though the third time Sims could go only a short distance before he collapsed. Williams could hear one mob member joke to another, ‘Short, you don’t know how to beat a Negro,’ before showing him the proper technique. Williams heard one final burst of gunfire, and then a group of men came up the road past the pines where he was hiding, one of them casually smoking a cigarette. The men got in a couple of cars, one heading off towards Hickory Grove and other going the opposite direction.18 Just before dawn, Bob Burris ventured outside to look for Sims, hoping the mob had dispersed. He found Sims lying in a cotton field about two hundred yards from the road and a half mile from Burris’s house. Sims was alive and still conscious, but he knew he was dying and said as much to Burris. Sims said he knew the people in the mob, but he refused to name them. Burris rushed down the road to Bob Hartness’s place to get a wagon to take Sims to Burris’s house. With the wagon, he brought Isaiah Williams and the two ministers who had been staying with Williams and returned to where Sims was. In the meantime, another neighbour had found Sims and carried him in his wagon back to Burris’s house. Sims was carefully taken out of the wagon and laid on the ground in the backyard, but he was fading quickly. Ten minutes later, without making any further statements, Sims died.19 The news that a preacher had been lynched in York County inspired local and state authorities to begin a vigorous investigation. They began on the Thursday Sims died, acting on the information Bob Burris could provide about the attack. Three names came up immediately. Frank Twitty, the one Mary Burris ran into as she tried to flee, was an African American in his late twenties; he was arrested on Thursday. Also arrested on Thursday was Fred Penninger, an eighteen-year-old white man. Born in North Carolina, he had moved to South Carolina around 1905 and lived in Sharon. The third assailant identified was Dick Norman, but he initially managed to evade arrest. A coroner’s investigation was officially opened, but then adjourned until Monday to await developments and further arrests. On Saturday 25 August 1917, Bill Sanders and Tom Sanders were arrested and put in jail.20

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On 27 August 1917, Governor Manning sent the district’s solicitor to assist the investigation. J. K. Henry, who lived in Chester as Sims had, arrived Monday morning to assist the coroner and the sheriff. He had the full backing of the governor, who had sent a telegram to Henry, and saw that it was published in the newspapers, saying, ‘I trust you will do everything in your power to make a rigid investigation of the case and to bring the perpetrators of the crime to justice.’ Two more men were arrested that Monday, the elusive Dick Norman and another white man in his twenties, Zell Bolin. Henry’s investigation began to produce some information on which African Americans had been involved in the lynching, and soon Lonnie Franklin was in jail as well. By Saturday, Henry had also arrested Lawyer Sanders, the thirty-year-old son of Bill Sanders. By the time the coroner’s jury reconvened in the York County courthouse on Monday 3 September 1917, eight men had been arrested. Many of Sims’s congregation were in the audience, only to hear the coroner’s jury issue that standard verdict that Sims had been killed by ‘parties unknown’. This would have set the arrested men free, but new warrants had been prepared against them to be handed to the grand jury for their consideration. A final arrest was made: T. R. Penninger, a fifty-year-old blacksmith from Sharon and the father of Fred Penninger, one of the first men arrested. The state’s chances of a successful prosecution were raised when Dick Norman was persuaded to confess on the Monday of the coroner’s inquest; he was released on Wednesday on $1,000 bond. Perhaps seeing his friend get out of jail inspired Zell Bolin to follow in his footsteps, because he confessed on Thursday 6 September. Norman’s and Bolin’s confessions shook things loose and led to the arrest of two prominent whites. Meek McGill was thirty-five years old, a merchant and the postmaster of the town of Hickory Grove, about five miles from Sharon. More surprising, perhaps, was the arrest of Carson Lattimore, Hickory Grove’s policeman.21 Two and a half weeks after Sims was lynched, the York County grand jury indicted all the men arrested for his murder, six whites and five blacks. The trial was scheduled for the November term of court. It began on Tuesday 27 November 1917, with Judge J. W. DeVore of Edgefield on the bench. At first it looked like the confessions from Norman and Bolin might be thrown out on the flimsy grounds that they had not known

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what they were doing when they confessed or that they had been made false promises, but these objections were overcome, and the damning confessions stayed in. Two witnesses testified that while Bill Sanders had been in jail, he had admitted to being in the mob that killed Sims. The jury took ten whole minutes to decide on a verdict of ‘not guilty’.22 The legal struggle over Watson Sims’s lynching did not end with the mob’s acquittal. While North Carolina may have had a more effective set of legal procedures in place for trying members of lynch mobs on criminal charges, South Carolina had a remedy available in civil court, a law that held counties financially liable to the legal representatives of persons lynched there. The law emerged out of the post-Reconstruction attempts to stop the sort of racial violence associated with the upheavals of the Ku Klux Klan and the overthrow of Reconstruction state governments. In the 1880s, African Americans in South Carolina had protested against the worsening climate of racial violence. After the killing of a prominent black citizen in Charleston in November 1885, black leaders there held a large meeting calling for an end to racial violence and invoking the language of a potential ‘race war’ if changes were not made. Four years later when eight African American men were lynched in Barnwell, a meeting in Columbia drew participants from around the state and appealed to all citizens to uphold the law. Failing that, they advised African Americans to flee areas where mob violence occurred. Early in his term as governor, Ben Tillman actively opposed lynching. In his inaugural address, he called on the legislature to grant the governor the power to remove the sheriff of a county where a lynching occurred. In 1891, Tillman tried to prevent the lynching of an African American man in Edgefield, though he did not succeed. Starting in 1892, however, Tillman changed his position and began to endorse lynching, starting with some strong statements in favour of it during the campaign that year. In April 1893, Tillman sent a black rape suspect back to Denmark, South Carolina, after he had been brought to Columbia for safe-keeping, despite clear evidence that the man would be lynched, as indeed he was. Still, as happened in North Carolina as white Democrats secured their control of the state government a few years later, when white South Carolinians rewrote their constitution in 1895 to keep African Americans out of politics, they added a provision making

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counties liable for damages of at least $2,000 to the legal representatives of the victim of a lynching. In 1896, South Carolina put the constitutional provision into statutory form, and Ohio and Virginia passed similar laws the same year. When Governor William H. Ellerbe addressed the legislature in his annual message in January 1899, he made lynching one of his main topics. Ellerbe denounced lynching because it weakened the state’s sovereignty over its citizens, and vowed to work to stop it. He advocated strengthening the new law, providing for the removal of sheriffs and constables who did not prevent lynchings, increasing the minimum damages liability for counties to $5,000, and taking away the right to vote or hold office from anyone convicted of participating in a lynching. The 1896 law was used soon after it came into effect. When Lawrence Brown was lynched in Orangeburg County in 1897 on suspicion of arson, his father Isaac Brown sued the county for $10,000. At the first hearing in September 1898, the judge ruled that the law only applied when the victim was taken from the custody of law enforcement officials, but the state supreme court established an important principle when it overturned that ruling. The case was heard again in October 1899, but the jury decided for the county in the face of overwhelming evidence. The judge set aside the verdict and ordered a new trial, but when the case was heard in September 1900 the result was the same.23 Mary A. Sims seems to have waited a few months before deciding to sue York County for her husband’s death. In early February 1918, she went to Probate Court in Chester County to be appointed administratrix of her husband’s estate. Two African American businessmen from Chester assisted her by helping her post the required bond. Julius F. Douglas was a barber in his mid-thirties who owned his own shop in Chester. The other person was Eli N. Isom, who had been a carpenter before moving into the undertaking business. As soon as she was named administratrix and thus had legal standing, Mary A. Sims filed suit against York County on 22 February 1918, represented by John A. Marion, a white attorney from Chester. The case was heard in July 1918, and the jury decided in favour of the county. Judge Ernest Moore granted Sims a new hearing because ‘the finding of the jury is without sufficient evidence to support it and was manifestly against the preponderance of the testimony and contrary

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to the law of the case as charged by the Presiding Judge’. When the case was heard again in December 1918, the jury ruled in favour of Sims in the amount of $2,000, and records suggest, though not conclusively, that she may have actually collected the money in April 1920 after another year and a half of delays.24 Despite the best efforts of the fledgling interracial movement, racial violence did indeed worsen over the course of World War I. With the federal government’s appeal to a mobilized citizenry, the racial tension created by migration and troop training, economic volatility, and then the pressures of demobilization of troops, it could hardly have done otherwise. Nonetheless, the 1920s would see changes in the patterns of lynchings between the Carolinas, with South Carolina still failing to control mobs while North Carolina convinced itself it had seen its last lynching.

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A Disgrace to North Carolina: Oliver Moore, Tarboro, N.C., 1930 The lynching that shocked North Carolina out of complacency in August 1930 was another emblematic lynching with a young black farm labourer as its victim and a particularly sordid undertone of child sexual abuse.1 But by 1930, the context for racial violence in the South began to change. Although no one ever went to trial for the lynching of Oliver Moore, the forces mobilized in response to his death were those that would bring the lynching era to an end in the Carolinas by World War II. African Americans, through both the NAACP’s national leadership and a network of local activists, were engaged in a campaign to raise public awareness of and outrage over lynching, the most brutal symbol of the entire Jim Crow system it enforced. Southern white liberals became more widespread and effective, as the interracial movement before World War I expanded and institutionalized as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), and white women formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Prominent regional newspapers condemned lynchings in the harshest terms. Sociologists, not the most likely of heroes, lent the prestige of science to attempts to solve the South’s problems, and, under the auspices of the CIC and Howard W. Odum’s Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sociologists and white and black leaders across the South formed the Southern Commission for the Study of Lynching. Finally, state governments found it in their interests, and found the means, to suppress lynchings. Federal action on lynching was never likely given the power of Southern senators to block legislation they did not like. Since the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913 and senators were elected directly by the people, they found that keeping federal fingers out of local law enforcement (or lack thereof) proved popular, and no senator would relish going into an election as the man who let a federal anti-lynching law through.

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The fitful, but sometimes effective, attempts of state governments to suppress lynching during this period should be seen as one of the effects of the Progressive Era on the South and also as part of the South’s increasing integration into the nation. Historian William A. Link has argued that the South, longer than other regions of the country, held onto ‘rural republican traditions’ and a suspicion of centralized authority. For decades, the priority for most southerners was that ‘the local community enjoyed primacy in the management of public affairs’. The prohibition movement of the late nineteenth century was one impetus for stronger state governments in the South, but a stronger state government was also necessary for nearly all the improvements that Progressive Era reformers wanted to make in education, public health and other areas. Lynching was a particular problem because not only did it challenge the authority of a state now firmly committed to the racial orthodoxy of white supremacy, as discussed in an earlier chapter, but it also threatened to damage the entire fabric of society and open space for class-based conflicts between whites. Another reason for state governments to work against lynching in the 1920s a bit more seriously than they had before was tourism. With the coming of the ‘Good Roads’ movement by World War I and the beginnings of what would become an annual peregrination of well-heeled travellers from the north-east to the sun and sand of Florida, states such as North Carolina and South Carolina hoped to cash in on their location as a good stopping-over point on the way. Charleston, South Carolina, built an important segment of its economy on its identity as a tourist destination in the 1920s. Out-of-staters keen to see antebellum mansions and mountain peaks might be put off by lynchings.2 In July 1920, the North Carolina governor proved the lengths to which the state government would go to prevent lynching and save some of its citizens from the others. Three black men had been arrested for an assault on a white woman and were being held in jail at Graham in Alamance County, between Greensboro and Durham. A mob began to form. Not hesitating, Governor Thomas W. Bickett dispatched the Durham Machine Gun Company of the North Carolina National Guard to the scene with harsh but explicit orders: ‘shoot straight if an attempt on the lives of the prisoners is made’. The guardsmen arrived and took up positions around

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the jail. Over the course of the evening, the mob tried to rush the jail three times and were turned back. Eventually, members of the mob hiding in a nearby cornfield began firing on the troops. After a dozen shots, the guard commander ordered his men to return fire with automatic pistols and machine guns, killing James Ray, a middle-aged white farmer from Graham, and wounding two other men. This stopped the mob’s immediate activities, but threatened worse as hundreds more people gathered, and an all-out assault on the militia was discussed. The state Adjutant General, J. Van B. Metts, ordered a special train from Raleigh and came with more troops. Before he arrived, though, a thunderstorm broke the evening’s tension, and the hard rain dispersed the crowd. Metts and the machine gun company escorted the prisoners back to Central Prison in Raleigh. Bickett’s actions were vindicated further a few weeks later. Two of the suspects had already been released for lack of evidence, and Judge Thomas J. Shaw heard a writ of habeas corpus for the third man and released him as well. The momentum of 1920 failed to carry through 1921. There was a lynching prevented in March of that year in Wake County, where the capital, Raleigh, is. A mob had a black man charged with attacking the wife of a prominent white farmer and were only waiting for a rope when sheriff ’s deputies arrived and rescued him. A black man suspected of rape in August was not so lucky: a mob hanged him in Jones County in what would become North Carolina’s last lynching of the 1920s.3 The determination of governors such as Thomas W. Bickett and sheriffs like W. D. Grant of Wayne County saved North Carolinians from lynch mobs in the 1920s. In 1927, Larry Newsome, a twenty-three-year-old African American man, was suspected of the murder of a white farmer’s wife. The posse that captured him wanted to lynch him, but Sheriff Grant said, ‘Boys, this is my prisoner, and I am going to see that the law takes its course.’ Grant carried Newsome directly to Central Prison in Raleigh to await trial. Desire for vengeance had not abated by the time Newsome came to trial in Goldsboro in December 1927. Five minutes after the trial began, the father and uncle of the murdered girl charged through the courtroom, grabbed Newsome and pulled him out of his chair. Others began rushing towards the defendant as well, and what a reporter described as a ‘general stampede’ broke out as people left the courtroom. Some, fearing

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gunfire, took cover behind overturned furniture, and one man made his exit through the pane of glass in one of the doors. The bailiff and other officers surrounded Newsome and beat the men who were attacking him until they were forced to let go. Newsome was hustled off into a side room, and the sheriff stood blocking the doorway. When the sheriff fired two shots from his pistol into the courtroom ceiling, the situation finally calmed down. The girl’s father was handcuffed for the duration of the trial, and her uncle had an armed guard at his shoulder. A local National Guard unit took up positions inside the courtroom and guarded Newsome for the rest of the trial. The judge kept a large automatic pistol next to his gavel for the next three hours until Newsome was convicted and sentenced to die at the hands of the state of North Carolina, not a Goldsboro mob.4 South Carolina’s response to lynching during the 1920s was, to say the least, less robust than North Carolina’s. Between the time Watson T. Sims was lynched in York County in 1917 and the end of 1930, fifteen people, all African Americans, were lynched in twelve separate incidents in South Carolina. By far the worst of these was the lynching of three members of the Lowman family in Aiken County. Sam Lowman and his family were tenant farmers on a farm near Monetta, about thirteen miles out in the country from Aiken. They found themselves caught up in a conflict between their landlord and other whites who were in the Ku Klux Klan. On the pretext of looking for illegal distilling, the police raided the Lowman home in April 1925, and the sheriff, along with Sam Lowman’s wife, wound up dead. The Lowmans who survived the attack were convicted of the sheriff ’s murder in May 1925, but an African American attorney from Columbia appealed the cases to the state supreme court and won a new trial in October 1926. When one member of the Lowman family was acquitted, the local Ku Klux Klan, lawyers and law enforcement officials hastily planned a lynching. In the early hours of 8 October 1926, Bertha, Demon and Clarence Lowman were handed over to a mob, driven to the outskirts of town and shot to death. Participants in the mob included a mill president and Edgar Brown, an attorney who would soon become the most powerful politician of his generation in South Carolina. An investigation was made, but nothing came of it.5

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In the 1920s, the NAACP brought increasing pressure to bear from a variety of directions to end the practice of lynching. Resistance to violence was in the blood of the NAACP; the organization was formed in 1909 in reaction to the race riot in Springfield, Illinois. One of the first large-scale actions of the organization was to protest against the 1911 lynching in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. The methods here foreshadowed much of the group’s approach to the problem. They tried to get evidence at the local level that could lead to successful prosecutions of mob members, but they also held rallies to raise awareness elsewhere and tried to secure anti-lynching legislation. The NAACP established a permanent committee to work against lynching in 1916 and established relationships with newspapers and magazines willing to help publicize the findings of the group’s investigations and their efforts. They gathered data on lynchings and published it in a book in 1919. One NAACP representative, Walter F. White, began the bold but dangerous practice of going to southern communities immediately after lynchings to gather information, a process facilitated by his ability to pass for white himself. The focus of the NAACP’s anti-lynching work began to shift somewhat in 1918 as Congressman Leonidas Dyer, a Republican from St Louis, Missouri, sponsored a federal anti-lynching bill. Although it passed the House of Representatives in January 1922, the power of southern senators killed the bill by the end of that year.6 While the NAACP’s status as an organization based in the North – and run by African Americans themselves – made its work against lynching suspect in the eyes of many white southerners, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation originated in the South among the white liberals of the pre-war interracial movement. The Red Summer of 1919 dashed the hopes for racial harmony expressed at Willis D. Weatherford’s 1917 law and order conference. There were more than seventy lynchings across the South in 1919, besides several race riots. The bloodiest of these was the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas, where white landowners and their allies crushed a farmworkers’ union, killing an unknown number of African Americans – estimates range over a hundred. In South Carolina, tensions between white sailors and African Americans in Charleston led to four hours of rioting in May 1919, with three men killed and forty more

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injured. Black war veterans found themselves particularly targeted for violence. When Joe Stewart stopped some white men in Laurens from beating a black boy, he was lynched. Violence against African Americans became part of a broader pattern of repression after the war that saw the Industrial Workers of the World liquidated and foreign radicals deported. The NAACP, which had established beachheads in the South during the war, was rolled back as well. A new branch in Anderson, South Carolina, created in spring 1919 lasted only a few months, and another established in Aiken in 1918 was gone by 1923. Branches in other states met a similar fate: Texas went from thirty-three branches in September 1919 to seven in December 1921. Refusing to accept the changes brought about by black migration out of the region, much less the claims on civil rights made by African Americans who had followed W. E. B. Du Bois’s advice to set aside grievances and ‘close ranks’ for the war effort, many white southerners tried hard, and violently, to return race relations to their pre-war status quo.7 In light of the post-war racial violence and reassertion of an unbending white supremacy, the southern interracial movement was needed all the more. In January 1919, Will W. Alexander brought together a group of white and black leaders from around the South to form an ‘After the War Program’ in Atlanta to carry on the social work the YMCA had contributed to the war effort. Originally from the Ozarks in Missouri, Alexander studied theology at Vanderbilt University before entering the Methodist ministry. The hard times in Nashville caused by the 1914 cotton crisis moved Alexander, and he did what he could to help both whites and blacks. When the war came, Willis D. Weatherford, who had been a member of Alexander’s congregation, recruited him to help organize wartime programmes in Atlanta with the YMCA. The group Alexander brought together in 1919 soon evolved into the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. The CIC worked from a paternalistic perspective: well-meaning whites would come together, with input from the better class of African Americans, to see what could be done to improve the lives of African Americans, and then they would see it was done. For all its mildness, the CIC’s programme managed to antagonize people on either end. Most whites saw the CIC’s capitulation to black requests as

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the first crack in the wall of Jim Crow, while many African Americans who hoped for faster change after the death of Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism thought the CIC was dragging its heels and refusing to foster real changes, especially since the CIC never meant to eliminate segregation, only make it work more smoothly without the needless brutality. Although the CIC remained a fairly loose organization, it began to form local branches in cities and towns in all the southern states, becoming the ‘major interracial reform organization in the South’ by the mid-1920s with as many as 7,000 members.8 Women within the CIC formed the Interracial Woman’s Committee, which quickly took the lead on the fight against lynching. Women’s missionary societies, especially among Methodists, got many white women involved in social concerns, and African American activism within the predominantly white YWCA merged with this other strain of activism in the first couple of years of the CIC’s existence. After an important organizational meeting in Memphis in October 1920 where white and black women acknowledged the need to work together, as women, to address the region’s problems, particularly lynching, the CIC established the Interracial Woman’s Committee. Working within communities to smooth out racial tensions and actively prevent incipient lynchings, the women of the interracial movement issued a more potent challenge to the status quo than might be apparent at first glance. The form of white supremacy supported by the practice of lynching was more accurately described as white male supremacy, and as historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall argued nearly three decades ago, it is important to keep in mind that lynching kept women in line as surely as it kept African Americans in line. By building up the idea that black men were all ready to rape white women, white men posed themselves as the chivalric defenders of white women. Hall explains the dynamic succinctly: ‘The lynch mob in pursuit of the black rapist thus represented the trade-off implicit in the code of chivalry, for the right of the southern lady to protection presupposed her obligation to obey.’ When southern white women began to reject the idea that they needed white men to lynch to protect them, they launched a serious assault not just on the system of white supremacy, but on the system of male supremacy with which it was intertwined.9

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Edgecombe County, North Carolina, sits seventy miles east of Raleigh. It was settled in the 1720s by Virginians, and the region produced a variety of crops, and naval stores, before eventually moving into cotton and later tobacco. With a sizeable black population as a legacy of slavery, Edgecombe County was no stranger to racial violence. In 1870, the Ku Klux Klan castrated a group of eleven African American men. The area’s large black population also made it a political stronghold for African Americans, with Edgecombe County sending eleven black legislators to the North Carolina House of Representatives between 1868 and 1900. As part of the rape scare whipped up as an adjunct to the Democrats’ 1898 political campaign, a black man was lynched in Tarboro for the rape of a white woman. By 1930, Edgecombe County was an example of what was wrong with the South. About a quarter of the county’s 47,000 residents lived in the town of Rocky Mount, which straddled the Edgecombe and Nash County line. Aside from Rocky Mount and the county seat of Tarboro, with just over 6,000 inhabitants, Edgecombe was a rural place, with farms mostly producing only cotton or tobacco. Conditions on these farms were in decline, and rates of tenancy had been increasing throughout the 1920s. In 1925, fully 83 per cent of farmers did not own the land they worked, twice the rate of North Carolina as a whole.10 Information about Oliver Moore, who was lynched in 1930, has been hard to come by, and the portrait that emerges is in broad strokes only, little differentiated from portraits that could be made of thousands of others like him. His death certificate says he was twenty-nine years old and married, though the newspapers at the time do not appear to have been interested enough in Moore’s life to mention his wife. A newspaper notice, when he was being hunted as a fugitive, described him as darkskinned and on the slight side, with some attention-catching gold teeth. Neighbours later described him as a ‘white man’s nigger’ who worked in Rocky Mount during the winter months as a shoeshine boy. In the spring of 1930, he went to work on a white man’s farm near Macclesfield, within a stone’s throw of the Wilson County line. There Moore worked as a tenant farmer but also ‘as a sort of house boy’ for his employer, and he had a small house a couple of hundred yards away from his landlord’s place.11

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Tobacco farmers near Wilson, North Carolina. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

On 18 July 1930, Oliver Moore was working at his boss’s tobacco barn, curing tobacco. The boss’s two daughters, aged seven and five, were playing nearby. Something happened, though what it was is impossible to say. The various accounts differed, but they all amounted to some sort of attempted rape or molestation. What Moore did next varies substantially from source to source and bears on his guilt or innocence of the alleged assault. One newspaper article the next day claimed Moore ran off right away, which would seem to announce his guilt. A different article the same day said the girls ran screaming to the house and Moore continued working for some time before eventually disappearing into the woods. An account right after the lynching said Moore did not run off until the girls’ father telephoned the police. The most extensive account, given some months after the assault and lynching, was based on statements by the older girl. She said Moore had suggested playing a game, and then he put her in a

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tobacco wagon and hurt her. She ran crying to the house, followed by her sister and Moore. When the father asked what had happened, Moore said he must have scared the girl, but the girls’ mother ‘discovered traces of what had happened, and while she was excitedly telling her husband, Moore, hearing her, ran away’.12 The white father’s first call was to the Wilson County sheriff, but when it was established the assault actually happened on the Edgecombe County side of the county line, the father called Sheriff Ed Bardin in Tarboro around 10.30 p.m. When Bardin and his son Tom, a deputy, arrived, they found a huge crowd already assembled. Bardin organized them as a posse and set out after Moore, searching the fields, the woods and the swampy creek bottoms till daybreak without success. They did arrest Anderson Moore, who said his brother was hiding out in the woods. According to Sheriff Bardin, ‘The people were hot for him. He would have been shot … without a chance to surrender, if he could have been found.’ The sheriff and posse continued to search various locations over the next couple of days, but they could find no trace of Moore. On 21 July 1930, they discovered that Moore’s clothes were gone from his house, and Bardin offered a $100 reward for his capture and circulated a thousand flyers. Rumours flew: maybe Moore was around Old Sparta, or maybe he was hiding in a pocosin (a type of freshwater evergreen bog distinctive to North Carolina’s coastal plain) in Wilson County. In reality, Moore had fled to Suffolk, Virginia. After about a month, E. E. Harrell heard that Moore was back and staying with Chayward Moore, his brother. Chayward was a tenant farmer on a farm belonging to Harrell’s brother, about eleven miles from the scene of the alleged crime. On Friday 15 August 1930, Harrell crept up to the outside of Chayward’s house, and he could hear Oliver Moore speaking inside. Harrell burst in, but Chayward was between Harrell and Oliver, who jumped into a closet. After a few minutes of talking, Harrell persuaded Oliver Moore to come out and surrender. Moore said he had been scared of being lynched when Harrell first came in, and Moore thanked Harrell for taking him safely to jail. He emphatically denied, however, that he was guilty of any assault.13 Monday afternoon, 18 August 1930, Moore’s case came before the Tarboro Recorder’s Court for a preliminary hearing. That morning,

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Bardin worried there might be trouble, and he gave the judge a revolver for protection. At the hearing, the girls identified Moore as the one who had attacked them. A nurse from the local hospital, who happened to be the girls’ aunt, testified that the girls were being treated for venereal disease. Moore was never allowed to speak, and when the judge called for lawyers to volunteer to handle the case on Moore’s behalf, there was no response. Moore was bound over for trial and returned to his cell without bail. At the preliminary hearing there was no hint of trouble, and Sheriff Bardin encountered no problems while walking the prisoner the three blocks from the jail to the courtroom and back. Bardin had spent the first two nights after Moore was apprehended sleeping at the jail to protect him, but after the preliminary hearing, Bardin felt confident enough to return home to his own bed.14 Around midnight, a number of cars pulled up to the jail, their licence plates removed or obscured. Men with shotguns dispersed as pickets; they turned away any cars going down the street and discouraged the curious from making any inquiries. Deputy Sheriff R. O. Watson was suckered by the ‘we have a prisoner to put in jail’ ruse and made a brief attempt to resist the mob until guns were pointed at him. Moore seemed to sense just what was happening, and when the mob took him out of the jail he went calmly with the men to one of the cars. The procession of cars drove through the night to Macclesfield and on to a patch of trees about a hundred yards from Moore’s own house and two hundred from his landlord’s house. A plough line was tied around his chest under his arms, and Moore was hoisted up on the limb of a pine tree, dangling there quietly for a few seconds before dozens of shotguns boomed and pistols cracked, ending his life.15 Thousands of people came from Edgecombe and Wilson counties to see Moore’s dead body hanging from the pine tree. As one report described the scene, ‘The road where his body was found was thick with cars and strangers, and at times it was almost impossible to drive an automobile near.’ Around nine o’clock, Sheriff Bardin and the coroner for Edgecombe, Dr J. E. L. Thomas, arrived on the scene and cut the body down. Moore’s body lay on the pine needles while Bardin and Thomas conferred with the sheriff and coroner of Wilson County, who had arrived by that time. They concluded that the killing was in Wilson, so it was the Wilson County

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coroner, V. M. Martin, who eventually led the inquest that concluded Moore had died at the hands of parties unknown. Local residents interviewed a couple of months later expressed the attitudes of Tarboro’s middle class towards the lynching. Someone from the newspaper commented, ‘In principle, I’m against lynching, but this crime was so horrible, I think it was all right. There’s no doubt about Moore’s guilt.’ A county officer deplored the public criticism the lynching brought to Edgecombe County, but concluded, ‘There’s no question of Moore’s guilt, and personally, I’m glad it happened.’ Another prominent official largely agreed: ‘From the standpoint of state and legality it is regrettable; personally, I think it’s a good thing. After hearing the evidence I don’t doubt the black’s guilt.’ One of the town’s doctors qualified his support with concern about the evidence, noting, ‘There will always be an element of doubt in my mind as to Moore’s guilt. This is the first virulent case of positive gonorrhea I have ever seen develop in three days. If the Negro had been examined and found to have had gonorrhea I would not question his guilt. If they got the right man I’m glad of it.’ The response of a law enforcement officer suggests why the mob had such an easy time getting its hands on Moore: ‘The black son of a b… got what he deserved. If the crime had been committed against the lowest white woman in the world he should have been killed. If I had been there I would not have interfered, for them folks would ’a’ killed a good man to get that nigger.’16 The governor’s response was rather different. O. Max Gardner was born in Shelby, North Carolina, eighteen years before the new century, and since the beginning of his political career in 1907 he had campaigned for reforms, even if they were not universally popular. The 1908 prohibition law he supported no doubt disappointed some North Carolinians. Elected lieutenant governor in 1916, his election to the governor’s office in 1928 marked a generational shift in North Carolina politics. Gardner’s commitment to justice did not falter, even when the labour unrest of 1929 saw him defending Communists’ rights to a fair trial. Gardner had been enjoying a vacation at Flat Rock, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the middle of August. He was golfing at Biltmore Forest Country Club when the news of the lynching reached him. Gardner immediately issued a strong condemnation of the lynching:

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I am horrified that the ugly stigma of a lynching should blot the record that North Carolina has kept clean for nearly a decade … For nine years there has been no mob violence in this state and I think we all more or less felt that we had had our last lynching. … I am going to investigate this thing to the fullest extent, and I intend to exert every effort to get at the bottom of it and to bring those responsible before the courts to answer for the crime they have committed.

Since taking office, Gardner had followed what was by now a North Carolina tradition of strong statements and actions meant to prevent lynchings. Just a few months earlier, several black men were jailed in Concord, North Carolina, charged with assaulting a white woman who lived in the mill village. A mob of several hundred gathered in front of the jail, so Sheriff W. H. Caldwell called on Gardner for help. Gardner ordered out a company of infantry, and the danger passed. The next day, the sheriff said he was sure the men arrested had not been the right ones anyway. It was a textbook example of how a responsible sheriff and a determined governor could use the state’s power to curb mob violence. Indeed, less than a month earlier, when newspapers asked Gardner to comment on Cole Blease’s latest outburst in favour of lynching to protect the virtue of white women, Gardner had said, I regard lynching and every other form of mob violence not only as morally wrong in every instance but as fundamentally destructive of the rights of every citizen. Under our system of government every man, irrespective of race, condition or the crime he has committed, is entitled to a trial by jury, to be represented by counsel and to have his guilt and punishment judicially determined in the light of the law and facts.17

Gardner’s commitment propelled the local investigation into Moore’s lynching. In a publicly reported message, Gardner promised support to Sheriff Bardin, saying, ‘Although I am not thoroughly conversant with the facts of the case as yet, Sheriff Bardin apparently did all in his power to bring the guilty parties to justice. He has the state back of his county forces in the effort to apprehend these men, who, pretending to wish justice done, have flouted the laws of their state and its record as a dealing in justice.’ The solicitor for the district, Don Gilliam, seemed to be trying hard but kept hitting a wall of silence. A day after the lynching, Gilliam

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admitted, ‘Frankly, I don’t know what my next move will be, but I’m going to move somewhere. I don’t know how I am going to find out the name of a single member of this mob but I’m going to do everything in my power to find it.’ A local African American activist described Gilliam as a ‘fearless man’, so hopes were raised that he might get to the bottom of the lynching. One particularly confusing aspect of the lynching had to do with the testimony at the preliminary hearing that probably did the most to doom Moore: that the two young white girls had contracted a venereal disease from Moore. Gilliam apparently either just did not believe that story or at least wanted to conduct a thorough investigation, because he insisted over Bardin’s objections that tissue samples from Moore’s body be sent to the pathologist’s office in Raleigh for examination. Although a local doctor sent off the samples, other doctors quoted in the press insisted the effort was pointless since a dead body could not be conclusively tested for venereal disease. Gilliam’s ability to accomplish anything was severely compromised since he could not get anyone who knew the mob’s identities to say anything. As one North Carolina newspaper observed, ‘If a majority of the people in Edgecombe county were anxious for a solution it wouldn’t be long until officers would be receiving definite tips.’18 Ed Bardin’s investigation was a little less vigorous than Gilliam’s and unsurprisingly unsuccessful. From the beginning, Bardin expressed his doubts about the prospects for the investigation: ‘I am doing everything I know how to do now. If the Governor or anybody else can advise me how to find out who took part in this, I will appreciate it. I don’t know where to turn next.’ Bardin objected to Gilliam sending Moore’s tissue samples for analysis, imagining, perhaps, the hell that would ensue if Moore were found to not have venereal disease. Over the next week, Bardin made several trips into the county, but he could get no leads on the identities of mob members. Considering the curious coincidences of the night of the lynching, maybe Bardin was just as happy when the investigation fizzled out, before his own conduct came in for questioning.19 All sorts of organizations condemned the lynching in North Carolina. The National Negro Business League, with North Carolina black insurance executive C. C. Spaulding as executive secretary, was meeting in Detroit and sent a telegram to Gardner saying the lynching had ‘disgraced the

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fair name of North Carolina and misrepresented it before the world for its record for good will, fair dealing, and helpful cooperation between its citizens of both races’. The North Carolina Student Volunteer Union, a college missionary group, said they were ‘sorry that this disgrace has come upon our State’. The annual meeting of Quakers in North Carolina found the lynching to be ‘cause of deep concern and regret’ and sent a letter to Gardner saying that ‘we hope and believe thou wilt handle the matter to the best interest of our state and humanity’.20 Not just organizations but individuals wrote to Governor Gardner to attack the lynching and those who carried it out. L. J. Holmes, an African American man originally from North Carolina who had moved to Boston, wrote, ‘My God what a blow to a supposed civilized nation.’ An African American minister from Anderson, South Carolina, condemned the violence but praised Gardner for his opposition to it: ‘We thank God for men like you in office, Governor and may your type be increased. … God is using you to bring about a better era of Race relation and good citizenship in this country.’ Whites, too, were angry about the lynching, as attorney David Sinclair of Wilmington made clear, stating, ‘I am no negro lover, neither do I despise them, but whether the victim be white or black, the finer sensibilities of the better people of our State suffer keenly when the law of the jungle goes into effect.’ Sinclair was the Chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee of New Hanover County, and it is a sign of how far North Carolina had come in thirty years that a powerful white Democrat would say such things in the place where Democrats had killed blacks to overturn the municipal government in the 1898 Wilmington Massacre.21 The Tarboro lynching became the object of multiple investigations beyond the ineffectual one carried out by local law enforcement officials. The NAACP quickly launched its own investigation. The day after the lynching, the NAACP’s Walter F. White contacted two NAACP leaders in North Carolina. Dr A. M. Rivera of Greensboro was president of the local NAACP branch, and he knew the importance of fighting racial violence. At the age of fourteen in 1898, he and his family had fled the Wilmington Massacre, relocating 200 miles inland in Greensboro. Rivera left behind the family business of undertaking and became a dentist; as a professional,

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he had no white employer to displease by becoming an NAACP leader. The other person White wrote to was R. McCants Andrews, an attorney based in Durham. Having earned his law degree at Howard University in 1918, Andrews became one of the leading black lawyers in North Carolina in the 1920s, often surprising white attorneys and juries who had never encountered an African American attorney before. White requested Andrews to check into how sound the charges against Moore were. For publicity purposes, it was much better to protest the lynching of an innocent man than a guilty one. Andrews was also encouraged to get the names of any mob members, so that the NAACP could send the information directly to the governor, putting the lie to the coroner’s verdict blaming ‘parties unknown’. Andrews did visit Tarboro soon afterwards on his way back from a trip to Washington, D.C., but he found that Dr Cain of Tarboro had already done a complete investigation and was going to send what he had found to NAACP headquarters. The NAACP continued to pursue the case into spring 1931. C. F. Rich, with the NAACP branch in Tarboro, wrote the NAACP headquarters that a prisoner who had been in jail at the time of the lynching could identify several mob members, including some who were politically prominent in Edgecombe County. ‘I am sure’, Rich wrote, ‘that some white evidence can be gotten if the case once gets under way.’ Although White tried to get NAACP’s director of branches Robert Bagnall to go to Tarboro to investigate this possibility, it is not clear whether he did. In any case, the NAACP’s attention was soon consumed by the Scottsboro case in Alabama, which focused national attention on questions of black men, white women and southern courts from April 1931 onwards. Even the CIC itself investigated the Tarboro lynching. There is not much information on what they were doing, but L. R. Reynolds of Richmond, Virginia, came down to Tarboro and attended the coroner’s inquest, ‘gathering newspaper articles, editorial comment, general information, public opinion, and the feeling of the white citizens in Edgefield and Wilson counties. He declined to state the purpose of the investigation.’22 More significant, though, was the investigation carried out by the recently formed Southern Commission for the Study of Lynching (SCSL). The SCSL was a good example of the kind of engagement between the academy and the public in the South pioneered in Chapel Hill. The

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leading figure in this movement was Howard W. Odum, who had arrived at the University of North Carolina in 1920 and founded its department of sociology. Four years later, he set up the Institute for Research in Social Science. Odum’s focus on the South as a regional unit of analysis was part of a much broader movement within American intellectual culture in the interwar period that considered regional distinctiveness an essential part of the American experience and something that had to be accounted for in any approach to reform and change. At Chapel Hill, sociology had ‘a commitment to social justice and a cultural approach to sociological questions’ influenced by the Chicago School with its reliance on case studies and the use of many kinds of evidence. In combination with Odum’s commitment to regionalism, this style of sociology was not merely something abstract and theoretical, but a discipline which would use a scientific approach and the particularities of a given region in order to tailor a brand of modernism that would best fit it. Many of the southern studies conducted by the IRSS involved the vexed question of African Americans and their place in the region’s society. The other key figure in the Chapel Hill study of lynching was Arthur F. Raper, who grew up on a farm south of Salem, North Carolina, and went to the University of North Carolina just after World War I to study history. After he graduated, he took his evolving interest in social work and the ‘Negro question’ to Vanderbilt University in Nashville where he earned an M.A. in sociology. In 1926 he returned to North Carolina to begin studying with Odum. After getting started on his studies, though, he did not long remain in Chapel Hill. Having met Will Alexander in 1925 in Nashville, Raper was a perfect candidate for the position of research director of the CIC, and he moved to Atlanta in 1926 to take on this responsibility as he worked on his doctorate.23 Responding to an upsurge in lynchings in 1930, the CIC set up the SCSL in July of that year, by which time there had already been fourteen lynchings across the South. The SCSL included six whites and four blacks, a mix of newspapermen, educators and religious leaders. George Fort Milton, the editor of the Chattanooga News, was its chairman, and Julian Harris of the Atlanta Constitution, the son of Uncle Remus author Joel Chandler Harris, was also a member. Educators included Odum; Dr W. J. McGlothlin,

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Arthur F. Raper. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

who was president of Furman University, a Baptist-affiliated college in Greenville, South Carolina; Dr R. R. Moton, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute; and Dr John Hope, the president of Atlanta University, one of the

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leading African American institutions in the country. McGlothlin was also the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Methodists were represented by Dr W. P. King of Nashville. The group’s first meeting was held in Atlanta on 3 September 1930, and they announced three purposes for the new organization. First, they would ‘discover underlying causative and contributing factors in lynchings’. Second, the SCSL intended to ‘analyze factors which have been influential in the prevention of lynchings’, and they would also ‘make a digest and evaluation of all special legislation and legal agencies already provided in the various states for prevention and punishment of mob violence’. The method of accomplishing this would be to make case studies of all the lynchings that occurred in 1930, using one white investigator (Raper) and one African American, who could access information unavailable to even the most sensitive white investigator. As the work developed that autumn, Raper himself was involved with a number of cases further afield in the South, and he left the investigation of the Tarboro lynching to Odum and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina. The actual investigation was carried out by N. Clifford Young, a new Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina who had just arrived from Millsaps College in Mississippi. The Law School at the University of North Carolina also got involved that fall, running a series of seminars on the legal aspects of lynching and law enforcement in the South. The Tarboro case, written up as Young’s master’s thesis, eventually became a chapter in Raper’s 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching. Even as uncompromising a critic as W. E. B. Du Bois recognized that Tragedy marked a watershed in the attitudes of white southerners to lynching and in the general orientation of the interracial movement itself. As Raper’s biographer has observed, he ‘had seen that eliminating lynching would necessitate changing the structure of southern society’. The Tragedy of Lynching was designed to appeal not simply to academic sociologists with a scientific interest in lynching, but to a mass audience, a way of getting the prestige and authority of rigorous scientific research behind the goals of the anti-lynching movement. The Tragedy of Lynching received favourable treatment in the southern press, partly because editors wanted to do whatever they could to prevent the South from being further isolated from the rest of the country during the Great Depression.24

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The Raleigh News and Observer had come out early as one of the strongest voices objecting to the lynching of Oliver Moore. This might have seemed surprising since the News and Observer had been edited by Josephus Daniels since 1894, and in 1898 he had used it relentlessly to whip up the frenzy that drove the white supremacy campaign of that year and helped inspire the Wilmington Massacre. Nonetheless, as soon as the Democrats were securely in power, the News and Observer took a strong stance against lynching, calling for the prosecution of mob members as early as the turn-of-the-century administration of Governor Charles Aycock. When the second lynching of 1906 occurred in Salisbury, the News and Observer printed the gruesome picture of the victims hanging from an oak tree and described the lynching as a ‘war on the state’. Its coverage of the Edgecombe County lynching in 1930 emphasized the brutality of the scene and the depravity of the masses of people who found amusement in viewing Oliver Moore’s corpse. The first article on the lynching carried a photograph of Moore’s body still hanging from the pine tree and started out with a harsh denunciation: ‘It was quite the thing to go look at the bloody dead nigger, hanging from the limb of a tree near the Edgecombe–Wilson county line this morning.’ As the article continued, the journalist used the same sort of lurid detail that usually accompanied the account of the assault that provoked the lynching (what historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall calls the ‘folk pornography of the Bible belt’) to describe those gawking at the lynching scene. ‘Whole families came together,’ he wrote, ‘mothers and fathers bringing even their youngest children. It was the show of the countryside – a very popular show. Men joked loudly at this sight of the bleeding body, riddled with bullets. Girls giggled as flies fed on the blood that dripped from the Negro’s nose. … Today was a holiday in this section, a holiday in which all classes from a hundred miles around participated.’25 The Raleigh News and Observer’s aggressive stance offended some in eastern North Carolina. A. B. Gillam of Windsor, North Carolina, wrote indignantly, ‘But there is another thing in connection with this, that is a greater shame and disgrace to North Carolina. That is, that a newspaper … should blazon to the world, by a large photograph, on its front page, the disgusting scene of the lynched man hanging by a rope from the lynching

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Oliver Moore, published in the Raleigh News and Observer. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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tree. This is the greater shame.’ Not even thinking of backing down, the News and Observer responded with an editorial titled ‘Who Lynched the Negro?’ that is worth quoting at length: There are a few people – we are thankful they are so few – who seem to be somewhat confused about the lynching in North Carolina the other day. They appear to think that The News and Observer lynched the Negro or at least that the paper in printing the picture of the dead man hanging from the limb of a tree with the holiday crowd in the background, committed a vastly more heinous crime. One gathers from the general absence of condemnation of the lynching in most of the letters received that printing the picture was the one and only offense. … The fact that the picture aroused the indignation that the lynching ought to have stirred, demonstrates that there is a capacity for indignation, even if it short circuited somehow upon The News and Observer instead of the lynchers. … The News and Observer doesn’t like to print revolting pictures. It doesn’t like to record revolting facts. It doesn’t expect its readers to go into ecstasies of glee or to find humor and entertainment in them. The News and Observer doesn’t conceive of its function as one of entertainment solely. It would be quite disappointed if many of its thousands of readers failed to react with a degree of horror both to the picture of the lynched Negro and to Robert Thompson’s graphic story of the lynching. After all, the revulsion, if it is real and honest, will quickly find its proper target in the crime that was committed rather [than] the newspaper that printed the picture of the victim.

One thing that seems to have made a real difference here was the decision of the News and Observer to run the photograph of Moore on its front page. Photographs of lynchings had previously tended to serve as triumphal souvenirs of the event, encapsulating the power whites wielded over blacks and capturing the presence of whites at a particular historical moment. Southern newspapers rarely printed lynching photographs, and even mainstream, national magazines did not do so until the late 1930s. The fact that the Raleigh News and Observer would print such a photograph not as a celebration but as a denunciation and that they would defend its use in such strong terms indicates a split between opinion leaders at the state level and recalcitrant elements of the local press and residents that would become durable by the 1930s and ultimately decisive as states moved to stamp out the practice of lynching.26

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In the lynching of Oliver Moore in 1930 and the responses it provoked, we can see the constellation of forces that would bring an end to lynching in the Carolinas by World War II. For one thing, the Great Depression would lead to changes in the national constituency of the Democratic party. With African American support for the Democrats becoming significant in 1936, it would be increasingly difficult for the party at the national level to keep both its new black voters and its old Southern whites happy, which eventually saw a Democratic president in 1947 putting the weight of the federal government behind the civil rights movement. The NAACP’s investigation of Tarboro came to naught, but in the next fifteen years the NAACP would maintain steady pressure for federal anti-lynching laws, and the conditions of World War II would help it flourish in parts of the South where it had been dormant since the end of the previous world war. Out of the interracial efforts of the CIC in 1930 emerged the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, who rejected the notions of chivalry that supported lynching and used a sophisticated strategy of local engagement and public relations to bring pressure to bear on sheriffs and governors to put an end to lynching. Southern white liberals of the sort who populated the ASWPL suffered a reverse in the mid-1950s after the Brown v. Board of Education decision made it clear that segregation would have to end and provoked a backlash that left them with little middle ground on which to stand, but by this time, lynching was all but dead.27 Finally, World War II, much more than the New Deal, created a vast and powerful state, and this newly energized state would respond even more vigorously to challenges to its authority, as was seen in the response to the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle in Greenville, South Carolina.

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Conclusion

The year before South Carolinian Strom Thurmond ran for President as the candidate of the segregationist Dixiecrats, he was widely admired by African Americans. Thurmond, just back from World War II, where he had been part of the D-Day offensive with the Eighty-Second Airborne, was elected in 1946, one of a crop of progressive governors taking office across the South. Men such as Thurmond and Ellis Arnall of Georgia were responding to a mood in the South that wanted change and progress. After the suffering of the Great Depression and disgust with the political leaders who had run the South for so long, southerners who had worked together to win a war began putting politicians in office who would change things. The ideals of people like Willis D. Weatherford had begun to be implemented. In his inaugural address, for instance, Thurmond called for an end to the poll tax, the introduction of the secret ballot, improvement of education funding, and stronger legislation protecting workers’ health.1 This forward momentum lurched to a stop in February 1947 with a brutal reminder that South Carolina was still, might always be, the South. Willie Earle, an African American veteran in his mid-twenties, lived in Liberty, in Pickens County, but on 15 February 1947 he had been in Greenville. He took a taxi home that evening, and not far from Liberty a confrontation left the white driver dying beside the road. Earle was jailed, and shortly before dawn on 17 February 1947 a mob of a few dozen men, mostly cab drivers from Greenville, took him out of the Pickens jail. Just across the Saluda River in the edge of Greenville County, they beat him to death with clubs and shot him with a shotgun. Governor Thurmond responded by deploying the state constabulary to assist local law enforcement officials in Pickens and Greenville counties, saying, ‘I do not favor lynching and I shall exert every resource to apprehend all persons who may be involved in such a flagrant violation of the law.’2

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As we have seen, most clearly in the case of Oliver Moore in 1930, governors and judges could oppose lynching all they wanted, but without change in the attitudes of citizens at the local level, lynching would continue, at least sporadically. With the lynching of Willie Earle, however, we can begin to find widespread changes in attitude. The vast majority of the letters sent to Thurmond about the lynching deplored it and praised his strong stand against lynching, whether the writer was from South Carolina or as far afield as England. James McBride Dabbs summed this position up more eloquently than most: ‘I am under the strong impression that the majority of people in South Carolina are ready for a progressive government; we are being held back by a reactionary political machine, and by the resistance of a few bitter-enders, who cannot recognize the trend of the times. We who look to the future are proud to follow your leadership.’ A Baptist preacher from nearby Spartanburg, Rev. John B. Isom, based his opposition to lynching on religious grounds and saw the possibility that the South was ready to make necessary changes. ‘The lynching is another horrible example of how race prejudice warps and debases the attitudes, ideas, and deeds of those who are infected by it,’ Isom argued. It reflects the sad failure of our homes, churches, schools and community governments to indoctrinate the people with the spirit of the fatherhood of god and the brotherhood of man. … The law of democracy and the Spirit of God Almighty demand that we abolish the political parties and the ‘Jim Crow’ laws that foster a superiority complex among white people which robs the Negroes of their inalienable rights, and steals from the white people the virtues of civilization.

Isom was admittedly more radical in his views than most of his contemporaries, but he was closer to the mainstream in 1947 than the handful of people who wrote to Thurmond to praise the lynchers.3 Another major difference in the response to the Willie Earle lynching was the active involvement of the federal government in the form of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There was still no federal anti-lynching statute, of course, nor would there be, but the beginnings of the Cold War had made protecting the lives and rights of African Americans more of a priority for Washington than it had been before. As one minister from

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Chicago wrote in a letter to Thurmond, ‘During this critical period of American foreign policy, when the deeds and reputation of America are at stake in its fight with Russia to show the world that the Western way of life is better than the Eastern, your stand is an encouragement to the minority peoples of the world, that America will protect her own minority people, as well as any other nation.’ Still, even the involvement of the FBI, the commitment of a progressive governor, and the beginning of substantial change in public opinion towards lynching could not overcome a jury’s reluctance to convict lynchers in this case: the thirty-one men charged with the killing all walked free.4 With the Willie Earle lynching in 1947, the history of lynching in the Carolinas comes full circle. The violence of the Reconstruction era had immediate and permanent effects on political life, and this paved the way for the overthrow of Reconstruction in South Carolina later in the decade, which in turn made it possible to create a political and judicial framework that tolerated, sometimes even encouraged, lynching. Once started, lynching proved very difficult to stop. Various groups in the South and beyond opposed lynching from the beginning, but no one approach by any single group could bring it to an end. Eventually a combination of the efforts of African American activists, both within and beyond the South, liberal whites in the South who could speak as insiders to their fellow southerners, and determined state governments and local officials, primarily governors and sheriffs, stopped lynching. Lynching remained a tenacious part of the southern experience for roughly eighty years, partly because it quickly and easily became a part of the region’s culture, a deeply rooted aspect of how most people in the South thought and how they told the story of the place where they lived. The narratives people told about their world could spark a lynching, as they did in the cases of Richard Puckett or Rev. Watson T. Sims. They could quickly shape how the rest of the country understood the significance of a lynching, as they did when the Unionville lynching in 1871 became the final straw in convincing the federal government to act against the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually, more and more southerners themselves began to challenge the kinds of narratives that had been told about lynching,

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from Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the 1890s through white liberals such as Willis D. Weatherford or Arthur F. Raper to average citizens such as John B. Isom. By looking carefully at individual lynchings, filling in the background of who was involved and why, and just what was going on in the places where they happened, we create much more complex accounts of these events than we have previously had. The lynching of Richard Puckett in 1913 had as much to do with a white adulterer as a black rapist. Giles Good was the victim of neighbours who had resented his political aspirations and assertiveness for years. Case studies such as the ones in this book can help us understand more thoroughly how the phenomenon of lynching, too long thought of rather ahistorically, connects to the other parts of American history.

Notes

Notes to Introduction 1 My figures here for North Carolina and South Carolina come from the data compiled for Project HAL by Liz Hines and Eliza Steelwater. The data are an updated version of the data collected in the 1990s by E. M. Beck and Stewart Tolnay and are available on the project’s website at http://people.uncw.edu/hinese/HAL/ HAL%20Web%20Page.htm. The figure for Mississippi is from Terence Robert Finnegan, ‘At the Hands of Parties Unknown: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940’, Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 1993, 24n.11. 2 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 156–9; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and ‘Legal Lynchings’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Finnegan, ‘At the Hands of Parties Unknown’; William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1847–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Howard Smead, Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave, 2001). The best summary of the historiography of lynching is by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ‘Conclusion: Reflections on Lynching Scholarship’, American Nineteenth Century History 6:3 (Mar. 2005): 400–14, but see also W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ‘Approaches to Racial Violence and Lynching’, in Brundage (ed.), Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 21–3.

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Notes to Chapter 1: Reconstruction Violence and the Foundations of the Lynching Era: Unionville, S.C., 1871 1 Undated newspaper clippings, Wallace-Gage Papers, SHC; Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944), 185. 2 George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 95; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 215, 338–9, 386; John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865–1877 (Columbia, S.C.: State Co., 1905), 118; Elaine Frantz Parsons, ‘Emphatically a Party of Gentlemen: The Contingency of Cross-Class Alliances in a Reconstruction-Era Klan’, paper presented at Social Sciences Historical Association, 17 November 2007, Chicago (copy of paper in possession of the author). 3 Harry Hammond, Report on the Cotton Production of the State of South Carolina (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1884), 38. 4 Edgar, South Carolina, 271, 277, 286; United States. Congress. Joint Select Committee on the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Report of the Joint select committee to inquire into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary states (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1872), S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 990. Since it is significant to note whose testimony is being used, I will indicate the witness being cited in parentheses before the page number, and I will use the abbreviated title Ku Klux Conspiracy. Joan E. Cashin, ‘A Lynching in Wartime Carolina: The Death of Saxe Joiner’, in W. Fitzhugh Brundage (ed.), Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 110; Minnie L. Walker, ‘Ramblings of North Pacolet’, item F-2-20, Federal Writers’ Project–Works Progress Administration Collection, South Caroliniana Library; Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 117; Allan D. Charles, ‘Union’, in Walter Edgar (ed.), The South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 985. 5 Mannie Lee Mabry (ed.), Union County Heritage (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Hunter Publishing Co., 1981), 337; Cashin, ‘Lynching in Wartime Carolina’, 110, 114; Undated clipping in Wallace-Gage Papers, SHC; 1870 census, South Carolina, Union County, Draytonville Township, p. 8; Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 62; Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 78. 6 Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 14–16, 27–34; Eric Foner, Reconstruction:

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America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 261–4; Cashin, ‘Lynching in Wartime Carolina’, 124; J. G. Long, ‘The Ku Klux Klan’, photocopy of typescript in ‘Ku Klux Klan’ vertical file, Union County Museum, Union, S.C.; Union Times, 9 December 1950. John D. Fowler, ‘Congressional Reconstruction’, in Richard Zuczek, Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2006), vol. 1, 166–8; Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 64–5. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 59, 78; Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 150–69. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 3, 49, 71; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 57; Long, ‘The Ku Klux Klan’; Wallace-Gage Papers, SHC; Charlie Jeff Harvey, ‘Reminiscences’, available online at ‘Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938’, mesn 142/251247, http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/snhtml/snhome.html (4 September 2007). Trelease, White Terror, 115, 117; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 54; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 998; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1011–12. Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 74–5; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, Box 13, Folder 18: Felix H. Tarbell to Major D. P. Corbin, Commanding U.S. Troops in S.C., Columbia, 3 December 1870. Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 969; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1011–13; Columbia Daily Phoenix, 23 November 1870, 15 January 1871. Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1013. Statutes At Large of the State of South Carolina, vol. 14 (Columbia, S.C.: Republican Print Co., [1872?]), 374; House of Representatives, 42nd Cong., 2nd Sess., Misc. Doc. 48, ‘I. G. McKissick vs. A. S. Wallace’, 2–3, 39. Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1022; Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 141, 143, 146; Edgefield Advertiser, 15 September 1870; Harvey, ‘Reminiscences’; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Matthew C. Butler), 1185–7. B. James Ramage, Local Government and Free Schools in South Carolina (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1883), 25–6; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 993–4, 998; Columbia Daily Phoenix, 10 November 1870; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (John L. Young), 1096–8; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (A. W. Thomson), 1117–18; 1870 census, South Carolina, Union County, Fishdam Township, p. 6.

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17 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Matthew C. Butler), 1204; Columbia Daily Phoenix, 9 November 1870. 18 Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, Box 13, Folder 6, Coroner’s Inquest for A. B. Owens, 8 November 1870; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 975; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, Box 13, Folder 6, D. D. Going to RKS, 11 November 1870; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, John A. Hubbard to RKS, 14 February 1871; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, Box 13, Folder 18, Felix H. Tarbell to Major D. P. Corbin, Commanding U.S. Troops in S.C., Columbia, 3 December 1870; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Samuel Nuckles), 1159; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (W. T. M. Williams), 1104. 19 Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, 12 January 1871; 1870 Union Co., S.C. census, Union Twp., p. 13; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 970, 974–5; David A. McCreight, ‘Ku Klux Stories’, available online at ‘American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940’, http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html (4 September 2007); Columbia Daily Phoenix, 4 January 1871. 20 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 970, 975; Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, 12 January 1871; Columbia Daily Phoenix, 4 January 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1018. 21 Mrs J. Frost Walker, Jr., ‘Incidents During Reconstruction’, item F-2-20, Federal Writers’ Project–Works Progress Administration Collection, South Caroliniana Library; Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, 12 January 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1018; Columbia Daily Phoenix, 4 January 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 970, 975. 22 Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, 12 January 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1019. 23 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Eliza Chalk), 1128–30; also Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Thomas Vanlue), 1156. 24 Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, 12 January 1871. 25 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Eliza Chalk), 1133; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (A. W. Thomson), 1112; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 977, 984; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Alfred Vanlue), 1137; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1026. 26 Columbia Daily Phoenix, 14 January 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 977; Harvey, ‘Reminiscences’; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Alfred Vanlue), 1136; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (William A. Bolt), 1119; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (A. W. Thomson), 1112. 27 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Alfred Vanlue), 1138; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 1, (D. T. Corbin), 74; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Thomas Vanlue), 1156.

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28 Yorkville Enquirer, 26 January 1871. 29 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1039; Yorkville Enquirer, 26 January 1871; Jerry L. West, The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan in York County, South Carolina, 1865–1877 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002), 66; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, D. Johnson to RKS, 28 January 1871, Box 14, Folder 23. 30 Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, W. F. M. Williams to RKS, 14 January 1871, Box 14, Folder 3; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, T. J. Green to RKS, 24 January 1871, Box 14, Folder 19. 31 Columbia Daily Phoenix, 11 January 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Alfred Vanlue), 1136–7; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Thomas Vanlue), 1155–6; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Eliza Chalk), 1128–9, 1131–3; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (William A. Bolt), 1121–2. 32 Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, 9 March 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 972, 979, 981, 989–90, 992–3. 33 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (H. Thomson Hughes), 1092–4; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1027; Edgefield Advertiser, 23 February 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 979, 984; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Joseph F. Gist), 1067. 34 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (H. Thomson Hughes), 1091, 1095; Edgefield Advertiser, 23 February 1871; Columbia Daily Phoenix, 14 February 1871. 35 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (H. Thomson Hughes), 1091–2. 36 Columbia Daily Phoenix, 14 February 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (H. Thomson Hughes), 1092; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (William A. Bolt), 1119–20; Edgefield Advertiser, 23 February 1871. 37 Edgefield Advertiser, 23 February 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 1002–3. 38 Columbia Daily Phoenix, 23 February 1871; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 1005; Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina. 39 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Samuel Nuckles), 1165; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Alfred Wright), 1174. 40 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Samuel Nuckles), 1165; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Alfred Wright), 1174; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Christina Page), 1142; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Thomas Vanlue), 1155, 1158; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Alfred Vanlue), 1135; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Eliza Chalk), 1128, 1131; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James H. Goss), 68. 41 Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 93, 110n.24; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 989; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, J. I. Britt to RKS, 28 February 1871, Box 14, Folder 43; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, John C. Reister to RKS, 1 March 1871,

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Box 15, Folder 8; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 266. Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 987–8, 997; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (John L. Young), 1097; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, John Tinsley to RKS, 18 March 1871, Box 15, Folder 20. Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, A. D. Spears to RKS, 5 April 1871, Box 15, Folder 29; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, Philip Dunn to RKS, 27 March 1871, Box 15, Folder 24; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, William S. Gregory, Jr. to RKS, 24 April 1871, Box 15, Folder 34; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, R. M. Stokes to RKS, 24 April 1871, Box 15, Folder 34; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, H. R. White to RKS, 31 May 1871, Box 16, Folder 14; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Robert W. Shand), 997–8; Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, D. Johnson to RKS, 2 April 1871, Box 15, Folder 28; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James H. Goss), 66–7. Gov. Scott Papers, SCDAH, Box 15, Folder 9, Warren D. Wilks and Sam Nuckles of the Committee to RKS, 2 March 1871; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 93, 95–7. African Repository, 48:2 (February 1872), 38; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 93–108, 118–22. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 222; Union Progress, 27 March 1901; undated clipping, Wallace-Gage Papers, SHC. Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 163–4, 176, 188–201.

Notes to Chapter 2: Black Politics and Lynching after Reconstruction: Giles Good, Yorkville, S.C., 1887 1 David A. McCreight, ‘Ku Klux Stories’, American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940 (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/ wpahome.html); George P. Rawick (ed.), The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), S.C. Narratives, Vol. XIV, Part 2, 120–1; Gov. Scott Papers, Box 15, Folder 16, John Christopher to RKS, 12 March 1871; Gov. Scott Papers, Box 15, Folder 18, Capt. John Christopher to RKS, 15 March 1871, SCDAH. 2 ‘The K. K. K. at Mt. Pleasant’, article 3, B-1-16, Works Progress Administration– Federal Writers’ Project Collection, SCL; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Joseph F. Gist), 1042; Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (James B. Steadman), 1034–5. 3 Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C. vol. 2, (Joseph F. Gist), 1041–67. 4 ‘The K. K. K. at Mt. Pleasant’.

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5 James Lester Good, Jr, Robert Good and His Descendants (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 2000), 287–8, 290, 294, 299; 1880 census, S.C., York Co., Bullocks Creek, E.D. 164, p. 54; Email communication from Nathania Branch-Miles to author, 9 December 2003; Militia Enrollments, 1869, Kershaw–York, Adjutant and Inspector General, Military Department (S192021), SCDAH. 6 York County Court of General Sessions Records, photocopies in ‘Giles Goode and lynching 1886/1887’ file, Historical Center of York County, York, S.C.; 1880 census, York Co., Bullocks Creek, E.D. 164, p. 57. 7 Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 204–5, 209–15. 8 William J. Cooper, The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877–1890 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005 [1968]), 94–103; George Brown Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 43; Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 98–107. 9 1880 census, S.C., York Co., Bullocks Creek, E.D. 164, p. 54.; Yorkville Enquirer, 9 October 1884, 4 December 1884. 10 Yorkville Enquirer, 9 October 1884, 4 December 1884. 11 Yorkville Enquirer, 9 October 1884, 16 October 1884, 4 December 1884, 9 July 1885; York County, Clerk of Court, General Sessions Journal, 1878–1888, C169, SCDAH, pp. 368, 378, 379. 12 F. D. Jones and W. H. Mills (eds), History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina since 1850 (Columbia, S.C.: R. L. Bryan, 1926), 137–8, 151, 516, 519–20. 13 Yorkville Enquirer, 15 December 1886; Inez Moore Parker, The Biddle–Johnson C. Smith University Story (Charlotte, N.C.: Charlotte Publishing, 1975), 3–9. 14 Bruce E. Baker, ‘The “Hoover Scare” in South Carolina, 1887: An Attempt to Organize Black Farm Labor’, Labor History 40:3 (August 1999), 266; Bruce E. Baker, ‘“The First Anarchist That Ever Came to Atlanta”: Hiram F. Hover from New York to the New South’, in Rachel Rubin, James Smethurst and Chris Green (eds), Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 39–56; Yorkville Enquirer, 15 December 1886. 15 Yorkville Enquirer, 22 December 1886. 16 Yorkville Enquirer, 11 November 1886, 15 December 1886. 17 Yorkville Enquirer, 8 December 1886, 15 December 1886. 18 Yorkville Enquirer, 8 December 1886, 15 December 1886. 19 Yorkville Enquirer, 8 December 1886, 15 December 1886. It is perhaps confusing for the reader that so many of the individuals involved in this story shared the surname Good, but the historian cannot choose the facts with which he has to work. William

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E. Good, the father of the murdered boy, was the grandson of James Bankhead Good, who had originally owned Giles Good. Yorkville Enquirer, 8 December 1886, 15 December 1886. Yorkville Enquirer, 15 December 1886. Yorkville Enquirer, 15 December 1886. Yorkville Enquirer, 15 December 1886. Yorkville Enquirer, 22 December 1886, 6 April 1887. Jones and Mills, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, 521; Yorkville Enquirer, 15 December 1886; William E. Good death certificate, vol. 12, No. 5547, York Co., 13 March 1917, SCDAH; Psalms 39.4; William E. Goode commitment file, No. 4925, Box 4, Commitment Files, South Carolina State Hospital (Columbia, S.C.) (S190024), SCDAH. Yorkville Enquirer, 6 December 1886, 13 April 1887; Job 1.21. Yorkville Enquirer, 6 and 13 April 1887. Yorkville Enquirer, 13 April 1887. Yorkville Enquirer, 13 April 1887. Yorkville Enquirer, 13 April 1887; Terence Robert Finnegan, ‘At the Hands of Parties Unknown: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940’, Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1993, 235–8. Yorkville Enqurier, 20 April 1887.

Notes to Chapter 3: Rape and Lynching in the New South: Manse Waldrop, Central, S.C., 1887 1 Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 115–20; W. J. Megginson, African American Life in South Carolina’s Upper Piedmont, 1780–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 129, 312–13; Mattie May Morgan Allen, Central Yesterday and Today (Taylors, S.C.: Faith Printing Co., 1973), 26. 2 Allen, Central, 26–8. 3 Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 87–9; Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13–14, 81–93; Bruce E. Baker and Shepherd W. McKinley, ‘Francis Joseph Pelzer’, in Walter Edgar (ed.), The South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 710. 4 Nelson, Iron Confederacies, 103; Brian Kelly, ‘Sentinels for New South Industry:

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5 6

7

8

9

10 11

12

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Booker T. Washington, Industrial Accommodation and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South’, Labor History 44:3 (August 2003), 337–57. 1900 census, South Carolina, Pickens Co., Central Twp, E.D. 118, p. 10; Megginson, African American, 196–229, 253–73; Pickens Sentinel, 17 June 1887. Megginson, African American Life, 333; 1910 census, South Carolina, Pickens County, Central Township, E.D. 143, p. 38; Bill Williams, Statement from Coroner’s Inquest on Death of Manse Waldrop, enclosed with B. D. Garvin to Gov. John P. Richardson, 10 January 1888, Folder 19, Box 24, Petitions for Commutation of Sentences, Oconee–York Counties, Papers of Governor John P. Richardson (1886–1890), SCDAH (hereafter MWI); Pickens Sentinel, 17 February 1887. The topic of black masculinity between slavery and the rise of Jim Crow remains underexplored. The discussion here combines ideas from a number of sources working on related areas: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1986–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Elsa Barkley Brown, ‘Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom’, in Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Bryant Simon, (eds), Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 28–66; Heather Cox Richardson, West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). Delia Sherman, Statement from Coroner’s Inquest on Death of Lula Sherman, enclosed with B. D. Garvin to Gov. John P. Richardson, 10 January 1888, Folder 24, Box 24, Petitions for Commutation of Sentences, Oconee–York Counties, Papers of Governor John P. Richardson (1886–1890), SCDAH (hereafter LSI); G. W. Miller, LSI; Mary Spearman, LSI; Cato Sherman, LSI; Margret Vance, LSI. Delia Sherman, LSI; Hamp Forrester, LSI; 1880 census, S.C., Pickens County, Central Twp, E.D. 133, p. 16; Margret Vance, LSI; Cato Sherman, LSI; H. C. Miller, LSI; T. W. Folger, LSI. 1880 census, S.C., Pickens Co., Central Twp, E.D. 133, p. 11; Allen, Central, 18; Megginson, African American Life, 293, 333; T. W. Folger, LSI. Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 66–9; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 297–8. LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890

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24 25

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(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Altina L. Waller, ‘Community, Class and Race in the Memphis Riot of 1866’, Journal of Social History 18:2 (Winter, 1984), 233–46; Lisa Cardyn, ‘Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging the Body Politic in the Reconstruction South’, Michigan Law Review 100:4 (February 2002), 675–867; Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 190–1, 195, 197. Cardyn, ‘Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence’, 815; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 50–1; Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 189. LSI; Henry Bolton, MWI; Manse Waldrop, LSI; Cato Sherman, MWI; Charleston News and Courier, 5 January 1888. J. C. Watkins, MWI; Harrison Haywood, MWI; James Michal, MWI. Megginson, African American Life, 366; MWI. William Payne, MWI; James Michal, MWI; T. W. Folger, MWI. James Michal, MWI; J. N. Hopkins, MWI. D. E. Garvin, MWI; R. G. Eaton, MWI; Charleston News and Courier, 3 and 5 January 1888. Charleston News and Courier, 5 January 1888. Charleston News and Courier, 5 January 1888. Charleston News and Courier, 3 January 1888, 5 January 1888; Pickens Sentinel, 12 January 1888. 1860 census, S.C., Spartanburg Co., Spartanburg, p. 3; 1870 census, S.C., Pickens Co., Garvin Twp, Five Mile P.O., p. 2; 1880 census, S.C., Pickens Co., Central Twp, E.D. 133, p. 10; Allen, Central, 16; Hyman Rubin, III, South Carolina Scalawags (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 96; Pickens Sentinel, 12 January 1888. Walhalla Keowee Courier, 12 January 1888; Pickens Sentinel, 12 January 1888. Walhalla Keowee Courier, 26 January 1888; Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction, rev. edn (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 79, 131; Charleston News and Courier, 15 May 1888, 17 May 1888, 18 May 1888, 6 July 1888. Stephen A. West, ‘From Yeoman to Redneck in Upstate South Carolina, 1850–1915’, Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 1998, 475–82, 492–5, 520–1; Nelson, Iron Confederacies, 100–5; Court of General Sessions Journal, Pickens County, 1886– 1903, Pickens County Courthouse, Pickens, S.C., 74, 75, 77, 79–80; 1880 census, S.C., Pickens Co., Liberty Twp., E.D. 135, p. 42; Allen, Central, 18. Court of General Sessions Journal, Pickens County, 1886–1903, 82, 87, 89. Court of General Sessions Journal, Pickens County, 1886–1903, 111, 116–17, 119– 20; Megginson, African American Life, 383; J. J. Norton to Gov. John P. Richardson, 3 April 1889, Folder 24, Box 24, Petitions for Commutations of Sentences,

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Oconee–York Counties, Papers of Governor John P. Richardson (1886–1890), SCDAH. 29 Folders 19–24, Box 24, Petitions for Commutations of Sentences, Oconee–York Counties, Papers of Governor John P. Richardson (1886–1890), SCDAH; Petition from ‘citizens of the town of Central’, Folder 24, Box 24, Petitions for Commutations of Sentences, Oconee–York Counties, Papers of Governor John P. Richardson (1886–1890), SCDAH; Petition from ‘citizens of Pickens County’, Folder 24, Box 24, Petitions for Commutations of Sentences, Oconee–York Counties, Papers of Governor John P. Richardson (1886–1890), SCDAH. 30 Petition from John A. Barre et al., 30 March 1889, Folder 24, Box 24, Petitions for Commutations of Sentences, Oconee–York Counties, Papers of Governor John P. Richardson (1886–1890), SCDAH; Samuel William Bacote, Who’s Who Among the Colored Baptists in the United States (Kansas City, Mo.: Franklin Hudson Pub. Co., 1913), 114–17; Monroe A. Majors, Noted Negro Women, Their Triumphs and Activities (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971 [1893]), 111; G. F. Richings, Evidences of Progress Among Colored People (Philadelphia: G. S. Ferguson, 1902), 139; Pardons for Harrison Hayward and William C. Williams, 15 April 1889, pardons no. 59 and 60, Pardon and Commutation Book, 188-1893, Papers of Governor John P. Richardson (1886–1890), SCDAH; 1900 census, S.C., Pickens Co., Central Twp., E.D. 118, p. 10; Delia Sherman death certificate, vol. 22, no. 17753, Pickens Co., SCDAH; Kato Sherman death certificate, vol. 36, no. 21530, Pickens Co., SCDAH; Megginson, African American Life, 384; 1930 census, S.C., Pickens Co., Central Twp., E.D. 17, p. 11. 31 For further discussion of these issues, see Bruce E. Baker, ‘Lynch Law Reversed: The Rape of Lula Sherman, the Lynching of Manse Waldrop, and the Debate over Lynching in the 1880s’, American Nineteenth Century History 6:3 (September 2005), 273–93.

Notes to Chapter 4: North Carolina’s Turn Against Lynching: J. V. Johnson, Wadesboro, N.C., 1906 1 Anonymous from Morven, N.C., telephone interview with author, 29 September 1994, notes in possession of author; Walter Samuel Lockhart, ‘Lynching in North Carolina, 1888–1906’, M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1972; Bruce Edward Baker, ‘Lynching Ballads in North Carolina’, M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995. 2 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1941), 32–3, 44–5,

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115–23; Sheldon Hackney, ‘Southern Violence’, American Historical Review 74:3 (February 1969), 908, 925; Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 6; Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Hyman Rubin, III, South Carolina Scalawags (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 112–18; Steven Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), esp. 146–55. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 16; Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 164, 218–54; Gordon B. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865–1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 47–50, 158–61; Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer–Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 96–7; James L. Hunt, ‘Farmers’ Alliance’, in William S. Powell (ed.), Encyclopedia of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 415–16; Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 150–2. Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 152–3. Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 157, 161; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1986–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 98–9; Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman, 256–7. Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 163–71; Atlanta Constitution, 11 January 1899. ‘Daniel P. Johnson’ genealogy vertical file, Anson County Public Library, Wadesboro, North Carolina; 1860 census, South Carolina, Chesterfield County, p. 69; 1870 census, North Carolina, Richmond Co., Wolf Pit Twp., Rockingham P.O., p. 15; 1880 census, North Carolina, Anson County, Morven Township, E.D. 2, p. 5. Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 3, 20, 118–19. Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 5 July 1906, 6 November 1890, 13 November 1890, 14 September 1893; Deed Book 26, p. 277, and Deed Book 28, p. 530, Anson County Courthouse, Wadesboro, N.C.; ‘Daniel P. Johnson’ genealogy file, Anson County Public Library, Wadesboro, N.C.

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12 1860 census, North Carolina, Anson County, Morven Township, p. 7; 1870 census, North Carolina, Anson County, Morven Township, p. 31; 1880 census, North Carolina, Anson County, Morven Township, p. 21; Register of Marriages, Anson County Courthouse, Wadesboro, N.C.; Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 5 July 1906. 13 Will Book, D-308, Anson County Courthouse, Wadesboro, N.C.; Judgement Docket, D-150 and D-152, Anson County Courthouse, Wadesboro, N.C.; Deed Book 35, p. 94, Anson County Courthouse, Wadesboro, N.C. In 1904 and 1905, J. V. Johnson paid half as much tax as he had in 1903; see Anson County Tax Lists, 1903–1906, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 14 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 5 July 1906, 28 December 1905; Record of Lunacy, Anson County Courthouse, Wadesboro, N.C. 15 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 5 July 1906, 28 December 1905. 16 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 26 April 1906. 17 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 26 April 1906. 18 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 26 April 1906. 19 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 26 April 1906, 18 January 1906. 20 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 19 April 1906; North Carolina Bar Association, Proceedings of the Fortieth Annual Session of the North Carolina Bar Association ([s.l.]: North Carolina Bar Association, 1938), 6–7; Atlanta Constitution, 28 August 1898, 10 February 1900; Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 26 April 1906, 30 May 1906. 21 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 18 July 1906; 1900 census, N.C., Anson Co., Morven Twp., E.D. 8, pp. 1, 2, 31; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 29. 22 Bruce E. Baker, ‘North Carolina Lynching Ballads’, in W. Fitzhugh Brundage (ed.), Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 233–4. 23 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 30 May 1906, 18 July 1907. 24 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 30 May 1906, 18 July 1907. 25 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 30 May 1906, 18 July 1907; Charlotte Daily Observer, 31 May 1906, 2 June 1906. 26 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 30 May 1906. 27 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 30 May 1906; [Raleigh, N.C.] Biblical Recorder 71:48 (6 June 1906), 8. 28 Alice R. Cotten, ‘Robert Broadnax Glenn’, in William S. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), vol. 2,

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307; R. D. W. Connor, North Carolina: Rebuilding an Ancient Commonwealth, 1584–1925 (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1929), vol. II, 559; Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 30 May 1906. Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 16 August 1906. Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 30 May 1906. 1910 census, North Carolina, Anson County, Morven Township, E.D. 11, p. 14; Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 19 July 1906, 26 July 1906; 1910 census, North Carolina, Anson County, Morven Township, E.D. 11, p. 14; 1920 census, North Carolina, Mecklenburg County, Charlotte Ward 5, E.D. 147, p. 10. North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, N.C., Governor’s Papers (R. B. Glenn), GP313, Folder June 1906, John T. Bennett to Governor R. B. Glenn, 18 June 1906; Atlanta Constitution, 2 June 1906; North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, N.C., Governor’s Papers (R. B. Glenn), GP313, Folder July 1906, L. D. Robinson to Hon. R. B. Glenn, 3 July 1906, and John H. Bennett to Governor R. B. Glenn, 12 July 1906; Greensboro Daily News, 4 November 1937; Atlanta Constitution, 19 January 1901, 14 July 1902, 23 June 1903; Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 19 July 1906. Atlanta Constitution, 15 July 1906, 7 August 1906, 8 August 1906, 11 August 1906. Gov. R. B. Glenn to the People of North Carolina, 15 August 1906, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, N.C., Governor’s Papers (R. B. Glenn), GP313, Folder August 1906. Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 22 November 1906, 18 July 1907, 25 July 1907, 1 August 1907. Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, 21 November 1907; 1910 census, N.C., Anson Co., Morven Twp., E.D. 12, p. 11; 1920 census, N.C., Anson County, Morven Twp., E.D. 12, p. 10; 1930 census, Maryland, Prince George’s Co., Seat Pleasant Dist., Carmody Hills, E.D. 17-48, p. 20. Atlanta Constitution, 6 December 1895, 24 February 1896.

Notes to Chapter 5: Lies and Lynching: Richard Puckett, Laurens, S.C., 1913 1 Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), ix; Bruce E. Baker, ‘Under the Rope: Lynching and Memory in Laurens County, South Carolina’, in W. Fitzhugh Brundage (ed.), Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 324. 2 William Copeland Cooper, ‘Laurens County’, in Walter Edgar (ed.), The South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006),

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540–1; Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 88, 112–13; ‘Random Recollections of Revolutionary Characters and Incidents’, Southern Literary Journal and Magazine of Arts, July 1838: 40–4. Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 80–1, 88–9, 106–7, 174; G. Leland Summer, Folklore of South Carolina, including Central and Dutch Fork sections of the state and much data on the early Quaker and Covenanter customs, etc. ([n.l.]: [n.p.], 1950); Ku Klux Conspiracy, S.C., vol. 1, xviii, 13, 69, 76, 77, 79, 154, 155; John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865–1877 (Columbia, S.C.: State Co., 1905), 400. Department of the Interior. Census Office. Report on the Manufactures of the United States at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880) (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1883), 354; Bureau of the Census, The Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Statistics for South Carolina (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913); Laurens Advertiser, 8 January 1913; William Copeland Cooper, ‘Laurens Glass’, in Edgar, South Carolina Encyclopedia, 541–2; David L. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 129–214. Figures come from census data available at the University of Virginia Library ‘Historical Census Browser’ at http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/ stats/histcensus/. Textile figures are for 1907 from August Kohn, The Cotton Mills of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: South Carolina Department of Agriculture, Commerce, and Immigration, 1907), 86–9. Hyman Rubin, III, South Carolina Scalawags (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), xviii, 102; William J. Cooper, Jr, The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 [1968]), 58; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 166; Michael Robert Mounter, ‘John Laurens Manning Irby’, in Edgar, South Carolina Encyclopedia, 483; Baker, ‘Under the Rope’, 320. Charleston News and Courier, 12 August 1913; Laurensville Herald, 15 August 1913; Laurensville Advertiser, 13 August 1913. Laurensville Herald, 15 August 1913; Charleston News and Courier, 12 August 1913; Laurensville Advertiser, 13 August 1913; Greenville Daily News, 12 August 1913. Laurensville Advertiser, 13 August 1913; Albert E. Sloan et al. to Cole L. Blease, 21 Aug. 1913, Box 22, August 1913, General Correspondence, Papers of Governor Coleman L. Blease (1911–1915), SCDAH; Charleston News and Courier, 12 August 1913; Laurensville Herald, 15 August 1913; Columbia State, 12 August 1913; Greenwood Index, 14 August 1913.

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9 John M. Cannon to Cole L. Blease, 12 Aug. 1913, Box 22, August 1913, General Correspondence, Papers of Governor Coleman L. Blease (1911–1915), SCDAH; Laurensville Herald, 15 August 1913; Spartanburg Herald, 12 August 1913; Columbia State, 12 August 1913. 10 Spartanburg Herald, 13 August 1913; Laurensville Herald, 15 August 1913. 11 In this chapter, I am to some extent following in the footsteps of historian Bryant Simon’s examination of fact and fiction in the history of lynching as discussed in two articles, ‘Narrating a Southern Tragedy: Historical Facts and Historical Fictions’, Rethinking History 1 (Autumn 1997), 165–87, and ‘Facts and Fictions in the Archives’, Rethinking History 5:3 (December 2001), 427–35. 12 Laurens Advertiser, 13 August 1913; Laurensville Herald, 15 August 1913; Greenwood Index, 14 August 1913; Columbia State, 12 August 1913; Spartanburg Herald, 12 August 1913; Charleston News and Courier, 12 August 1913; Greenville Daily News, 12 August 1913. 13 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 177. 14 Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 111–19, 141–8. 15 R. L. Polk Laurens (S.C.) City Directory, 1912 (Richmond, Va.: R. L. Polk, 1912), 117. 16 Lawrence Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 25–6, 39–40; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 41. 17 Terence Robert Finnegan, ‘At the Hands of Parties Unknown: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940’, Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1993, 34–5, 64, 103, 166; George B. Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 54–67; Baker, ‘Under the Rope’, 331. 18 Bryant Simon, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 12–20; Laurens Advertiser, 26 February 1913; Greenwood Index, 7 August 1913; New York Times, 4 December 1912. Blease prided himself on annoying those he called ‘aristocrats’; in his January 1913 inaugural address, he advocated a law banning the University of South Carolina from fielding a football team (not such a bad idea, really). New York Times, 22 January 1913. 19 Avis Thomas-Lester, ‘The Legacy of Lynching’, Washington Post (23 June 2005), 16; Baker, ‘Under the Rope’, 328–9; R. L. Polk Laurens (S.C.) City Directory, 1912, 114, 117; 1910 census, South Carolina, Laurens County, Laurens Ward 6, E.D. 58, pp. 3,

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11, 12; Court of General Sessions (Laurens County), Criminal Dockets, 1909–1920, Special January 1913 Term, Case #29, SCDAH; John M. Cannon to Cole L. Blease, 12 Aug. 1913, Box 22, August 1913, General Correspondence, Papers of Governor Coleman L. Blease (1911–1915), SCDAH; Laurensville Herald, 15 August 1913. Patricia Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Selected Works, compiled with an introduction by Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 200–15 (quotation 200); Michael D’Orso, Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996), 84; Maxine D. Jones et al., ‘Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida in January 1923’, http://mailer.fsu.edu/~mjones/ rosewood/rosewood.html (20 August 2007). Tolnay and Beck, Festival of Violence, 259. For a more detailed version of this argument about the anti-lynching movement and lynching historiography, see Bruce E. Baker, ‘Lynch Law Reversed: The Rape of Lula Sherman, the Lynching of Manse Waldrop, and the Debate Over Lynching in the 1880s’, American Nineteenth Century History 6:3 (September 2005), 274–76. Thomas-Lester, ‘Legacy of Lynching’, 16; Bruce Alpert, ‘Senate Inaction on Lynching Needs Apology’, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 30 September 2004, 5; Avis ThomasLester, ‘Senate Will Vote On Apology For Failure To Outlaw Lynching’, Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, 12 June 2005, 32; 109th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Res. 39. ‘Obituary: James Cameron’, London Guardian, 27 July 2006; Baltimore Daily Record, 10 April 2003; David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, ‘Preface’, in David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson (eds), Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), xv–xvi. Margaret M. Russell, ‘Cleansing Moments and Retrospective Justice’, Michigan Law Review 101:5 (March 2003), 1236–41; D’Orso, Like Judgment Day; Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (2001), available online at http://www.tulsareparations.org/TRR.htm (17 September 2007); Peter Schmidt, ‘Oklahoma Scholarships Seek to Make Amends for 1921 Riot’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 July 2001, A22; 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission (2006), available online at http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/1898-wrrc/ (17 September 2007). Richard Stewart, ‘Murder Case Forces Jasper to Revisit Horror of Slaying in June’, Houston Chronicle, 24 January 1999. See, e.g., Carl T. Rowan, ‘Editorial: What Jasper Murder Tells Us About America’, Houston Chronicle, 13 June 1998. The Houston Chronicle has gathered its coverage of the James Byrd case and presented

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it on a website at http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/special/jasper/ (17 September 2007). Kathy Janich, ‘Line Steady For Last View of Lynching Photographs’, Atlanta JournalConstitution, 13 January 2003, 1C; Roberta Smith, ‘An Ugly Legacy Lives On, Its Glare Unsoftened By Age’, New York Times, 13 January 2000, E1; Brent Staples, ‘The Perils of Growing Comfortable With Evil’, New York Times, 9 April 2000, 4:16; Caroline Abels, ‘Confronting American History: Warhol Hosts an Exhibit of Lynching Photos Certain To Wrench Viewers’ Hearts’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9 September 2001, A1; ‘Death By Lynching’, New York Times, 16 March 2000; William Rushing, ‘Lessons From Horror’, New York Times, 11 April 2000, A28; Caroline Abels, ‘Chilling Warhol Show Ends’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 January 2002, A1. Little Rock Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 30 April 2003; Augusta Chronicle, 7 December 2003, B02; Columbia State, 13 July 2005; Monica Davey, ‘Letter From Duluth: It Did Happen Here: The Lynching That a City Forgot’, New York Times, 4 December 2003, A22. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002); Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Pantheon, 2003); Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (New York: Scribner, 2003); Greg Bluestein, ‘FBI Reviewing 1946 Lynching Case’, Newark Star-Ledger, 14 April 2006, 49. These popular accounts all built on the innovative work of a number of professional historians, most notably W. Fitzhugh Brundage, who reinvigorated the academic study of lynching in the 1990s. For a helpful overview, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ‘Conclusion: Reflections on Lynching Scholarship’, American Nineteenth Century History 6:3 (2005): 401–14, which originated as a keynote address at the ‘Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies’ conference at Emory University in October 2002. Bill Egbert, ‘Miss. Death a Lynching, Jesse Hints’, New York Daily News, 28 June 2000, 5; Dora Apel, ‘On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/11’, American Quarterly 55:3 (September 2003), 473; Abby Goodnough, ‘A Suicide or a Lynching? Answers Sought in Florida’, New York Times, 29 July 2003; Cameron McWhirter, ‘Lynching Rumor Pits Ugly History Against Facts’, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2 May 2004, 1A.

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Notes to Chapter 6: A Wartime Lynching: Rev. Watson T. Sims, Sharon, S.C., 1917 1 Brian Kelly, ‘Sentinels for New South Industry: Booker T. Washington, Industrial Accommodation and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South’, Labor History 44:3 (2003), 338. 2 George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 33, 60, 121. 3 Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 38–9, 42, 49, 51; H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 10, 17–18, 131; Chester Semi-Weekly News, 24 August 1917; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 46, 59, 78, 113. 4 Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 66; Herbert C. Hoover, ‘America’s Food Problem’, Independent (1917) 92:572, reprinted in David F. Trask (ed.), World War I at Home: Readings on American Life, 1914–1920 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970), 102; Columbia State, 15 August 1917, 19 August 1917. 5 Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 23–24, 31, 35; Jeanette Keith, ‘The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South’, Journal of American History 87:4 (March 2001), 1336, 1338, 1346; Columbia State, 17 August 1917. 6 George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 54; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 477; Columbia State, 21 August 1917, 22 August 1917. 7 Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 87; Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 1, 41, 64, 72–9, 92–5, 115. 8 Wilma Dykeman, Seeds of Southern Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 58; Wilma Dykeman, Prophet of Plenty: The First Ninety Years of W. D. Weatherford (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1966), 66, 72. 9 Sara Trowbridge Combs, ‘Race Reform in the Early Twentieth Century South: The Life and Work of Willis Duke Weatherford’, M.A. thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2004, 18–19, 23, 27–31. 10 Combs, ‘Race Reform in the Early Twentieth Century South’, 60, 63; Dykeman, Prophet of Plenty, 67, 69, 75, 102. 11 Dykeman, Prophet of Plenty, 131–3; T. Harry Gatton, ‘Gilbert Thomas Stephenson’, in William S. Powell (ed.), Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 5 (Chapel

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18 19 20

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Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 441–2; Gilbert T. Stephenson, ‘Relation of Criminal Court Procedure to Mob Violence’, in W. D. Weatherford (ed.), Lawlessness or Civilization – Which? (Nashville: Williams Printing Co., 1917), 19–22; Combs, ‘Race Reform in the Early Twentieth Century South’, 112–16. Theodore Hemmingway, ‘Prelude to Change: Black Carolinians in the War Years, 1914–1920’, Journal of Negro History 65:3 (Summer 1980), 215–18; Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 20, 22, 24, 29, 34. Columbia State, 25 August 1917; Statement of C. S. Neely, Coroner’s Book, ‘Lynching’ file, Historical Center of York County, York, S.C. (hereafter ‘Coroner’s Book’), 328; Statement of G. M. Robinson, Coroner’s Book, 328; Statement of Lulu Gill, Coroner’s Book, 330; Statement of Emma Dye, Coroner’s Book, 329. Statement of Emma Dye, Coroner’s Book, 329; Statement of C. S. Neely, Coroner’s Book, 329; Columbia State, 17 August 1917, 25 August 1917 (quotation); Statement of G. M. Robinson, Coroner’s Book, 327–8; Statement of Emma Dye, Coroner’s Book, 329. John M. Coggeshall, Carolina Piedmont Country (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 122–3; Statement of Isaiah Williams, Coroner’s Book, 325; Columbia State, 25 August 1917; Statement of Bob Burris, Coroner’s Book, 322. Statement of Bob Burris, Coroner’s Book, 322; Statement of Mary Burris, Coroner’s Book, 323; Statement of Pearl Burris, Coroner’s Book, 324; Statement of Clarence Burris, Coroner’s Book, 324; Statement of Fred Sanders, Coroner’s Book, 324; Columbia State, 29 November 1917. Columbia State, 29 November 1917; Statement of Bob Burris, Coroner’s Book, 322; Statement of Mary Burris, Coroner’s Book, 323; Statement of Isaiah Williams, Coroner’s Book, 326. Statement of Fred Sanders, Coroner’s Book, 325; Statement of Isaiah Williams, Coroner’s Book, 326–7. Statement of Bob Burris, Coroner’s Book, 322–3; Statement of Clarence Burris, Coroner’s Book, 324. Columbia State, 24 August 1917, 25 August 1917, 26 August 1917; 1910 census, South Carolina, York County, Bethesda Township, E.D. 94, p. 37; 1920 census, South Carolina, York County, Broad River Township, Sharon, E.D. 102, p. 3. Columbia State, 26 August 1917, 28 August 1917, 29 August 1917, 2 September 1917, 4 September 1917, 6 September 1917, 8 September 1917, 29 November 1917. Columbia State, 11 September 1917, 15 November 1917, 28 November 1917, 29 November 1917, 30 November 1917.

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23 George Brown Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 246–51, 254; Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 169, 174–81; Atlanta Constitution, 17 May 1896, 7 January 1897, 11 January 1899, 2 October 1899, 28 September 1900. 24 Book F, p. 129, #2034, Probate Office, Chester County Courthouse, Chester, S.C.; Chester, South Carolina City Directory, 1908, Vol. I (Asheville: Piedmont Directory Co. Inc., 1908), 92, 111; 1920 census, S.C., Chester County, Chester, E.D. 24, p.34; 1910 census, S.C., Chester County, Chester Ward 3, E.D. 22, p. 35; 1920 census, S.C., Chester County, Chester, E.D. 25, p. 20; Summons and Complaint, Mary A. Sims vs. York County, Judgement Rolls, Box 118, Case #5023, Photocopies at York County Historical Center, York, S.C.; 1920 census, S.C., Chester Co., Chester, E.D. 24, p. 59; Order Granting New Trial, 24 July 1918, Mary A. Sims vs. York County; Mary A. Sims vs. York County; Judgement on Verdict, Mary A. Sims vs. York County.

Notes to Chapter 7: A Disgrace to North Carolina: Oliver Moore, Tarboro, N.C., 1930 1 Since these events occurred in 1930, not that long ago, I have chosen to not mention the names of the children involved. 2 William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 3, 48–51, 59–61; Stephanie E. Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 3 New York American, 20 July 1920, in Papers of the NAACP. Part 7, The anti-lynching campaign, 1912–1955. Series A, Anti-lynching investigative files, 1912–1953 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, [1986?].), reel 15 (hereafter ‘NAACP’), fr. 636; Shreveport Times, 2 August 1920, NAACP, fr. 577; New York American, 20 July 1920, fr. 636; Brooklyn Times, 20 July 1920, NAACP, fr. 636; New York Post, unknown date, NAACP, fr. 636; 1920 census, N.C., Alamance Co, Graham, E.D. 7, p. 1; New York Post, unknown date, NAACP, fr. 636; New York Age, 2 October 1920, NAACP, fr. 652; Atlanta Constitution, 26 March 1921, 16 August 1921. 4 The Free Press, 10 December 1927, NAACP, fr. 597; New York World, 12 December 1927, NAACP, fr. 598. 5 Terence Robert Finnegan, ‘At the Hands of Parties Unknown: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940’, Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1993, 247–54

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6 Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 22, 26–8, 30–1, 41–2. 7 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 61; Kieran Taylor, ‘“We Have Just Begun”: Black Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919’, Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58 (Autumn 1999): 265–84; Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 50–7; Bruce E. Baker, ‘Under the Rope: Lynching and Memory in Laurens County, South Carolina’, in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 336. 8 Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 62; Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 4, 12, 22–9, 45–6, 57–67; Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 22. 9 Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 59–106, 151 (quotation). 10 N. Clifford Young, ‘A Case Study of the Tarboro Lynching’, M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1931, 28, 33, 42; E. Tunney Cobb, Jr, ‘Race Relations in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, 1700–1975’, senior honors thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1975, 29; Leon E. Truesdell, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930: Population, Volume I: Number and Distribution of Inhabitants (Washington: GPO, 1931), 781, 788. 11 Oliver Moore Death Certificate, Vol. 1443, p.67, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina; Young, ‘Case Study of the Tarboro Lynching’, 45, 50; Raleigh News and Observer, 22 August 1930. 12 Tarboro Daily Southerner, 19 July 1930; Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 19 July 1930; Raleigh News and Observer, 19 August 1930; Young, ‘Case Study of the Tarboro Lynching’, 46. 13 Tarboro Daily Southerner, 19 July 1930, 22 July 1930, 24 July 1930; Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 19 July 1930, 16 August 1930; Young, ‘Case Study of the Tarboro Lynching’, 45; Bland Simpson, ‘Pocosin’, in William S. Powell, ed., Encyclopedia of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 892. 14 Tarboro Daily Southerner, 19 August 1930; Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 19 August 1930; Young, ‘Case Study of the Tarboro Lynching,’ 46, 48–9. 15 Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 19 August 1930; Tarboro Daily Southerner, 19 August 1930; Raleigh News and Observer, 24 August 1930. 16 Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 19 August 1930; Tarboro Daily Southerner, 19 August 1930; Raleigh News and Observer, 19 August 1930; Oliver Moore Death

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17

18

19 20

21

22

23

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Certificate, Vol. 1443, p. 67, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina; Young, ‘Case Study of the Tarboro Lynching’, 56–7. Richard L. Watson, Jr, ‘Oliver Maxwell Gardner’, in William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 2 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 274–6; Tarboro Daily Southerner, 21 August 1930; Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 19 August 1930; Greenwood, Miss. Commonwealth, 28 June 1930, NAACP, fr. 571; Chicago Defender, 2 August 1930. Rocky Mount Evening Telegram, 19 August 1930; Tarboro Daily Southerner, 20 August 1930; Raleigh News and Observer, 20 August 1930, 24 August 1930, 25 August 1930; R. McCants Andrews to Walter F. White, 23 August 1930, NAACP, fr. 870. Raleigh News and Observer, 20 August 1930, 26 August 1930. Telegram from National Negro Business League to Hon. O. Max Gardner, 22 August 1930, Charles W. Clay to Gov. O. Max Gardner, 19 August 1930, Anderson M. Barker to Gov. O. Max Gardner, 25 August 1930, Governor’s Papers (O. Max Gardner), Box 14: General Correspondence, 1929–1930, Folder: Mob Violence, 1930, 1931, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina. L. J. Holmes to Hon. O. M. Gardner, 25 August 1930, C. W. Francis, Anderson, S.C., to Honorable J. M. Gardner, 24 July 1930, David Sinclair to Governor O. Max Gardner, 20 August 1930, Governor’s Papers (O. Max Gardner), Box 14: General Correspondence, 1929–1930, Folder: Mob Violence, 1930, 1931, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina; 1930 census, S.C., Anderson Co., Varennes Twp., E.D. 49, p. 5; 1930 census, Massachusetts, Suffolk Co., Boston, E.D. 339, p. 34. Walter F. White to Dr A. M. Rivera, 20 August 1930, NAACP, fr. 848; Alexander M. Rivera, interviewed by Kieran Taylor, Documenting the American South, University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 30 November 2001; J. Clay Smith, Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 207–8; Walter F. White to R. McCants Andrews, 20 August 1930, NAACP, fr. 847; R. McCants Andrews to Walter F. White, 13 March 1931, NAACP, fr. 866; C. F. Rich to Walter F. White, 5 February 1931, NAACP, fr. 858; Walter F. White to Robert W. Bagnall, 13 February 1931, NAACP, fr. 857; Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Raleigh News and Observer, 24 August 1930. Louis Mazzari, Southern Modernist: Arthur Raper from the New Deal to the Cold War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 15, 33, 37, 38–9, 41, 43, 45, 53–4; Guy Benton Johnson and Guion Griffis Johnson, Research in Service

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25 26

27

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to Society: The First Fifty Years of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 138–45; Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). ‘The Commission on the Study of Lynching (1930)’, from Commission on Interracial Cooperation Papers, 1919–1944, microfilm (Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1983) (hereafter ‘CIC’), reel 41, fr.1309–13, VI:150; ‘The Commission on the Study of Lynching (1930)’, CIC, reel 41, fr.1309–13, VI:150; Arthur F. Raper to Howard W. Odum, 5 November 1930, CIC, reel 41, fr. 1507, VI:151; Young, ‘Case Study of the Tarboro Lynching’; 1930 census, Hinds County, Jackson, Ward 6, E.D. 25–9, p. 7a; Howard W. Odum to W. W. Alexander, 5 December 1930, CIC, R41, fr. 1530, VI:151; Howard W. Odum to W. W. Alexander, 8 December 1930, CIC, R41, fr. 1539, VI:151; R. H. Wettach, announcement of seminar on ‘Administration of Justice’, 18 December 1930, CIC, R41, fr. 1546, VI:151; Charles T. McCormick to ‘Alex’, 24 November 1930, CIC, R41, fr. 1550, VI:151; Press release, 23 December 1930, CIC, reel 26, fr. 1653, IV:15; Mazzari, Southern Modernist, 81, 98, 101. Josephus Daniels, Editor in Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 389, 493; Raleigh News and Observer, 20 August 1930. Raleigh News and Observer, 25 August 1930, 28 August 1930; Amy Louise Wood, ‘Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy’, American Nineteenth Century History 6:3 (September 2005), 378, 382–4, 392. John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994), 615–18; Michael Klarman, ‘How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis’, Journal of American History 81 (June 1994): 81–118.

Notes to Conclusion 1 Nadine Cohodas, Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 82, 96–7; John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 345–59. 2 Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, 371–3; New York Times, 18 February 1947. 3 James McBride Dabbs to J. Strom Thurmond, 22 February 1947, and Rev. John B. Isom to J. Strom Thurmond, 18 February 1947, Folder 634, Box 47, Thurmond Collection.

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4 Prince Jarubi to J. Strom Thurmond, 18 February 1947, Folder 635, Box 47, Gubernatorial Series, A. Official, 1. ‘In’, Strom Thurmond Collection, Clemson University Libraries Special Collections, Clemson, South Carolina (Thurmond Collection); Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, 373.

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Waldrep, Christopher. The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Waller, Altina L. ‘Community, Class and Race in the Memphis Riot of 1866’. Journal of Social History 18:2 (Winter, 1984): 233–46. Watson, Richard L., Jr. ‘Oliver Maxwell Gardner’. In William S. Powell (ed.), Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Selected Works, compiled with an introduction by Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. West, Stephen A. ‘From Yeoman to Redneck in Upstate South Carolina, 1850–1915’. Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998. Wexler, Laura. Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America. New York: Scribner, 2003. Whites, LeeAnn. The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Williamson, Joel. After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965. ——The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the South since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Wood, Amy Louise. ‘Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy’. American Nineteenth Century History 6:3 (September 2005): 373–99. Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Young, N. Clifford. ‘A Case Study of the Tarboro Lynching’. M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1931. Yuhl, Stephanie E. A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Zuczek, Richard. State of Rebellion: South Carolina during Reconstruction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Index

371st Regiment 155 A Red Record 137 Abbeville (S.C.) 141 Abbeville County (S.C.) 133 Abel Baptist Church 75, 90 Adams, Lewis 105 African Americans, political activism of 5, 15–16, 18 African Methodist Episcopal church 89 Aiken (S.C.) 168, 170 Aiken County (S.C.) 168 Alamance County (N.C.) 166 alcohol 11, 82, 102, 112, 168 as cause of violence 86, 103 Alexander, Rev. Joseph 54 Alexander, Robert 50 Alexander, Will W. 170, 181 Allen University 89 Allen, Buck 27 Allen, George 138 Allen, James 140 American Colonization Society 38 American Protective League 148 Anderson (S.C.) 170, 179 Anderson County (S.C.) 37, 74 Anderson, C. L. 29, 35 Andrews, R. McCants 180 Anson County (N.C.) 93 army 37, 45, 149 occupation during Reconstruction 15, 17, 48 Arnall, Ellis 189 arson 14, 26, 58, 101 Asheville (N.C.) 116 Ashtabula Plantation (Anderson Co., S.C.) 80 Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching 154, 165, 187

At the Hands of Persons Unknown 142 Atlanta (Ga.) 72, 140–2, 153, 181 Atlanta and Richmond Air-Line Railway 72–4, 134 Atlanta Constitution 182 Atlanta University 183 attorneys 17, 31–2, 34, 86, 107, 112, 116, 154, 162, 168, 175, 180 Aycock, Charles 184 Ayers, Edward L. 6 Bailey, Henry 57 Baily, Tom 157 Baker, Newton 150 ballad, about lynching 93, 108 Baptists 13, 75, 78, 112, 155, 183, 190 Bardaglio, Peter W. 80 Bardin, Ed 174–5, 178 Bardin, Tom 174 Barnwell (S.C.) 161 Baton Rouge (Chester Co., S.C.) 45–6 Beck, E. M. 4 Belle Glade (Fl.) 142 Bennett, John T. 107, 116 Bethel Presbytery 54 Biblical Recorder 112 Bickett, Thomas W. 166 Biddle Institute 56 Biddlesville (N.C.) 56 Birmingham (Ala.) 139 Black Code, of S.C. 14 Black Holocaust Museum 139 Black Mountain (N.C.) 153–4 Black, Dan 30 Blair, J. P. 60 Blease, Coleman L. 6, 126–7, 134, 147, 152, 177 Blease, Coleman L., illustration 129

234

INDEX

Blue Branch Presbyterian Church 55 Blue Ridge Association 154 Blue Ridge Railroad 72 Blue Ridge 72 Bobo, Mac 33–4 Boggan, H. S. 107 Boggan, Henry 109 Boggan, John A. 105, 109, 114, 118 Bolin, Zell 160 boll weevil 147 Bolt, William A. 30 Bolton, Henry 84, 88 Boston (Mass.) 179 Broad River 11, 20, 32, 41, 54, 56, 59, 155 Broadoad Sanitorium 103 Brown, Edgar 168 Brown, Isaac 162 Brown, Lawrence 162 Broxton Bridge (S.C.) 119 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh 6, 108 Bryan, William Jennings 98 Buffalo (S.C.) 33 Bulloch County (Ga.) 141 Bullocks Creek Presbyterian Church 54, 64 Bullocks Creek 41, 46, 48, 54, 58 Burris, Bob 157–9 Burris, Clarence 158 Burris, Mary 157–8 Burris, Pearl 157–8 Butler, Matthew C. 20–1 Byars, Tom 33 Byrd, James 140 Caldwell, W. H. 177 Calhoun, John C. 75 Calvinism 65 Cameron, James 139 Camp Jackson (Richland County, S.C.) 149–50 illustration 151 Camp Sevier (Greenville County, S.C.) 149 Camp Wadsworth (Greenville County, S.C.) 149 Cannon, Berry 21 Cape Fear River 101 Carrigan, William D. 6 Caudle, T. L. 107

Central (S.C.) 71 Central (S.C.) 87 Chalk, Eliza 25, 30 Chamberlain, Daniel H. 39 Charleston (S.C.) 72, 86, 155, 161, 166 Charleston Navy Yard 149 Charleston News and Courier 68 Charleston Riot (1919) 170 Charlotte (N.C.) 63, 72, 116 Chattanooga News 182 Chester (S.C.) 20, 35, 43, 53, 63, 148, 155, 160 Chester County (S.C.) 35, 45–6, 58, 162 map 46 Chesterfield County (S.C.) 100 Chicago (Ill.) 191 Chicago Tribune 137 Civil Rights Act of 1875 50 Civil Rights Cases (1883) 50 Civil War 12, 47, 54, 72, 76, 97, 100, 112 Clayton, Dr. S. A. 83–4 Cleveland, Grover 51 Clinton Riot (1870) 122 Clover (S.C.) 156 Coatesville (Pa.) 169 Coker, D. R. 150 Cold War 190 Cole, John 57 Colleton County (S.C.) 119 Columbia (S.C.) 3, 29–31, 34–5, 62–3, 155, 161 Columbia Record 68 Columbia Register 68 Commission on Interracial Cooperation 165, 169–70, 180–181, 187 Committee on Public Information 148 Concord (N.C.) 176 constitution, of N.C. 99 constitution, of S.C 1865 14 1868 10, 14–15 1895 40, 99, 161 Cooper, R. A. 125–6, 135 coroner’s inquests 60, 78–81, 84, 127, 137, 160, 175–6 cotton 12, 58, 100, 145, 147 cotton, marketing 47, 57, 73 county government 18, 20–1, 30, 36–7, 98

INDEX Craig, Bill 57 Crawford, Columbus 48, 53 Crews, Joe 123–4 Crooks, Ed 81 Cross Keys (S.C.) 32 Crypto-lynchings 142–3 Cunningham, Bloody Bill 122 Dabbs, James McBride 190 Daniels, Josephus 98, 184 de la Beckwith, Byron 139 Democratic party 154, 187 African American support for 52 relationship to Ku Klux Klan 10 Denmark (S.C.) 161 DeVore, J. W. 160 disguise 26, 109 Dixon, Thomas, Jr. 131 Doggan, Abram 15 Dominick, Fred H. 150 Douglas, Julius F. 162 Dowdle, Bailey 59, 61, 66–7 Dowdle’s Creek 60 Dray, Philip 142 Du Bois, W. E. B. 170, 183 Duck Pond Church (Union County, S.C.) 23–4 Duluth (Minn.) 141 Duncan, H. W. 20 Dunn, Fred 108 Dunn, Philip 31, 36 Dunn, W. C. 108 Durham (N.C.) 180 Durham, J. J. 89 Dyer, Leonidas 169 Earle, Willie 187, 189 East St. Louis Riot (1917) 150 Eaton, Gaylord 81–2, 84, 88 Economy of N.C. 3 of S.C. 3 Edgecombe County (N.C.) 172–87 Edgefield (S.C.) 69, 160–1 Edgefield County (S.C.) 39, 96, 133 Edwards, Barrett 33 Edwards, Laura 77

235

Eight-Box Law 51 Elaine (Ark.) 169 Elaine Massacre (1919) 169 Election Law of 1882, see Eight–Box Law elections 1867 15 1868, April 16 1868, November 17 1870 19, 21, 122 1871 37 1872 38–9 1875 39 1876 39, 51 1878 51 1880 51 1884 50–4 1886 97 1892 97 1894 97 1896 98 1898 99, 107, 112, 172 1928 176 laws governing 18 Ellenton Massacre (1876) 39 Ellerbe, William H. 162 Elliott, Robert Brown 28 Enoree River 11, 121 Evers, Medgar 139 Fair Forest Creek 11 Farmers’ Alliance 57, 96–7 Farr, Simeon 20 Federal Bureau of Investigation 190 federal government, response to lynching 35, 37–8, 165, 190 Federal Writers’ Project 44, 48 Fincher, William 33 Finnegan, Terence 6 Fire in a Canebrake 142 Fish Dam (Union County, S.C.) 21, 35 Fite, Gilbert C. 149 Flat Rock (N.C.) 176 Florida 155 Florida, lynchings in 7 Folger, Dr. T. W. 78–9, 82–3, 87 Folger, Rufus 84

236 Forrester, Hamp 78 Fort Hill (S.C.) 75 Fort Jackson (S.C.) 3 Foster, Fincher 35 Frank, Leo 140, 142 Franklin, Lonnie 160 Freedmen’s Bureau 18, 28, 56–7 Freeman, John M. 86 Furman University 183 Gardner, O. Max 176–9 Garvin, Ben 78, 84 Garvin, David 82, 87 Gary, William F. 87 Gastonia (N.C.) 63 Gathings, Eddie 93 geography of N.C. 1 of S.C. 1 Georgia 72, 147, 155 lynchings in 6 Gilbert, John Wesley 154 Giles, Sampson 20, 36 Gillam, A. B. 184 Gilliam, Don 178 Gilmore, Brawley 45 Gilmore, Glenda 77 Gist, Dave 30 Gist, Joseph F. 47 Glenn, R. H. 62, 66 Glenn, Robert B. 99, 112–14, 117 illustration 113 Going, Drury D. 22, 30 Goldsboro (N.C.) 167 Good, Dr. J. B. 60 Good, Ed 59 Good, Giles 1, 48, 58, 75, 155, 199–200n.19 early life 49 assault on Robert Alexander 50 and killing of Ellison Saunders 52 arrest for murder of Lee Good 61 lynching of 66–8 illustration 69 Good, James Bankhead 49, 199–200n.19 Good, John 53, 61 Good, Lee 59–60

INDEX Good, Lula 60 Good, Mary Jane 59 Good, Samuel 54 Good, William E. 59, 61, 199–200n.19 Gordon, Charner 27–28 Goshen Hill (S.C.) 11, 32 Goss, J. H. 15 Goss, Laurens 25 governors of Georgia 189 of N.C. 98, 112–14, 117, 166, 176–9, 184 of S.C. 6, 17–19, 21–2, 28–9, 31, 35–6, 39, 45, 50, 88–90, 99, 126, 134, 150, 159, 162, 189 Graham (N.C.) 166–7 Grant, Ulysses S. 37 Grant, W. D. 167 Great Depression 187 Great Migration 145, 155 Great Wagon Road 54 Greenback-Labor party 52 Greensboro (N.C.) 107, 116, 179–80 Greenville (S.C.) 63, 132, 187, 189 illustration 76 Greenville County (S.C.) 189 Greenville Daily News 130 Greenwood County (S.C.) 133 Greer, Bob 30 Greer, J. M. 24 Gregory, Frank 17 grief 64–5, 86 habeas corpus 30–1, 34, 84, 122, 167 Hall, George 117 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd 171, 184 Hamburg Massacre (1876) 39, 96 Hampton, Wade 96, 124 Hardy, Jim 27 Harrell, E. E. 174 Harris, Joel Chandler 182 Harris, Julian 182 Harrison (Ark.) 141 Hartness, Bob 159 Harvey, Charlie 27 Hawkins, Barby 30 Hawkins, Silas 25

INDEX Hayes Station Massacre 122 Hayes, Rutherford 48 Haywood, Harrison 75, 81, 84, 88, 90 Haywood, Washington 75 Henry, J. K. 160 Hickory Grove (S.C.) 159–60 Hicks, John A. 125 Hill, L. B. 32–3 Hill, Lunny 30 Hines, Liz 193n.1 Holmes, L. J. 179 Hoodtown (York Co., S.C.) 59–60, 64 Hoover, Herbert 148 Hope, John 183 Hopewell Church 52–3, 56 Houston Riot (1917) 150 Hubbard, John B. 34 Hughes, Tom 17, 30, 32–3 Indiana, lynchings in 7 Industrial Workers of the World 170 Inman, Elias, attempted murder of 58 insanity 63–6, 70 Institute for Research in Social Science 165, 181 interracial conflict 50, 52–4, 155–9 interracial movement 152–5, 165, 169 interracial sex 58 Interracial Women’s Committee 171 Irby, J. L. M. 124 Isom, Eli N. 162 Isom, Rev. John B. 190 Jackson, Andrew 54 jail, assault on 26–8, 32–3, 61–2, 66, 109, 114, 117, 126, 167, 175 Jersey (Laurens County, S.C.) 131–2 Jeter, Getts 45 Johnson, Andrew 14 Johnson, Daniel P. 100 Johnson, David 29, 37 Johnson, Guinn 103–5 Johnson, Hugh 102–3, 108 Johnson, Ira 108 Johnson, J. V. 93, 100–20 Johnson, J. V. early years 100

237

youth 101 marriage 102 problems with in-laws 102–3 killing of Guinn Johnson 104–5 trial for murder 105–7 lynching of 108–11 illustration 110 Johnson, James Weldon 155 Johnson, Lester 108 Johnson, Marcia 102–3, 110, 114, 119 Johnson, Raynard 142 Johnson, Tom 103, 105, 108 Johnson, Virgil 119 Joiner, Saxe, lynching of (1865) 14 Jones County (N.C.) 167 Jones Creek 108 Jones, J. S. 110 Jones, John 105, 108, 118 Jonesville (S.C.) 13, 16, 30, 38 judges, in N.C. 105, 114, 116, 118, 154, 167, 175 judges, in S.C. 31, 62, 69, 88, 160, 162 justices of the peace, see trial justices Kelly, Brian 146 Kendall, H. D., Jr. 114 illustration 115 Kendall, H. D., Sr. 107, 114, 118 illustration 115 Kentucky, lynchings in 6 Keowee Courier 85 King, W. P. 183 Kitchin, Claude 147 Knights of Labor 97 Knox, Foster 84 Kokomo (Miss.) 142 Ku Klux Klan 5, 9–41, 54, 122, 168, 172 origins of 16 established in S.C. 16 in Union County 16 relationship to Democratic party 10 relationship to moonshining 23 use of rape 79 Lamb, Bob 30 Landrieu, Mary 138 Lattimore, Carson 160

238

INDEX

Laurens (S.C.) 121 Laurensville, see Laurens (S.C.) Laurens Cotton Mill, illustration 124 Laurens County (S.C.) 11, 32, 39, 133 Laurens Riot (1870) 122 Laurinburg (N.C.) 114 law, criminal code of S.C. 10 Lee, Samuel J. 86 Lever Food Control Act of 1917 148 Lever, Asbury F. 148 Lewis, Battle 118 Lewis, Zeke 118 Liberia 38 Liberty (S.C.) 87, 189 Limestone Springs Academy 16 Link, William A. 166 Lipscomb, Mose 1, 59, 61, 66–8 livestock 12 localism 11, 166, 190 Lockhart (S.C.) 43 Lockhart, James A. 107 Long, James Gideon 16 Lowman, Bertha 168 Lowman, Clarence 168 Lowman, Demon 168 Lowman, Sam 168 Lyle, J. Banks 16 Lynching attempts to prevent 83 by burning 131 by hanging 33, 67, 83, 110, 117, 126 by shooting 28, 34, 110, 158, 175, 189 federal response to 35, 37–8, 165, 190 justifications for 84, 134 laws against 114 lawsuits 161–163 opposition to 85, 95, 99 photographs of 140–1, 181–6 precipitating events 5, 104–5 study of 137–8, 181–4, 210n.28 trial of lynch mob 86, 116–17, 119, 160–1 Macclesfield (N.C.) 172 MacNeal, Sam 156 Madden’s Station (Laurens County, S.C.) 125, 132

Manning, Richard I. 6, 150, 159 Marion (Ind.) 139 Marion, John A. 162 Martin Luther King, Jr. Historical Site 141 Martin, V. M. 176 masculinity 71, 76, 80, 201n.7 Maybinton (S.C.) 11 McAlpin, Rev. John R. 55 McCluney, Jack 66 McCormick County (S.C.) 133 McCrady, Edward 51 McCravey, Andy, lynching of (1865) 14 McCreight, David A. 44 McCreight, Robert 44 McFarlan (N.C.) 101, 110 McGill, Meek 160 McGlothlin, W. J. 182 McKinley, William 98 McKissick, Amos 33–4 McKissick, Isaac G. 13, 25, 29, 31, 37 as Ku Klux Klan leader 16 McLendon, H. H. 107 McRae, John A. 107 McRae, Margrett A. 100 Means Crossroads (Union County, S.C.) 23 Meeks, Walter 114 Meeks, Walter, illustration 115 Memphis (Tenn.) 153, 171 Memphis Riot (1866) 14 Methodists 152, 170–1, 183 Metts, J. Van B. 167 Militia in N.C. 117, 166, 168, 177 in S.C. 22–9, 35, 134 established 17 role in Reconstruction 17 defeated by Ku Klux Klan 17 confrontation with Ku Klux Klan 46 disbanded by Gov. Scott 35–6 Miller, G. W. 77, 79–80 Miller, H. C. 79 Mills, Robert 64 Milton, George Fort 181 Milwaukee (Wis.) 139 ministers, African American 14, 22, 29, 38, 56, 89

INDEX

239

Mississippi 39, 139, 143 lynchings in 4, 6, 7 Missouri 170 Mobley, Junius 17, 20, 26 Monetta (S.C.) 168 Monroe (N.C.) 116 Montgomery County (N.C.) 105 Moore, Chayward 174 Moore, Ernest 162 Moore, Oliver background 172 manhunt for 174 arrested 174 lynching of 175 illustration 185 Moore’s Ford (Ga.) 139, 142 Morven (N.C.) 100–1, 107, 114, 119 Morven Presbyterian Church 108 Moton, R. R. 183 moving prisoners 623 Musgrove, Edward 121

Noland, Stout 30 Norman, Dick 159–60 North Carolina Collection 93 North Carolina Student Volunteer Union 179 North Carolina Supreme Court 116, 118 North Carolina, number of lynchings in 4 Norton, J. J. 88 Nuckles, Samuel 12–15, 20, 22, 35, 37 illustration 13

narrative 5, 130–3, 136–8, 146 Nash County (N.C.) 172 Nashville (Tenn.) 152, 154, 170, 181 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 137, 139, 155, 169, 179–80 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, established in S.C. 170 National Laborers Aid and Protective Society of North America 55, 61 National Negro Business League 179 Neal, Claude 7 Neal, Walter H. 114, 116 Neal’s Shoals (Union County, S.C.) 20 Negro Life in the South 153 New England 85 New Orleans Riot (1866) 14 New York Historical Society 140 New York 10 Newberry County (S.C.) 11, 32, 133 Newsome, Larry 167 Newspapers opposition to lynching 68 response to lynching 112, 127–30 Niven, W. A. 108

Pacolet River 11, 32 Paine College 154 Palm Beach County (Fl.) 142 pardon 89 Paris (Tex.) 114 Parish, I. T. 68 Parker, Mack Charles 7, 142 Parris Island (S.C.) 149 Parsons, Elaine 11 Patterson, Daniel W. 93 Payne, William 83 Pea Ridge (Union County, S.C.) 13, 20 Peachland (N.C.) 107 Pee Dee River 93, 100 Pelzer (S.C.) 74 Pendleton (S.C.) 81 Penninger, Fred 159–60 Penninger, T. R. 160 Pennington, W. E. 105 Peterson, H. C. 149 Pfeifer, Michael 6, 95 Pickens (S.C.) 75, 82 Pickens County (S.C.) 189 Pickens Sentinel 84

Odum, Howard W. 165, 181 Ohio 10, 162 Old Sneedsborough (Anson County, N.C.) 100 Old Sparta (N.C.) 174 Oney, Steve 142 Orangeburg County (S.C.) 149, 162 Orr, J. L., Jr. 84 Owens, A. B. 22 Owings, John D. 125, 136 Owings, M. L. 125, 135

240

INDEX

Piedmont 72 Pittsburgh (Pa.) 141 Pratt, J. L. 101 Presbyterians 54, 56, 65, 105 Pressly, B. C. 69 Progressive Era 152, 166 Puckett, James Malachi 131, 135 Puckett, Richard 4, 124–6 illustration 128 Puerto Rico 150 uakers 179 railroad, as employer of African American men 74 railroads 12 Raleigh (N.C.) 167 Raleigh News and Observer 98, 184–6 Randolph County (N.C.) 97 rape, of black women 78–9, 154 of white women 121, 134, 137, 171, 174, 177 Raper, Arthur F. 181–4 illustration 182 Ray, James 167 Reconstruction 3, 5, 9–41, 72, 78, 84, 97, 122 end of 9, 39–40, 50 Reese, John 84, 88 Regulators 121 Reid, Wallace 53 religion 64–6, 86 Republican party 5, 15, 48, 57, 84, 86, 97 Revolutionary War 122 Reynolds, L. R. 180 Rice, B. H. 31, 39 Rich, C. F. 180 Richardson, Heather Cox 77 Richardson, John P. 88–90 Richey, W. R. 136 Richland County (S.C.) 62–3 Richmond (Va.) 72, 180 riots Memphis (1866) 14 New Orleans (1866) 14 Chester (1870) 20 Laurens (1870) 122 Clinton (1870) 122

Ellenton (1876) 39 Hamburg (1876) 39, 96 Wilmington (1898) 139–40, 179, 184 Springfield (1909) 169 East St. Louis (1917) 150 Houston (1917) 150 Charleston (1919) 170 Elaine (1919) 169 Rivera, Dr. A. M. 179–80 Roberts, Dan 59, 61, 66–7 Roberts, Eli 59 Roberts, William 57, 61 Robertson, Thomas J. 37 Robinson, B. H. 23–4 Robinson, L. D. 107, 112, 114 Rock Hill (S.C.) 35, 63 Rockingham County (N.C.) 112 Rocky Mount (N.C.) 172 Rogers, J. Rice 26, 30 Rose Hill Plantation 12 Rosewood (Fl.) 137, 139 Rowan County (N.C.) 116–17 Russell, Daniel 98 Ruth Horowitz Gallery 140 Rutherford County (N.C.) 116 Salem (N.C.) 181 Salem Church 47 Salisbury (N.C.) 116–17, 184 Saluda County (S.C.) 133 Saluda River 74, 121, 189 Sanders, Bill 156, 159, 161 Sanders, Fred 158 Sanders, Lawyer 160 Sanders, Tom 159 Saunders, Ellison 52–4, 56 Saye, J. H. 157 Scaife’s Ferry (Union County, S.C.) 20 Scotch–Irish 54 Scott, Ellison 33 Scott, Robert K. 17, 19, 21–2, 28–9, 31, 35–6, 45, 50 Scott, Tom 72 Scottish Highlands 101 Sedalia (S.C.) 11 Shand, Robert W. 17, 34

INDEX Sharon (S.C.) 155–6, 159 Shaw, Thomas J. 105–7, 116, 118, 154, 167 Shaw, Thomas J., illustration 106 Shelby (N.C.) 176 sheriffs of N.C. 105, 109, 114, 117, 167, 174, 175, 177, 178 of S.C. 26, 30–3, 36, 62, 66, 125, 136, 160, 168 Sherman, Cato 75, 77, 84, 88, 90 Sherman, Delia 75, 77, 90 Sherman, Lula 75, 84 Sherman, Mandy Lu 81 Sims, Mary A. 162 Sims, Rev. Watson T. 4, 155 Sinclair, David 179 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church 139 Slickers 14 Smarr, W. T. 58 Smith, Dan 25 Social Gospel 152–3 South Carolina House of Representatives 9, 20, 28, 31, 37, 86 South Carolina Lunatic Asylum 64 South Carolina State Council of Defense 148, 150 South Carolina 155 South Carolina, number of lynchings in 4 South, as violent region 94–5 Southern Baptist Convention 183 Southern Commission for the Study of Lynching 181–4 Southern Folklife Collection 93 Southern Historical Collection 93 Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South 152 Southern Sociological Congress 152–3 Spanish-American War 98 Spartanburg (S.C.) 31–2, 190 Spartanburg and Union Railroad 12, 20 Spartanburg County (S.C.) 11, 16, 84 Spaulding, C. C. 179 Spears, A. D. 36 Springfield (Mo.) 142 Springfield Riot (1909) 169

241

St. John’s Baptist Church 155 Statesboro (Ga.) 141 Steelwater, Eliza 193n.1 Stephenson, Gilbert T. 154 Stevens, G. Matterson 22–4, 34 stock law 52 Stokes, R. M. 37 Suffolk (Va.) 174 Tarboro (N.C.) 172, 174, 180 Texas 147, 152, 170 Texas, lynchings in 6 textile mills 3, 73–4, 123, 125, 134 The Leopard’s Spots 131 The Tragedy of Lynching 183 theft 57, 60 Thomas, Dr. J. E. L. 175 Thomas, M. S. 107 Thomas, William M. 31 Thompson, A. W. 27 Thompson, Adam 57 Thompson, Prindley 59, 61, 66–7 Thompson, Rev. Silas 56 Thompson, Robert 186 Thomson, Andy 27–8, 30, 33–4 Thurmond, Strom 189 Tigler, Amos 56 Tigler, Ed 53 Tigler, Lewis 56 Tigler, Quay 54 Tillman, Ben 96, 99, 124, 134, 161 Tinsley, John 20, 31, 36 tobacco 104, 173 Tolnay, Stewart 4 Trawick, Kate Herndon 154 trial justices 18, 21–2, 29, 30, 37, 50, 52–3, 60, 78, 105, 108 Tulsa (Ok.) 139 Turkey Creek 43–4, 48, 54 illustration 44 Tuskegee Institute 183 Twitty, Frank 157–9 Tyger River 11 Union (S.C.) 5, 9 Union County (N.C.) 115

242

INDEX

Union County (S.C.) 9–41, 56 geography 11 map 46 Union League 15, 55 Union Reform party 19–22 Union Times 37 Unionville, see Union (S.C.) United States Senate 138 Unity Church 56 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 93, 107, 165, 181 University of South Carolina 208n.18 Vanderbilt University 152, 170, 181 Vanlue, Alfred 26 Vanlue, Joe 25–8, 30, 33–4 Virginia 155, 162 Virginia, lynchings in 6 Wadesboro (N.C.) 93, 105 Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer 112 Wake County (N.C.) 167 Waldrep, Christopher 95 Waldrop, Manse 77–83 Walker, Alex 18, 23, 26–9 Wallace, A. S. 37 Wallace, Rev. John 38–9 Wallace, William H. 29 early career 12–13 as Ku Klux Klan leader 16 and Union Reform party 19 in S.C. House of Representatives 39 as Speaker of S.C. House of Representatives 40 as judge 9, 88 illustration 10 Walton County (Ga.) 142 Warhol Museum 141 Washington (D.C.) 119, 180 Washington, Booker T. 74, 77, 146, 153, 155 Watkins, J. C. 78, 81 Watson, R. O. 175 Wayne County (N.C.) 167 weapons, carried by African Americans 17, 53

Weatherford, Willis D. 152, 154, 169–70, 189 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 137, 154 Wexler, Laura 139, 142 Whipper, W. J. 28, 37 White, H. R. 20, 36–7 White, Walter F. 169, 179 Wilkes, James 46–7 Wilksburg (Chester Co., S.C.) 45–7 Williams, Budd 23 Williams, Isaiah 157–9 Williams, W. F. M. 22, 29 Williams, William C. 75, 81, 84, 88 Wilmington (N.C.) 139, 179 Wilmington Massacre (1898) 139–40, 179–80, 184 Wilson County (N.C.) 172, 174–5 illustration 173 Wilson, Woodrow 147 Windsor (N.C.) 184 Winston (N.C.) 112 Winston-Salem (N.C.) 154 Witherspoon, I. D. 62 ‘Without Sanctuary’ 140–1 World War I 145, 165–6 mobilization 147–9, 155 draft 149 training camps 149 and YMCA 154 World War II 4, 165, 187, 189 Worthy, Jeff 56 Wright, George C. 6 Wright, Sylvanus 23, 27–8, 30, 33–4 Wylie, Emet 64 YMCA 152–3, 170 York (S.C.) 1, 35, 45, 54 York County (S.C.) 1, 5, 32, 41, 46, 48, 146, 155 map 46 Yorkville, see York (S.C.) Young, John L. 20, 26 Young, N. Clifford 183 YWCA 154, 171 Zuczek, Richard 35