Lynching in America and Terre Haute — Part 1

Lynching in America and Terre Haute — Part 1 ... Remembering their names
By Gary Daily | Special to the Tribune-Star
First of three parts


“What do we not want to know about the past? What do we not want to know about ourselves?” — Jacqueline Rose

On June 12, 1963, rifle in hand, a coward hides in bushes across the street from the home of Medgar Evers. At the time, Evers was the Black civil rights leader in Mississippi, the first field secretary for the NAACP in that state. Segregationist and KKK member Byron De La Beckwith murders Evers that night. He is arrested for the crime. In 1964, though much hard evidence was assembled and presented, two all-white juries failed to reach a verdict to convict Beckwith.


Movies and documentaries have been made about the murder of Medgar Evers. They have featured the tireless fight for justice his wife, Myrlie Evers-Williams, waged for over three decades. Beckwith was re-tried and convicted of the murder in 1994. He remained in prison until his death in 2001 at age 80. Medgar Evers was 37 when he was murdered.

Some now know the name Medgar Evers. Few know of the 22 Black lynching victims who died “at the hands of persons unknown” in Hinds County, Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi, Hinds County, is where Evers died.

Medgar Evers’ life was badly bruised by his contact with lynchings. He took up the work of civil rights in Mississippi in 1955, partially in response to the lynching of young Emmett Till of Chicago. Till was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in the summer of that year. He may or may not have whistled at a white woman working in a crossroads store in Money. For this alleged outrage, Emmett Till was brutally beaten, an eye gouged out, and shot in the head. His body was then tied with barbed wire to a 75-pound cotton gin fan and dumped into the Tallahatchie River.

Emmett Till was 14 years old at the time.

Some now know the name of Emmett Till. Money, Mississippi, is in Leflore County. Leflore was the most active lynching county in Mississippi. Few know the names of even one of the 48 racial terror lynching victims recorded in this single county between 1877 and 1950.

In 1940, Medgar Evers was a high school student when he witnessed this: Willie Tingle being dragged behind a wagon through the rough and dusty streets of Decatur, Mississippi. Tingle supposedly insulted a white woman. For this he was shot and hanged by a mob. Tingle was a Black friend of the Evers family,

Each day Medgar walked to school he passed by the tree Tingle was hanged from. Reports on this lynching note that bloody garments from Tingle’s dead body were purposely left under this tree for weeks. Did Evers move quickly as he passed this place of pain and injustice? Did he avert his eyes? Or did he think about what happened there? Did he remember this the rest of his life?


Medgar Evers was 14 at the time of the Willie Tingle lynching.

The numbers are unknown. Though whites and others were lynched after the Civil War, the vast majority of those lynched were Black men, women and children. How many?

Various counts have been taken. A recent report by the Equal Justice Institute (EJI) in Montgomery brings the number of verified African American victims of racial terror killings between 1865 and 1950 to almost 6,500. Few can name one individual in this deadly flood of the tortured and murdered. The victims of this deep stain on justice in America have been erased in our history books. They were denied due process, equality under the law, refused even a sliver of justice.

Lynchings can suddenly explode in a community. Sometimes they take place in the dark of night, with few around to witness the horror; sometimes they were highly publicized events, carried out as the sun burns overhead and crowds jostle for views of the grisly spectacle. But night or day, people in small towns and large cities always hear about, read about, and know about these lynchings.

Questions worth pondering are: How do white Americans remember (and forget) these lynchings? And Black Americans?

And not just in Medgar Evers’ Mississippi. Not just in the South. EJI has documented 18 lynchings in Indiana. One of those lynchings took place in Vigo County. The name of the Black American lynched here in 1901, hanged from the Wagon Bridge spanning the Wabash River at Terre Haute, was George Ward.

Have you ever heard that name? George Ward.

Coming Monday: “The problem that we have is not that these mobs were inhuman, it’s that they were human.”

Gary Daily is Associate Professor Emeritus, Department of History and African American Studies, Indiana State University. He is a member of the local Facing Injustice project. This column represents his research and views and not those of any other group or organization.

Lynching in America and Terre Haute — Part 2

Lynching in America and Terre Haute — Part 2 ... A post-slavery tool of white supremacy

By Gary Daily | Special to the Tribune-Star

Second of three parts

“The problem that we have is not that these mobs were inhuman, it’s that they were human.”

Lynching in America targeted Blacks. Many, many of the Black lynching victims were also tortured in unspeakable ways. And following the mob executions, the victims' bodies were often burned, portions cut off and sold for souvenirs. None of this was common in the darkest days of slavery.

These vicious, malign and sick acts might be understood as part of the transition from slave days to the era of Jim Crow. Slavery legally, through the United States Constitution and state laws, recognized the ownership of one human being by another. However, the project of turning enslaved people of African origins into property did not go smoothly. As the historian Kenneth Stampp fully documents, the enslaved could be a “A Troublesome Property.”

Black people in the fields, slave quarters, and in the “master’s house” always found ways to resist their enslaved condition. Though surrounded by the power of the law, the bull whip, and the threat of sale (which took Black people away from family and community), this “Troublesome Property” still fought the circumstances of their lives with courage and cunning.

Slave holders had a serious problem. In few cases did they discipline or punish by resorting to maiming or execution. Businessmen, the owners of this “property” prospered on free labor. Slaves were far too valuable to punish through crippling or elimination. But when the enslaved were turned into the free, this attitude changed dramatically.

With the end of the Civil War, roads and paths throughout the South were filled by Freedmen searching for family members scattered by sales or just leaving the scene of the crimes of slavery they had suffered on the home plantation. No longer the “owners” of these free Blacks, white southerners did not hesitate to lynch and torture those they deemed too free, too demanding, too ambitious, too “uppity.”

Here are two examples from the hundreds of reports submitted to the Freedmen’s Bureau (an agency set up to support and protect Blacks immediately following the Civil War):

“Killed because he did not take off his hat to Murphy.”

“A Negro was killed in the calaboose [jail] of the city of Selma, by being beaten with a heavy club, also being tied up by the thumbs, clear of the floor, for three hours, and further gross abuse, lasting more than a week”

Each report contained long lists of crimes against recently enslaved Blacks. The reports were filed under the title “Complaints and Outrages.”

With the end of Reconstruction in 1876, strict segregation was being instituted, Jim Crow reigned, and lynching became a tool of white supremacy, a much used instrument of terror and control. The “Complaints and Outrages” file was gone, but unvarnished, often supportive, reports of lynchings could now be found regularly in the newspapers of the day. An example: Flash forward to April 1911.

Livermore, Kentucky, is a small town 165 miles south of Terre Haute. It was there that a Black man, Will Porter, allegedly shot a white man named Frank Mitchell. Fearing a mob lynching the sheriff attempted to hide Porter in the local opera house. Leaders in the mob discovered this ploy, stormed in and seized the alleged shooter. However, rather than turning Porter over to the mob outside of the building, they proceeded to set a post up center stage, tie the victim to the post, and invite members of the mob waiting outside to purchase tickets and directly participate in the murder lynching of their prisoner.

What did this direct participation consist of? The price of an orchestra level seat granted the ticket holder an invitation to fire six bullets into the human being on stage. Balcony seat holders were allowed a single shot. Orchestra seating granted the ticket holder six. (It was common in lynchings to pass a gun around to create shared culpability, with each person firing a shot.) Fifty tickets were sold. It’s estimated that 200 shots were fired. How many of these tore into Will Porter’s body could never be determined.

Only recently founded in 1909, the NAACP investigated and publicized this lynching. Their active agitation played a part in an unusual occurrence, 18 white men involved in the Porter lynching were actually arrested and tried. Not so unusually, all 18 were quickly acquitted by an all white jury. The fifty ticket holders? They were left with the memories of their participation.

Today the Greater Terre Haute branch of the NAACP leads the locally based Facing Injustice project. Facing Injustice is working with the nationally known Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama. This partnership is bringing an historical marker (the first of its kind in the state of Indiana) to be set near the site where George Ward was lynched in 1901. The marker site is on the banks of the Wabash River, 165 miles north of Livermore, Kentucky.

No tickets were sold to the George Ward Terre Haute lynching. It took place mid-day on a Tuesday. There were no formal notifications put out in the community announcing the violent spectacle to come. Yet one to two thousand citizens from the community came to see the George Ward lynching.

Is this what the thousands came to see, wanted to see? They saw Ward dragged from jail and hanged from the Wabash River Wagon Bridge. They stood by to observe his dead body being cut down and burned on the west bank of the river. Feeling confident in their actions, their spectator contribution to this lynching, our Terre Haute community ancestors ignored the law and any spirit of justice.

Coming Wednesday: “Death at the hands of persons unknown.”

Gary Daily is Associate Professor Emeritus, Department of History and African American Studies, Indiana State University. He is a member of the local Facing Injustice project. This column represents his research and views and not those of any other group or organization.

Lynching - Part 2

 

Lynching in America and Terre Haute — Part 3

Lynching in America and Terre Haute — Part 3 ... Is silence in face of injustice still possible?
By Gary Daily | Special to the Tribune-Star
Last of three parts

“Death at the hands of persons unknown.”

George Ward was lynched in Terre Haute on Feb. 26, 1901. He was arrested in connection with the murder of an 18-year-old teacher, Ida Finklestein, at his workplace the morning of the 26th and lynched that same afternoon.


There is no such thing as a typical lynching victim. Yet every lynching in America (4,000 to 6,000 since 1865 — and the count goes on) is the same in one important way. Lynching is an illegal act, an injustice. George Ward and Ida Finklestein were both denied justice. A mob murdered Ward, and the young teacher’s assailant, whomever it might have been, was never investigated, arrested, or prosecuted under the law.

As so many of the coroner and judicial accounts of lynchings in the past would state in their reports, both George Ward and Ida Finklestein died “... at the hands of persons unknown.”

Eighteen documented lynchings have taken place in the state of Indiana. The Ward lynching is the only one in the history of Terre Haute. Important facts surrounding Ward’s lynching, in official documents, in news accounts and personal testimony, are few, sketchy, missing, lost, never collected. Descriptions of this violent lawlessness primarily come from the newspapers of the day.

At the turn of the 20th century, newspaper reports of lynchings were sensational, using heated language in their descriptions of crimes committed and the alleged perpetrators. The stories were often overtly racist. In the white press, in northern as well as southern newspapers, you would find headlines targeting lynching victims as “Negro ruffian,” “colored cannibal,” “dissolute Negress” and “African Annie.”

The Terre Haute Gazette ran this headline after George Ward’s lynching: “THE BLACK BRUTE KILLED BY A MOB.” The paper went on to introduce readers to the story: “A DETAILED STORY OF THE FIEND’S AWFUL CRIME.” When the lynch victims were Black, they were always assumed to be guilty.

Keeping this in mind, here is all that can be said with any assurance on the lynching of George Ward.

After George Ward’s arrest, he was taken to the Vigo County jail. In less than two hours, between noon and 1 p.m., a mob formed outside of the jail. He was seized by a group from this mob who broke through the jail door. It’s possible Ward was killed by a sledge hammer blow to the head by someone from this group. None of those breaking into the jail tried to hide their identity.


George Ward was then dragged at the end of a rope to the Wabash River Wagon Bridge which was four blocks away. He was kicked and possibly shot while being hauled through the growing crowd. None of those who dragged him or defiled his body as it passed them tried to hide their identity.

George Ward’s body was hanged from a cross bar on the bridge. None of those who looped the noose of wire and rope around his neck or helped to hoist the body until it left the ground to swing over the Wabash River tried to hide their identity.

George Ward’s body was soon cut down and taken to a sandbar on the west side of the river. His body was placed in a horizontal position on top of a pile of branches and wood planks. This pile was set on fire and turpentine and coal oil was added to fuel the flames. None of those who set and fueled this fire tried to hide their identity.

George Ward’s body burned for hours until it crumbled and fell apart. Some took away pieces of clothes, shoes, and bones as souvenirs. The souvenir scavengers are not known. However, a grainy photo of locals posing around the fire consuming Ward’s body was taken. None of those in this photo have ever been identified.

George Ward was a 27-year-old Black man, a steady worker, literate, married three years, and the father of two young children. The mob which took part in his lynching was white and included men, women and children. The mob’s size was estimated at between 1,000 and 2,000. Not one person in this mob ever came forward to report on their participation in the lynching of George Ward.

The Facing Injustice project in Terre Haute was organized in 2018 under the auspices of the Greater Terre Haute NAACP Branch. It has worked with the nationally known Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to bring an historical marker to the Vigo County community. This marker will serve as a remembrance of the George Ward lynching, a difficult and too real part of our community’s and nation’s history.

Until now, more than 120 years later, there was no indication of the crime committed near this site in 1901. At that time — the law, church leaders and their congregations, the community at large — were essentially silent. This historical marker should serve to raise a question in each of us: Is such silence in the face of injustice still possible today?

On Sept. 26, 2021, at 3 p.m. in Fairbanks Park, the George Ward marker will be installed and dedicated. The marker will be the first of its kind in the state of Indiana. Open to the public, all are invited to attend. You can be a part of this historic event.

Gary Daily is Associate Professor Emeritus, Department of History and African American Studies, Indiana State University. He is a member of the local Facing Injustice project. This column represents his research and views and not those of any group or organization.

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Published in Terre Haute Tribune Star, Sept. 22, 2021

Lynching -- Part 3