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.