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