Very Strange Fruit
By: Dale M. Brumfield
Tags: Black History, Lynching, Black Lives Matter, Criminal Justice, Jim Crow

Very Strange Fruit

Two unusual 1908 Southern lynchings underscore the sometimes unexplainable proclivities of Jim Crow-era mob violence

By INITIAL APPEARANCES, the lynching of an unidentified Black man in Pine Level, North Carolina was yet another in a long line of infuriating and tragic miscarriages of justice by angry, hooded Jim Crow-era mobs. In this case, the mob broke into a boarding house around 8:00 p.m. on Monday, January 6, 1908, and dragged the man outside. His mutilated body was found the next morning along some railroad tracks. It was assumed he had been shot to death then laid on the tracks to be mangled by a passing train.

But this described “strange negro” was not lynched because he killed someone, or because he raped, assaulted, or back-talked a white woman, as was usually the case. No one had ever been lynched for what he was accused. He was not even lynched by angry white men.

Six months later, around June 20 near Parkdale, Arkansas, a seemingly similar mob dragged a Black man named Ernest Williams outside of town and strangled him with a grass rope before hanging his body from a telegraph pole. His crime was not too rare to provoke a lynch mob, but it was the demographic of the mob that was unique

Both of these lynchings are shrouded in mystery, but both display unusual circumstances, uncommon mobs, and even stranger “crimes” that underscore the difficulties in understanding and analyzing the lynching phenomenon.

The complexities of lynching

The lynching of Blacks by Whites were significant and tragic occurrences across the United States but especially throughout the American South from 1880 until around 1940. While the lynching of Mexicans in the Southwest, and Native Americans in the Northwest was prevalent prior to and after the Civil War, from the earliest days of post-war reconstruction, mob violence and lynching were used in the Deep South to subjugate Blacks and uphold white supremacy, especially after the withdrawal of federal troops from Southern cities in the late 1870s. During the darkest days of Jim Crow, African-American men, women, and children — sometimes accused of crimes and sometimes not — were tortured, hung, shot, even mutilated and burned alive, sometimes in front of cheering crowds, especially in the Deep South states of Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, and Arkansas.

The definition of lynching adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) is widely accepted as the standard. It required four conditions: (1) there must be evidence that a person was killed; (2) the person must have met death illegally; (3) a group of three or more persons must have participated in the killings (for example, to rule out personal vendettas); and (4) the group must have acted under the pretext, however misguided, of protecting justice or tradition.

The caveat of “protecting justice or tradition” may be the secret to the sporadic diversity of lynching, enabling justification of even the flimsiest of reasons in the minds of the lynchers. This duality presents unusual challenges to historians and sociologists in explaining mob motivation and behavior — especially in the bizarre case of the “strange negro” of North Carolina and the one of Ernest Williams in Arkansas, both coincidentally lynched in the year 1908.

Doomed to disappointment

In the Pine Level case, an unknown Black man showed up in town one day, advertising and hawking a grand and unusual variety show the next night, in which there would be many ‘first-class features.” The Concord Daily Tribune reported that “When the show night came around the negroes of the community turned out in full force, attracted by the alluring advertisement.”

They were, however, “doomed to disappointment.” Instead of a full line-up of first-class entertainment, the attendees instead witnessed a one-man performance, “and a very poor performance at that,” presented by the agent himself. While it is unknown exactly what acts the “advance agent” did to extract such a negative response, the Daily Tribune noted that “it was a very angry set of negroes that wended its way homeward after the ‘show.’”

The Black performer was undaunted by the audience’s disappointment, and the next day he and an unidentified woman checked into a Black boarding house in Pine Level and began advertising yet another show two nights hence, this time accompanied by his female co-performer, billing it as “grander and greater” than the first show.

The Wilmington Messenger, Jan. 10, 1908

The show did not go on. The night before the advertised entertainment, a mob of Black men, each wearing a burlap sack over their heads, forcibly entered the boarding house and removed the showman. The next morning, his mangled body was found along the Southern Railroad tracks. A coroner’s jury concluded that the man had been killed before his body was laid on the tracks. Meanwhile, his female companion had disappeared, and neither of their identities were ever established.

While the community was the most likely the victim of fraud, the man was described as being lynched “for being a bad showman.”

The lynching had a temporary withering effect on traveling performers. The Raleigh Times noted that “Since North Carolina has taken to lynching the folks who give fake shows, some of the troops [performers] who come to Washington regularly have cut that state out of their itinerary.”

Black on Black

Historians struggle to explain the anomaly of Black-on-Black lynchings, which were rare during the Jim Crow era but not unheard of, especially in Mississippi and the Arkansas Delta region, with an estimated 200–250 committed. Bruce Baker in the book “Lynching Reconsidered: New Perspectives in the Study of Mob Violence” indicates that lynchings such as these “transcend the old tropes of lynching historiography.”

But transcend how? Did Blacks consider lynching one of their race a way of showing the ruling whites that they were equally disgusted by certain crimes, and were willing to take the drastic action needed to proactively contain a more brutal and far-reaching reaction from the white community?

Or was it just naked retribution? In Tazewell, Virginia in 1893 a Black coal miner named Charles Morgan was “hanged and riddled with bullets” after Morgan had indiscriminately fired into a crowd of people and killed a young Black boy named John Leese. The Clinch Valley Times reported that at around midnight on Sunday, April 2, 1893, “a mob of the better class of negroes marched to the jail quietly, and took possession of the prisoner. Half a mile west of the town the body of Morgan hangs to a ‘sour apple tree’ this morning filled with bullets.”

“Negro is Lynched by Mob of Women”

A few months after the Pine Level incident, in the Spring of 1908, the Black women of Parkdale, Arkansas organized a league to enforce “better moral conduct” among members of their race and to (according to the Daily Arkansas Gazette) “protect themselves from negro men.”

One resident of Parkdale, a Black railroad worker named Ernest Williams, who was regarded as a local blowhard and ruffian, repeatedly used “profane and objectionable language” in the presence of several members of this league of women. Taking their mission statement to an extreme after “a secret meeting,” at around 8:30 at night on June 22 a large group of Black Parkdale women, offended by Williams’ language, dragged the hapless Black man to a telegraph pole, stripped away his clothes and hung him with a rope until he was dead. “It is alleged Williams’ conduct was offensive to some of them,” reported the Gazette, “and that they captured him one night and took his life.” His nude body was found the next morning.

Waterloo [Iowa] Courier, June 22, 1908

The Gazette reported that “mystery enveloped the entire affair,” and that the crime caused a “sensation” not just among the Black community but among the whites as well. A coroner’s jury verified that the cause of death was strangulation with a grass rope. The white town marshal, most likely embarrassed by the affair and wishing it covered up, told the Gazette that he had no knowledge of the constitution of the mob and that no investigation had been conducted at that point.

If the account is true, it may be the only lynching on record committed by a mob of “insulted’ Black women. There were no follow-ups published regarding arrests of the mob and no further reports of Black men acting badly to the women of Parkdale.

“Was [Black-on-Black lynching] an equal-opportunity sanction that a community might use against the worst offenders without regard to the colors of the parties involved?” Baker asks, but this is not the case with either the Pine Level or the Parkdale cases, as neither victim could be considered by reasonable people as a “worst offender.” Whatever the reasons, they lent credence to the accusations of anti-lynching reformers, who deplored the impartial and retributive nature of lynch law, regardless of which race practiced it. Perhaps that was their point.

###

Read more “American Grotesk Historytelling” at www.dalebrumfield.net. My latest book “Railroaded” is available at all online sellers.