Lynching in Kirven, Texas
Three Black men were Lynched in Kirven, Texas for allegedly murdering a young girl. According to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary it was the 19th of 61 lynchings during 1922 in the United States. Background. On May 4th, 1922, on the last day of school in Kirven, Texas, 17-year-old Eula Ausley was forced from her house, sexually assaulted and then horribly mutilated. Her absence was missed and a search party was sent out. They came across the body and the search party turned into a posse of 1,000 men armed with  whatever weapon they had. Eula Ausley's family was in a feud with another family and the local Sheriff Horace Mayo already had two white suspects of that family in custody when the wife of McKinley "Snap" Curry told the Sheriff that he had suspiciously come home with blood on his clothes. The Sheriff changed the course of the investigation and arrested Curry. Under interrogation, he implicated two other men, Johnny Cornish (19) and Mose Jones (46). The three were arrested and held in jail. Lynching. At midnight of May 6th, the mob forced its way into the prison and  dragged the three men out of the jail. The men were tortured on a lot between the old Baptist Church and the Methodist Church in Kirven. Some reports state that they were castrated but at least two were burned alive. The victims were forced to watch as the others were tied to a plow had wood stacked around them, doused on gasoline and then lit on fire. One paper reported that Tom Cornish was hanged from a tree. Aftermath. The two white men, Claude and Audey Prowell, who were initially arrested, were released and the sheriff released a statement that  they were not involved in the murder of Eula Ausley. Author Monte Akers in his book "Flames After Midnight: Murder, Vengeance and the Desolation of a Texas Community," concluded that McKinley "Snap" Curry conspired with Claude and Audey Prowell to kill and murder Eula Ausley and that Mose Jones and Johnny Cornish were innocent. Bibliography. Notes References