Claude A. Clegg - Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South

Troubled Ground

2010 by Claude Andrew Clegg III

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clegg, Claude Andrew.

Troubled ground : a tale of murder, lynching, and reckoning in the

New South / Claude A. Clegg III.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-252-03588-3 (cloth : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-252-07782-1 (pbk.: acid-free paper)

1. LynchingNorth CarolinaSalisburyHistory20th century.

2. African AmericansViolence againstNorth CarolinaSalisburyHistory20th century. 3. MurderNorth Carolina SalisburyHistory20th century. 4. Rowan County (N.C.) Race relationsHistory20th century. I. Title.

HV6465.N67C65 2010

364.134dc22 2010025590

To the ending

of mans inhumanity

to man

Contents

Acknowledgments

A number of people and places made this book possible. I am thankful to the various libraries, archives, and other institutions that facilitated the telling of this story. These places include the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, the Rowan County Public Library, the Livingstone College Archives, the North Carolina State Archives, the libraries of Indiana University, the College of Charleston library, the University of South Carolina library, and the Salisbury Post. Further, I appreciate the insightful feedback of my Indiana University colleaguesWendy Gamber, Ed Linenthal, and Jim Madisonwho read early drafts of this book, as well as Bruce Baker, who allowed me to read an unpublished chapter of his own work on lynchings in the Carolinas. Additionally, I am grateful for the editorial guidance of Joan Catapano and the useful suggestions offered by the two anonymous reviewers. It should also be noted that John Hollingsworth did a particularly fine job on the maps.

Special thanks to relatives who have made life and my interest in this project more meaningful. My wife, Alfreda, was characteristically supportive of this work and provided a close reading of the preliminary draft. My sister-in-law, Shelia (Currie) Stokes, rounded up North Carolina newspapers for me during the 2008 presidential campaign and was a pleasure to talk with about politics. I am especially grateful to my parents, Elizabeth (Seigle) Burton and Claude Clegg Jr., for their support and guidance over the past four decades. In many ways, the writing of this book was inspired by them and the future that they made possible for me.

Prologue

Searching for a Troubled Past

In 2000, a book was published that pictorially represented the history of lynching in the United States. I neither recall when I first heard of this work, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, nor the date that it arrived at my home as a mail order. Nonetheless, as a student of history, I felt compelled to peruse the book and add it to my collection. From beginning to end, the work is a grim journey through the darkness of Americas racial past. It is a graphic rendition of nearly a centurys worth of hangings, burnings, shootings, and butcherings of African Americansand a few othersby mobs, abetted by the failure of the countrys leaders and citizenry to make meaningful efforts to halt such extralegal executions. Comprised of postcard photos, newspaper snapshots, and other images, I found Without Sanctuary powerful, even overwhelming, in its unrelenting visual statements about the possible depths of human depravity. I also found the volume, wrapped in its solemn black dust jacket, a disturbingly grotesque undertaking, but one that I felt necessary. After all, while there is arguably no tasteful way to present the appalling distasteful, I could appreciate what the author was asking the reader to see and to contemplate.

As I turned the pages and fixed my eyes upon the next picture and subtitle, I tried to imagine what the white faces that gazed back at me represented as they grinned beside smoldering or hanging corpses. I wanted to know and, at the same time, did not want to know what they were thinking. There was too much going on in some of the images to psychologically digest all at once. Some of the photos had obviously been taken in urban settings with stores and paved streets, while others captured lynchings conducted in backwoods and remote rural stretches. There were crowds of all sizes, with many self-consciously aware of the photographer and others entranced by the gruesome spectacle that they had created. People posed dramatically, leaned against trees and posts, tugged on the leashes of hunting dogs, and angled for a better view of the camera. Children are present in several of the images, undoubtedly brought to the lynching site by curious parents, some of whom were likely perpetrators of the murder. Many of the pictures suggest a broad communal participation in the killing or at least its observance, judging from the presence of women, the professionally dressed, and the unmistakably festive atmosphere. The black-and-white coloring of the photos conveys a sense of age, of things long past. However, the racial configuration of the images is undeniable in its pattern and message.

To be sure, the book infrequently portrays the lynching of white men, and at least one black woman suspended from a bridge, her neck, like so many others, bent unnaturally into almost a ninety-degree angle by the hangmans noose. Still, the bulk of the bookas were the vast majority of known lynchingsis about black male victims and white (mostly male) mobs. For me, it was these images that were the most difficult to mentally process, given their explicit portrayals or veiled suggestions of dismemberment, disfigurement, and other tortures. One has to look hard at these pictures simply to have a chance at believing them. And to believe them means to be horrified and brutalized by them, prompting a reflexive desire to quickly turn the page.

I looked at more of the pictures and read their descriptionsTexas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, on and on. There are very few states in the country unsullied by this past, with some more steeped in this history of mob murder than others. As a historian, I had known about this quintessentially American phenomenon and had even taught classes on African American history that treated lynching in some detail. But none of this prepared me for one of the images that I came across as I thumbed through this most arresting volume. The picture itself, rendered in sepia tones as opposed to black and white, is not the most macabre in Without Sanctuary. In relative terms, it might strike the intrepid viewerthat is, those who could endure viewing the full contents of the bookas a typical lynching scene involving black men and their white tormenters at the turn of the twentieth century. Immediately one notices the peculiar arrangement of the hanging bodies, which had been suspended from a tree branch by ropes tied around the neck and right leg of each victim. Also, the tattered clothing of the men, each with chest exposed, is discernable. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that one of the bodies was obviously not that of a man, but of a boy, perhaps in his mid-teens. Moreover, evidence of torture was clearly visible on the torso of one victim, along with telltale blood stains on his clothing. In common with many of the other depictions, I learned later that this lynching had drawn a huge crowd. Yet in the photo, only one white face is clearly visible, although the hands of others appear at the edges as they touch the massive oak. As had become my habit before turning the page, I glanced at the description of the picture, image no. 12, to see where and when this tragedy had occurred. And there it was as plain as the photo that it referenced: The lynching of five African American males. August 6, 1906, Salisbury, North Carolina.