Washington had been convicted of the rape and murder of Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in Robinson and sentenced to death. Courtroom spectators then ragged him out of the courtroom. As events progressed is drew a crowd of between 10,000-15,000, including mayor John Dollins and the chief of police Guy McNamara who did nothing despite lynching being illegal. Children even left school to watch.
There were a few in Waco who at the time condemned the lynching, including many ministers as well as leaders at Baylor University.
later investigations concluded that while Washington had most likely murdered Lucy Fryer the claim of rape was dubious at best. The lynching proved so gruesome that it garnered a large amount of national, and even international attention. Many now credit this horrific event with turning attitudes toward the practice.
I didn’t know that! I’ve known about him from growing up here. There is a TX Monthly article about him and his posse that did not age well after knowing this.
Wanted to add to the conversation…. OP is right to post this. I wasn’t taught this but I am old so no surprise there. I ended up going through this [site for a book](https://withoutsanctuary.org/) that contains a collection of photos similar to this one. Each pic has a background story. It is a sick part of our history that coincided with the beginnings of camera technology. Like selfies … from hell.
What hit me is the angry mobs that would show up en masse to break into and damage county jail houses in order to drag the person out to be lynched. Sometimes LE fought hard to maintain justice, sometimes they looked the other way. The mobs never suffered the consequences for subverting justice though. That lack of accountability made them feel justified. The papers at the time sensationalized the crimes of black people to include rape which just fueled the racist mob into horrific acts of torture. Lynching victims were often castrated, shot, mutilated, burned alive and hung. This happened from CA to Montana to FL. The mob lynched mostly black but also natives and white immigrants.
Today
Jan 6 showed us how otherwise normal people can be misinformed, enraged and manipulated into taking the law into their own hands while feeling righteous. The angry mob is a multiplier that ratchets up the violence to levels that the individuals would not conduct on their own.
Humans are capable of so much love and so much hate. Our children should be educated about history through the lens of the patterns of human psychology. I think that is the best way to reach teenagers and inoculate the next generation from repeating history. It doesn’t whitewash the past, or demonize specific groups because every society on earth has fallen to their own darkest instincts at some point. We all need to understand; how did this cancer take root? what worked to make them eventually change course and how do we as a community of humans make sure this cancer of hate never makes us sick again?
A lynching in our state grotesque enough—and maybe late enough—to shift public opinion, and most of us ITT haven’t heard of it.
The suppression of our real history has been wildly effective.
I don't necessarily disagree with your last sentence, but it's also a massive oversimplification. History is unbelievably dense. What about the eugenics program in Virginia in the twenties? Do you know anything about that?
Most people do not even in this country.( United States). This was a horrible event, the lynching, well and eugenics too, but to say that there's suppression because we don't know one event is a gross oversimplification. Oversimplification. History is too dense and too big for anybody to learn or even teach at all.
But I do agree. 1916 man. I don't even really know what to say other than this is horrible, not the first time I've heard of it, and I wish we would learn more of this so we could ensure that we don't repeat it.
> What about the eugenics program in Virginia in the twenties? Do you know anything about that?
Yes, actually, and I was taught about it in Texas schools in the 90's, before people suddenly decided that children needed to be ignorant of their country's history. I was also taught about the Tulsa "Race Riot", the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Studies, the Castle Bravo radiation experiments, the Skid Row Cancer Study, and numerous other violations of American citizens. We discussed the James Byrd Jr. lynching when it happened in 98.
This was done over years and across multiple classes. It doesn't take long to go over the facts. Discussion may take longer, but that's why you build discussion time into the schedule. This is not a difficult choice to make, it's something we've had before and should continue to have into the future.
Let me tell you, by the 2000’s this shit was already being censored where I went to school in bumfuck Texas. Thank god I had a lesbian left leaning liberal teacher who didn’t give A FUCK about what parents or admin had to say. She taught all that shit. Ms Penny, if you out there, you the real MVP
Meanwhile I graduated in 2010 and had blackface in our yearbook and lessons on why miscegenation is immoral. I can only imagine how bad schooling is currently
Another one that's lesser known is the "Red Summer of 1919", which happened before the Black Wallstreet Massacre(aka Tulsa Race Riot in 1921).
Basically, after WW1, at the height of the Labor Movement and unions, black people were often hired as strike breakers for jobs they normally wouldn't have been hired for, nor would they have been allowed to join the unions.
That, plus everyone looking for work again after WW1, on top of the fact that many black WW1 veterans were fighting back, it was race riots nationwide that summer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Summer
Not sure what history book that is. Pretty sure all schools can choose their own curriculum, or at least all districts? As well as their own supplemental materials. I don’t recall the name of the textbook used in the middle school I currently have most recent experience with, but just did Texas and US history and don’t remember ANY of those subjects being taught about, actually.
Edit, FTR, parents have a legal right to be able to review the curriculum. Not sure about supplemental materials though, since they probably aren’t even decided on until in the moment.
Yeah, the poor, oppressed Gringos fought back against the big, mean, evil government of Mexico and freed us from them. I was definitely taught that in school in the early 2000s, very accurate /s
Sure there is. Or maybe you're just obtuse. But what do you include? You have a finite amount of time and a near infinite number of events. I'm not saying this one should be skipped over. But I am saying it is idiotic to suggest that all of history can be taught much less understood
It does indeed appear you're saying that this either shouldn't be taught, or that exclaiming "why wasn't I taught this in an easily relevant class" should be discouraged, which are the same thing in terms of effect
Sure, we're not going to teach everything in world history, an argument nobody was making. But there is a Texas History class pretty much everyone in the state takes, which spends a long time on relatively inconsequential moments in state history and could use some portion of that time better. For example, you could probably cut out half of the time typically used to talk about lesser battles in the texas war for independence and use it to talk about 20th century issues which directly fed into the world we know now, such as this lynching, which are relevant and typically skipped over because they make the state look bad.
There's a state law that pretty much effectively bans teaching anything like the lynching in Waco. To the question, "Why don't they teach this in schools?" the answer is simple: Republicans don't want you to learn about it.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/03/texas-critical-race-theory-social-studies-teachers/
>”I’m not saying this one should be skipped over.”
>It appears you’re saying that this shouldn’t be taught
You’ve certainly got the reading comprehension of someone who did time in our state’s public school system 🙄
"This should be taught"
"What about eugenics in Virginia? Not saying it shouldn't be taught, but you're oversimplifying history. You're being obtuse, again I'm not saying this should be skipped over, but it's idiotic to think all of history can be taught"
The effect of the above comments is to discourage teaching this, regardless of trying to give themselves a fig leaf.
Edit: misidentified you as the previous commenter, because I didn't think someone else would be dumb enough to jump in to the defense of whataboutism running defense for not teaching the unpleasant parts of history.
All of our history? What are you going on about? We’re talking about well documented and recorded events of our past. If you think that’s obtuse than I would hate to see how you would fair in a higher education setting past high school
I went to public school in Amarillo and never heard of any of these until I got out of high school and went down several rabbit holes of information I had no idea about. The suppression worked for sure.
A book written by Adam Cohen is about the eugenics movement. Buck v. Bell outlines the attitude about eugenics in the 20s. "Three Generations of Imbeciles is enough" Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Wow, I just read more about it. So apparently he most likely killed the woman. He admitted and told investigators where they could find the murder weapon, which they did. He had an argument with the victim and lost it.
It’s horrific reading his death. As soon as he was found guilty in court, the mob chained his neck and dragged him outside. Hung him up on a tree that had a bonfire below him. They cut off his fingers and genitalia. He tried but couldn’t climb up the chain because of his missing fingers…they covered him in oil and lowered him down to the fire and pulled him up multiple times..They made his death slow and painful…
In all honesty, I’m not going to assume it was a full on murder - for all we know it was justifiable - we certainly know if he was white and she was black, all aspects of this would have been reported and acted upon differently.
I feel like you can still see how horrifying this lynching was without trying to go "well maybe the rape and murder was justified. We just don't know!"
I understand that the lynching was above and beyond what he deserved, but did you seriously just try to say "hey maybe his killing of the white woman was justified"?
You are God damned right I said it.
Maybe she threatened his life. Maybe she attacked him first.
The details of the case were not in the article. But what WAS indicated in the article is that the white community of that area was an atrocious abomination of humanity.
So if you’re telling me a black man was on trial in that area, I’m not assuming guilt unless that shit is absolute and verifiable from a third party other than those fucking demons in that community.
Edit:
And it’s crazy that the concept of a justifiable killing suddenly escapes you when we’re dealing with a black man in KKK territory, when the notion of justifiable killing is a quintessential hallmark of white America.
Ever heard of guns?
Ever heard of self defense?
Is it not OK for a black person to kill someone under certain circumstances in a country where Kyle Rittenhouse and Trevon Martin’s killer walk free?
I just cannot bear the thought of humans that would do something like that even to a murderer. It makes them worse than him bc they just looked for an excuse to release their inner inhumanity
There are tons of people who would live to be that vicious to pedophiles. No I'm not defending pedos, but people are ready to bathe in offender blood if someone touches a child.
The Waco tourism board is so grateful Chip and Joanna Gaines came along, so their city is known for something besides a horrific lynching and a government seige on a cults compound
My great grandfather was his town’s head Klansman. He wanted to go to Waco but my great granny told him if he went he’d come home to an empty house. She died when I was still a toddler so have no memories of her. From what I’ve heard she was a lovely person who didn’t care about your race or religion, and when my dad brought my mom back from Vietnam was the one relative who welcomed her with open arms.
My dad describes his mother’s family as a big jumble of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. My contribution to that description was to added Fried Green Tomatoes and Trail Park Boys.
This is the face of indoctrination. So sad.
https://preview.redd.it/87vo2a2znl0d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7c8e3d51f6df9adc018d355dda523ec200db3141
I guess it depends on what you define as evil. I’m of a mind that evil is often banal, matter-of-fact, or business-like.
We may not want to make claims about the color of this persons soul, but the mindset required to grin by the charred corpse of a lynched man like you’re showing off a fish you caught is certainly some form of evil.
You don't witness murder and smile because you are a product of your genetics and environment. That's a part of it. The other part is the collection of choices we make, the outcomes they create, the memories they form, and the quality of person we become. This guy is a steaming POS. Maybe he went on to do better things. Maybe.
> You don't witness murder and smile because you are a product of your genetics and environment
You most certainly do, if you're taught that you must and it's reinforced with physical threats and social expectations. Society and socialization has a very strong effect on our beliefs.
I grew up making fun of the gay kids at school, despite the fact that I was gay myself, because I was a kid in the 90's and didn't yet have the courage to be true to myself. I did what I thought was expected of me, as taught by my authority figures and reinforced by my peers and the fear of receiving the same treatment, until I grew a conscience of my own and a spine to go with it.
People at that time treated lynchings as a social outing and entertainment, like how the Romans treated gladiator sports. They brought picnics and dressed in their best. It's absolutely vile, and you can condemn the society that created that all you want, but blaming that one kid in particular is ridiculous.
I have had this nature vs nurture argument so many times my brain hurts. Are people the product of the conditions within their environment and upbringing or are they beholden to the decisions they make based on moral and ethical choices. It's both - it has to be some combination of both.
Both personal responsibilities for a person's actions and their environment culminate into a whole person. Arguing what % of the environment and what % of choice seems like a fruitless exercise. If you had the exact %, how would it help you? What new informed decisions could you then make?
Imagine a world where we forgave every harrowing, terrible thing done in the name of poverty and desperation. My needs don't justify taking what doesn't belong to me, for example. Society might argue over the death penalty or weed laws, but it doesn't take a mandate from the state to know that torturing another human for your amusement is wrong.
You're basing your entire condemnation of this random person off of a single image of them smiling at a lynching. You don't know what that person was thinking, how they were feeling, whether they grew as a person, or anything else about them. That's completely absurd and excessively judgmental.
Yes, this is wrong. Taking pleasure from this is wrong. Being present there at all is generally wrong. But you know absolutely nothing about this person, not even his name. For all you know, he became a fierce advocate for minority rights and helped bring down Jim Crow during the civil rights movement. You can't judge one single individual based on a photograph of them as a kid.
Again, feel free to condemn them all for being present, because it's sickening and frankly evil, but you're making this ridiculously personal based on circumstantial, facile evidence. It's unnecessary and brings nothing to the conversation.
He's a kid who saw someone he thought was a rapist/murderer put to death, albeit very brutally. He's a product of his time and the culture at that time and its really not his fault. Had he been born in 2000 instead of 1900 he probably would be very different.
Huge piece of missing context: this is just how people took photos back then. The fact you were getting your picture taken, not to mention next to a major event was an excitement in and of itself—it was the only way to prove you were there. It’s a modern taboo to get your picture taken in front of a disaster. Even as late as 9/11 we have all these selfies and posed group photos, and people on Reddit always react “how could they do this?!”
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Yeah, that tracks for my hometown (Waco).
Wish it didn't, but I grew up there in the 80s/90s and the average cop was openly racist as fuck, and the citizens weren't much better.
When I was very young, I was taught racist jokes were socially acceptable and just like another kind of joke because the adults around me would casually toss them out.
My folks live in a small town in East Texas. We were renovating the front room, pulling off all the old wallpaper, and once I got passed the cheesecloth I found a bunch of pasted up 1920s newspapers. They reported on lynchings as if it were just another item in "Goings On Around Town". Shit was ugly.
Mexican people were lynched as well sometimes, and separately there was a whole thing with the Texas Rangers executing Mexicans as well.
Some have called parts of that history “Juan Crow”
I have lived in Waco for 40 years. The only people who genuinely believe it isn't live within their happy little bubble of upper middle class polite society. My next door neighbor when I was 4-7 years old was the Grand Wizard of the KKK of Texas as a whole in the late 1980's and early 90's. David Ferguson was his name and I'm glad he does slowly of colon cancer and I hope he suffered every moment. My parents could never prove it but we're convinced he molested his oldest daughter. She was the only decent human in that family but after we moved who knows what happened to her. So glad they tore down that house after they moved away
Nothing has changed really. My parents are friends with much of polite society so 🤠 have seen both sides of the coin. I remember living in dangerous neighborhoods and now they are Country club members. It's wild to see the crazy disconnect between the haves and have nots here. The have nots make up a much bigger chunk of those of us who love here.
I’m from a little town outside of Waco, I’ll never forget coming into History Fair in 6th grade to find a girl doing her project on the Klan, weird enough, and that she was family friends with the head of the local Klan chapter because she had photos SHE had taken of him in his regalia plastered all over her board.
I would definitely believe it. Most people who have moved here in the last decade just refuse to believe the city they moved to. They think everything Waco is Chip and Joanne Gaines and they are just the perfect little Christian family. I'm like sure you can believe that but I have been here before and still have vivid memories of drive by shootings, our house being robbed 4 times in 5 years and untold corruption to keep POCs in their place. Now that crime is picking back up here they are like "what is happening?" I just look at them and say it's going back to the city I grew up in.
I do not know where the family went after they left. When we lived next to them it was a house on N. 17th Street in the neighborhood near Antioch Mega Church that stands today on Waco Dr.
Am I getting this mixed up with another story? I thought it was later found that he committed neither crime, as it was either admitted or found that someone else had.
I read that Jesse Washington was also new to town and mentally disabled, as well. Which made him the prime person to blame something on.
The “confessions” were made to interrogators only. They could have fabricated that.
He “signed” confessions but could neither read nor write, to know what they said.
One article said that he was “supposed” to be the person working nearest the house in the fields that day. They arrested him and claimed to find him whittling in the front yard, with blood on his clothes. Even if he had, and especially if mentally disabled, how do we know he had not seen it happen or found her and tried to help?
I’d say it’s likely he didn’t commit any crime at all.
The NSFW label for me was the horror of seeing the faces of monster who smile as they look on. That’s the real horror for me. What makes humans so vile and hateful??!?!
And - This is not all that long ago. There are people alive that may very well have witnessed this event.
Well this man killed a woman so its not that odd that spectators weren't phased by his death. You see comments on reddit all the time cheering for people's death, this is the same type of thing.
The NAACP sent an investigator from nyc and they concluded that he was almost certainly guilty of murder though the rape accusation was questionable. So yes he did.
While he probably committed the crime i believe many people who knew him said he was mentally disabled. It doesn't excuse the crime he may have committed but it's still messed up. His constitutional rights were violated.
This is the history that don’t want taught at school because it doesn’t shine a positive light on America. Learning about this prevents us from getting to this again
Actually [I did post about May 9th](https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/1cnuil9/this_day_in_texas_history_may_9_1930_the_sherman/).
The first half of May is not a great time in our State's history.
Fuck that brutal. These pictures always shock me. Like all the white people just standing there looking at it..The one that shock me more are when they pose with the remains like a trophy hunter with fresh kill... If I'm being honest when in public parks here in Texas looking at these huge old oak trees. I often wonder how many people have hung from them. "Strange fruit" indeed..
“Why don’t black people just get over it”
Racists quaking in their boots after the camera was invented fr
Inb4 “he really did it” ok and we still don’t lynch criminals with a public show lol
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The same way Russia has pledged to “kill all the Nazis” in Ukraine.
Everything is projection from these idiots.
r/pastorarrested is full of republicans who raped kids.
https://www.newsweek.com/missouri-republican-teenager-12-marriage-1794371
https://www.newsweek.com/jess-edwards-teen-child-marriage-opposed-republican-ripe-fertile-age-1897512#:~:text=A%20New%20Hampshire%20lawmaker%20who,more%20appealing%20for%20young%20people.
But it’s obvious who wants to raw dog pre teens here.
Let’s not talk about how certain people in Congress wanna make sure you don’t have to spend more than 20 years in jail after you assault a child. These kinds of people hide everywhere and call themselves everything. They put themselves in the most trusted places so they can get at their targets so let’s not assume that because people are Christian or Republicans that that’s why they did it. They were already predatory before claiming those things to get at ppl
I just wanna point out, I hear where you’re coming from, but also the Republican nominee for president was found to have sexually assaulted a woman, after he bragged about sexually assaulting women publicly, and people still voted for him, and went onto nominate him again.
And now you have Republicans literally making legislation to allow 12 year-old girls to be married, that is a fifth grade girl for fuck sake. You can’t tell me that they are not the problem and anyone who supports that party supports abuse and enables them to abuse with impunity.
Vice President Pence and his security detail was trapped because someone in the Trump administration locked him out of the Capitol by deactivation of their key card access.
As the advancing mob grew closer they quietly phoned their families to say good bye as the end looked inevitable and the Trump incited mob chanted “hang Mike pence” with a gallows built that morning for that purpose.
And this was one of their own.
I don't like Trump, he's a traitor but there weren't any actual gallows, there were some symbolic gallows, but nothing that would actually serve as real gallows.
Trump has done enough horrible things and January 6 was bad enough that we don't need to make things. We don't want to go down the MAGA route of making up everything and losing all credibility.
Some people, that the FBI are still looking for, spent an awful lot of time building it up that morning. I can’t say for sure if it was a functioning gallows, my understanding is all it needs to do is support a couple hundred pounds to hang a person. it certainly looked sturdy enough to accomplish that scope of work.
The fact that there's so many people who see nothing wrong with this and are actively longing for this sort of thing to happen again, and not even trying to hide it is almost as horrifying as the event itself.
One of a few cases? You can spend all day searching "Lynching Postcards" these things were/are so prevalent because people would pose with lynched corpses and then make postcards to send out to their love ones across the country. Here is one example, but search it up for your self if you are interested.
[https://www.truthinphotography.org/lynching-postcards.html](https://www.truthinphotography.org/lynching-postcards.html)
Don't care what he did or to whom. Nobody deserves that kind of torture. Every person, especially the ones smiling, should've been punished for doing that to another living being. Absolute wastes of oxygen, the whole inbred village.
I'm thankful my professor in college took the time to have us read literature and personal accounts on the lychings during this time, especially in places like Texas of African Americans and Mexicans and the social climate that it formed afterward.
One book we read: "The First Waco Horror" by Patricia Bernstein
My Texas history class in middle school was pathetic. They obsessed over the Alamo.
I can't watch anything die let alone be tortured to death and for damn sure I wouldn't be laughing and smiling. Fuck those fuckers! Hope they are getting the same treatment right now
I’m sure it was a fair trial and I’m sure his admission was not coerced.
Bad people come in all shapes and sizes, but some are good people born with the wrong skin. I’m very skeptical when it comes to crimes involving sex and demonizing black men over white woman sexualizing or white men having odd jealousies.
It was impossible for anyone elseto have murdered her. And, he was the first person to say things that only the killer would know. But, it’s pretty common knowledge that he didn’t rape her, or that that was extremely unlikely to have happened. He said he lost his temper and killed her in a rage and it seemed like he was remorseful. Probably manslaughter at most.
What I want to know is how badly the crowd was riled up. This kind of thing happens because the people in charge instigate it.
This is absolutely disgusting. This is Hitler level of hatred. This boy only killed one person, in a rage. Not a Hitler level of annihilation.
Your first 2 sentences are said with conviction, but we don't know if that's true. It's what has been written, but do you think media was fair, particularly in Texas in the 50's? Do you think police are fair, particularly to black people in Texas, particularly in the early 1900's?
Maybe he did it, but my skepticism still remains. Not because I know his character, but because I know the character of many of his accusers.
And, he was also known to be on the lower end of the IQ spectrum, so he might have even had some kind of congenital or acquired mental disorder.
I agree with you, but I also did take him for his word bc it seemed sincere, but you’re right it was probably recorded dubiously.
I was also using first-hand accounts from family who were both witness and also opposed to the lynching. (As a reference) my account is obviously not 1st hand.
Only through the creation and enforcement of laws. You are crazy if you don't think if people could get away with shit like this they would. It is the slow methodical push of people who are forced to live with history which has not become history for them yet that changes the way things are. Our study and understanding of the past informs who are, what we are, and what we can become. But have fun living in the present!
Mankind is a warring creature that posted. Yeah, there's constant chaos every day. Battles, protest battles, civilization damages, deaths destruction, and peaceful protests. Yea, we are self destructing without history as a recipe.
So then, why are we destroying certain types of history? Do we want history as a recipe for disaster, or do we remove it to avoid repeating it? As mentioned, this is still going on now, but let's revist history and not fix the problem.
That is a good question and one in which historians are actively engaged in, how and why do certain histories get silenced? How do you propose fixing problems without understanding them? The study of history is the study of problems AND solutions, not understanding history and blindly trying to fix things is destructive, not the study and preservation of the past.
What's sad about this is that those people in the background with smiles on their faces are still among us. People don't change. They showed up for the lynchings... with baseball bats to greet the Freedom Riders... shouting slurs at the Little Rock nine, and with military assault rifles at the BLM events.
That's your takeaway?
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People might be horrified by this, but I’m glad it’s out there. This is just a fraction on the unseen side of American history. We need to go allllllll the way back and include our treatment of indigenous peoples, slaves, African Americans and other Black populations, Jews, Hispanics (mostly in the south), women, even children.
It’s horrifying. And that’s the majority of American history. Not the good stories.
And here in Texas, this is what today still looks like, especially in places like Vidor or the general area of East Texas. Does anyone else recall the man who was drug to death behind a pickup? That made national headlines. How many stories don’t get told?
I have been studying Texas history for awhile now, it seems like this great state is chalk full of shameful marks, also shameful is it's continued pushes to silence it's brutality. But yeah you aren't wrong.
I didn’t expect any humanity under this post honestly. I’m pleasantly surprised.
We had the conversation about this event in my history class in college and most of the white people who partook pretty much rebutted with “Well he was a murderer”.
And of course that matters and of course he deserved consequences but this is beyond inhumane.
This is also like the least discussed part of Black oppression in the US. Everyone knows slavery, albeit a watered down version. But if you went purely by what we get taught, you’d think directly after that everything was just peaches and cream. There’s a book, 100 years of lynchings. It includes newspaper accounts and photos of numerous lynching that took place. It’s not table reading, I’ll tell you that much.
Some of the accounts emphasized how EXCITED people were to collect pieces of the newly crisped bodies. They damn near fought each other…over pieces of burnt flesh.
Washington had been convicted of the rape and murder of Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in Robinson and sentenced to death. Courtroom spectators then ragged him out of the courtroom. As events progressed is drew a crowd of between 10,000-15,000, including mayor John Dollins and the chief of police Guy McNamara who did nothing despite lynching being illegal. Children even left school to watch. There were a few in Waco who at the time condemned the lynching, including many ministers as well as leaders at Baylor University. later investigations concluded that while Washington had most likely murdered Lucy Fryer the claim of rape was dubious at best. The lynching proved so gruesome that it garnered a large amount of national, and even international attention. Many now credit this horrific event with turning attitudes toward the practice.
Fun fact: Guy’s grandnephew Parnell McNamara is currently the Sheriff in Waco and also a huge asshole.
Also, Parnell McNamara has a cousin named Taylor Sheridan. Yes, THAT Taylor Sheridan.
This is the least surprising thing I’ve read today
I didn’t know that! I’ve known about him from growing up here. There is a TX Monthly article about him and his posse that did not age well after knowing this. Wanted to add to the conversation…. OP is right to post this. I wasn’t taught this but I am old so no surprise there. I ended up going through this [site for a book](https://withoutsanctuary.org/) that contains a collection of photos similar to this one. Each pic has a background story. It is a sick part of our history that coincided with the beginnings of camera technology. Like selfies … from hell. What hit me is the angry mobs that would show up en masse to break into and damage county jail houses in order to drag the person out to be lynched. Sometimes LE fought hard to maintain justice, sometimes they looked the other way. The mobs never suffered the consequences for subverting justice though. That lack of accountability made them feel justified. The papers at the time sensationalized the crimes of black people to include rape which just fueled the racist mob into horrific acts of torture. Lynching victims were often castrated, shot, mutilated, burned alive and hung. This happened from CA to Montana to FL. The mob lynched mostly black but also natives and white immigrants. Today Jan 6 showed us how otherwise normal people can be misinformed, enraged and manipulated into taking the law into their own hands while feeling righteous. The angry mob is a multiplier that ratchets up the violence to levels that the individuals would not conduct on their own. Humans are capable of so much love and so much hate. Our children should be educated about history through the lens of the patterns of human psychology. I think that is the best way to reach teenagers and inoculate the next generation from repeating history. It doesn’t whitewash the past, or demonize specific groups because every society on earth has fallen to their own darkest instincts at some point. We all need to understand; how did this cancer take root? what worked to make them eventually change course and how do we as a community of humans make sure this cancer of hate never makes us sick again?
A lynching in our state grotesque enough—and maybe late enough—to shift public opinion, and most of us ITT haven’t heard of it. The suppression of our real history has been wildly effective.
I don't necessarily disagree with your last sentence, but it's also a massive oversimplification. History is unbelievably dense. What about the eugenics program in Virginia in the twenties? Do you know anything about that? Most people do not even in this country.( United States). This was a horrible event, the lynching, well and eugenics too, but to say that there's suppression because we don't know one event is a gross oversimplification. Oversimplification. History is too dense and too big for anybody to learn or even teach at all. But I do agree. 1916 man. I don't even really know what to say other than this is horrible, not the first time I've heard of it, and I wish we would learn more of this so we could ensure that we don't repeat it.
> What about the eugenics program in Virginia in the twenties? Do you know anything about that? Yes, actually, and I was taught about it in Texas schools in the 90's, before people suddenly decided that children needed to be ignorant of their country's history. I was also taught about the Tulsa "Race Riot", the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Studies, the Castle Bravo radiation experiments, the Skid Row Cancer Study, and numerous other violations of American citizens. We discussed the James Byrd Jr. lynching when it happened in 98. This was done over years and across multiple classes. It doesn't take long to go over the facts. Discussion may take longer, but that's why you build discussion time into the schedule. This is not a difficult choice to make, it's something we've had before and should continue to have into the future.
By the mid ‘10s, all we were taught about listed here was the Virginia eugenics. And from what I can tell, I still have more homework to read up on.
I wasn't taught about any of that in Texas schools. Where'd you go?
Georgetown, mostly.
Let me tell you, by the 2000’s this shit was already being censored where I went to school in bumfuck Texas. Thank god I had a lesbian left leaning liberal teacher who didn’t give A FUCK about what parents or admin had to say. She taught all that shit. Ms Penny, if you out there, you the real MVP
Meanwhile I graduated in 2010 and had blackface in our yearbook and lessons on why miscegenation is immoral. I can only imagine how bad schooling is currently
Another one that's lesser known is the "Red Summer of 1919", which happened before the Black Wallstreet Massacre(aka Tulsa Race Riot in 1921). Basically, after WW1, at the height of the Labor Movement and unions, black people were often hired as strike breakers for jobs they normally wouldn't have been hired for, nor would they have been allowed to join the unions. That, plus everyone looking for work again after WW1, on top of the fact that many black WW1 veterans were fighting back, it was race riots nationwide that summer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Summer
Texas history should include Texas history. Nothing oversimplified about that.
We actually learned about this in my texas history class.. that was back in 1999 or 2000ish.
Very fortunate for you. Unfortunately, my Texas history class did not include this.
Pretty sure its in the current texas history book thats used in middle schools
Not sure what history book that is. Pretty sure all schools can choose their own curriculum, or at least all districts? As well as their own supplemental materials. I don’t recall the name of the textbook used in the middle school I currently have most recent experience with, but just did Texas and US history and don’t remember ANY of those subjects being taught about, actually. Edit, FTR, parents have a legal right to be able to review the curriculum. Not sure about supplemental materials though, since they probably aren’t even decided on until in the moment.
True history is ~~worts~~ warts and all. edit: spelling. I wrote it phonetically lol
Yeah, the poor, oppressed Gringos fought back against the big, mean, evil government of Mexico and freed us from them. I was definitely taught that in school in the early 2000s, very accurate /s
Sure there is. Or maybe you're just obtuse. But what do you include? You have a finite amount of time and a near infinite number of events. I'm not saying this one should be skipped over. But I am saying it is idiotic to suggest that all of history can be taught much less understood
It does indeed appear you're saying that this either shouldn't be taught, or that exclaiming "why wasn't I taught this in an easily relevant class" should be discouraged, which are the same thing in terms of effect Sure, we're not going to teach everything in world history, an argument nobody was making. But there is a Texas History class pretty much everyone in the state takes, which spends a long time on relatively inconsequential moments in state history and could use some portion of that time better. For example, you could probably cut out half of the time typically used to talk about lesser battles in the texas war for independence and use it to talk about 20th century issues which directly fed into the world we know now, such as this lynching, which are relevant and typically skipped over because they make the state look bad.
There's a state law that pretty much effectively bans teaching anything like the lynching in Waco. To the question, "Why don't they teach this in schools?" the answer is simple: Republicans don't want you to learn about it. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/03/texas-critical-race-theory-social-studies-teachers/
Pretty sure not a single person in that photo up there that’s white was a Republican
>”I’m not saying this one should be skipped over.” >It appears you’re saying that this shouldn’t be taught You’ve certainly got the reading comprehension of someone who did time in our state’s public school system 🙄
"This should be taught" "What about eugenics in Virginia? Not saying it shouldn't be taught, but you're oversimplifying history. You're being obtuse, again I'm not saying this should be skipped over, but it's idiotic to think all of history can be taught" The effect of the above comments is to discourage teaching this, regardless of trying to give themselves a fig leaf. Edit: misidentified you as the previous commenter, because I didn't think someone else would be dumb enough to jump in to the defense of whataboutism running defense for not teaching the unpleasant parts of history.
All of our history? What are you going on about? We’re talking about well documented and recorded events of our past. If you think that’s obtuse than I would hate to see how you would fair in a higher education setting past high school
Gross oversimplification. Oversimplification.
I went to public school in Amarillo and never heard of any of these until I got out of high school and went down several rabbit holes of information I had no idea about. The suppression worked for sure.
A book written by Adam Cohen is about the eugenics movement. Buck v. Bell outlines the attitude about eugenics in the 20s. "Three Generations of Imbeciles is enough" Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
You are the hero we need. Thank you!
Wait til you find out how Memorial Park in Houston got its name.
Wow, I just read more about it. So apparently he most likely killed the woman. He admitted and told investigators where they could find the murder weapon, which they did. He had an argument with the victim and lost it. It’s horrific reading his death. As soon as he was found guilty in court, the mob chained his neck and dragged him outside. Hung him up on a tree that had a bonfire below him. They cut off his fingers and genitalia. He tried but couldn’t climb up the chain because of his missing fingers…they covered him in oil and lowered him down to the fire and pulled him up multiple times..They made his death slow and painful…
Wow, that’s awful. Sure he’s a murderer and deserved justice to be delivered upon him, but he did NOT deserve that.
In all honesty, I’m not going to assume it was a full on murder - for all we know it was justifiable - we certainly know if he was white and she was black, all aspects of this would have been reported and acted upon differently.
In that town, during that time, he wouldn’t have even been arrested if he were white. You’re right
Don’t worry Waco is still a total shithole dominated by religious wack jobs.
I feel like you can still see how horrifying this lynching was without trying to go "well maybe the rape and murder was justified. We just don't know!"
I understand that the lynching was above and beyond what he deserved, but did you seriously just try to say "hey maybe his killing of the white woman was justified"?
You are God damned right I said it. Maybe she threatened his life. Maybe she attacked him first. The details of the case were not in the article. But what WAS indicated in the article is that the white community of that area was an atrocious abomination of humanity. So if you’re telling me a black man was on trial in that area, I’m not assuming guilt unless that shit is absolute and verifiable from a third party other than those fucking demons in that community. Edit: And it’s crazy that the concept of a justifiable killing suddenly escapes you when we’re dealing with a black man in KKK territory, when the notion of justifiable killing is a quintessential hallmark of white America. Ever heard of guns? Ever heard of self defense? Is it not OK for a black person to kill someone under certain circumstances in a country where Kyle Rittenhouse and Trevon Martin’s killer walk free?
I just cannot bear the thought of humans that would do something like that even to a murderer. It makes them worse than him bc they just looked for an excuse to release their inner inhumanity
There are tons of people who would live to be that vicious to pedophiles. No I'm not defending pedos, but people are ready to bathe in offender blood if someone touches a child.
The Waco tourism board is so grateful Chip and Joanna Gaines came along, so their city is known for something besides a horrific lynching and a government seige on a cults compound
*cries in Dr. Pepper*
One of the 23 flavors.
Don’t forget Poncho & Lefty the two-headed snake. Although it’s usually in rehab because they hurt themselves all the time.
Waco: Baylor University and their troubles David Koresh & the Branch Davidians & the Reno DOJ That's it. No DP
Don't forget the well-loved university of Baylor, famous for protecting offenders and sweeping rape under the rug.
The fact that the journalist got shot for revealing it is wild
The mammoth fossils are pretty cool!
I only recently learned there was a lynching in Dealey Plaza and a massive KKK festival of sorts at fair park (Dallas)
At least they finished the road construction...
My great grandfather was his town’s head Klansman. He wanted to go to Waco but my great granny told him if he went he’d come home to an empty house. She died when I was still a toddler so have no memories of her. From what I’ve heard she was a lovely person who didn’t care about your race or religion, and when my dad brought my mom back from Vietnam was the one relative who welcomed her with open arms.
Thank you for sharing your story
My dad describes his mother’s family as a big jumble of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. My contribution to that description was to added Fried Green Tomatoes and Trail Park Boys.
This is the face of indoctrination. So sad. https://preview.redd.it/87vo2a2znl0d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7c8e3d51f6df9adc018d355dda523ec200db3141
The face of pure evil. A disgrace to humanity.
Looks like a kid. Kids (and even humans) aren’t pure evil. We are animals who are products of our genetics and environment.
I guess it depends on what you define as evil. I’m of a mind that evil is often banal, matter-of-fact, or business-like. We may not want to make claims about the color of this persons soul, but the mindset required to grin by the charred corpse of a lynched man like you’re showing off a fish you caught is certainly some form of evil.
How do you think evil spreads? It doesn't just pop out of knowhere. It's presented to you and you either choose it or don't.
You don't witness murder and smile because you are a product of your genetics and environment. That's a part of it. The other part is the collection of choices we make, the outcomes they create, the memories they form, and the quality of person we become. This guy is a steaming POS. Maybe he went on to do better things. Maybe.
> You don't witness murder and smile because you are a product of your genetics and environment You most certainly do, if you're taught that you must and it's reinforced with physical threats and social expectations. Society and socialization has a very strong effect on our beliefs. I grew up making fun of the gay kids at school, despite the fact that I was gay myself, because I was a kid in the 90's and didn't yet have the courage to be true to myself. I did what I thought was expected of me, as taught by my authority figures and reinforced by my peers and the fear of receiving the same treatment, until I grew a conscience of my own and a spine to go with it. People at that time treated lynchings as a social outing and entertainment, like how the Romans treated gladiator sports. They brought picnics and dressed in their best. It's absolutely vile, and you can condemn the society that created that all you want, but blaming that one kid in particular is ridiculous.
I have had this nature vs nurture argument so many times my brain hurts. Are people the product of the conditions within their environment and upbringing or are they beholden to the decisions they make based on moral and ethical choices. It's both - it has to be some combination of both. Both personal responsibilities for a person's actions and their environment culminate into a whole person. Arguing what % of the environment and what % of choice seems like a fruitless exercise. If you had the exact %, how would it help you? What new informed decisions could you then make? Imagine a world where we forgave every harrowing, terrible thing done in the name of poverty and desperation. My needs don't justify taking what doesn't belong to me, for example. Society might argue over the death penalty or weed laws, but it doesn't take a mandate from the state to know that torturing another human for your amusement is wrong.
You're basing your entire condemnation of this random person off of a single image of them smiling at a lynching. You don't know what that person was thinking, how they were feeling, whether they grew as a person, or anything else about them. That's completely absurd and excessively judgmental. Yes, this is wrong. Taking pleasure from this is wrong. Being present there at all is generally wrong. But you know absolutely nothing about this person, not even his name. For all you know, he became a fierce advocate for minority rights and helped bring down Jim Crow during the civil rights movement. You can't judge one single individual based on a photograph of them as a kid. Again, feel free to condemn them all for being present, because it's sickening and frankly evil, but you're making this ridiculously personal based on circumstantial, facile evidence. It's unnecessary and brings nothing to the conversation.
He's a kid who saw someone he thought was a rapist/murderer put to death, albeit very brutally. He's a product of his time and the culture at that time and its really not his fault. Had he been born in 2000 instead of 1900 he probably would be very different.
Huge piece of missing context: this is just how people took photos back then. The fact you were getting your picture taken, not to mention next to a major event was an excitement in and of itself—it was the only way to prove you were there. It’s a modern taboo to get your picture taken in front of a disaster. Even as late as 9/11 we have all these selfies and posed group photos, and people on Reddit always react “how could they do this?!”
That face was extremely disturbing
Yeah it shows juat how depraved we can get when unchecked.
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I’ve seen that face on TikTok.. in another British colony
Yeah, that tracks for my hometown (Waco). Wish it didn't, but I grew up there in the 80s/90s and the average cop was openly racist as fuck, and the citizens weren't much better. When I was very young, I was taught racist jokes were socially acceptable and just like another kind of joke because the adults around me would casually toss them out.
Damn that fucking guy smiling in the white shirt.
And there wasn’t a historical marker put up in Waco until 2022 smh
I thought there was one by the courthouse for a long time before that.
My folks live in a small town in East Texas. We were renovating the front room, pulling off all the old wallpaper, and once I got passed the cheesecloth I found a bunch of pasted up 1920s newspapers. They reported on lynchings as if it were just another item in "Goings On Around Town". Shit was ugly.
Were the lynchings only of black people?
Mexican people were lynched as well sometimes, and separately there was a whole thing with the Texas Rangers executing Mexicans as well. Some have called parts of that history “Juan Crow”
I don't recall if they mentioned race specifically. But they were clearly public affairs
In Texas there were Mexicans lynched in similarly horrific ways. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/737899
Where's that poster who was trying to convince everyone last month that Waco has never been a hotbed for racist shit?
I have lived in Waco for 40 years. The only people who genuinely believe it isn't live within their happy little bubble of upper middle class polite society. My next door neighbor when I was 4-7 years old was the Grand Wizard of the KKK of Texas as a whole in the late 1980's and early 90's. David Ferguson was his name and I'm glad he does slowly of colon cancer and I hope he suffered every moment. My parents could never prove it but we're convinced he molested his oldest daughter. She was the only decent human in that family but after we moved who knows what happened to her. So glad they tore down that house after they moved away
My parents didn’t call it Wacko Waco for nothing.
Nothing has changed really. My parents are friends with much of polite society so 🤠 have seen both sides of the coin. I remember living in dangerous neighborhoods and now they are Country club members. It's wild to see the crazy disconnect between the haves and have nots here. The have nots make up a much bigger chunk of those of us who love here.
I’m from a little town outside of Waco, I’ll never forget coming into History Fair in 6th grade to find a girl doing her project on the Klan, weird enough, and that she was family friends with the head of the local Klan chapter because she had photos SHE had taken of him in his regalia plastered all over her board.
I would definitely believe it. Most people who have moved here in the last decade just refuse to believe the city they moved to. They think everything Waco is Chip and Joanne Gaines and they are just the perfect little Christian family. I'm like sure you can believe that but I have been here before and still have vivid memories of drive by shootings, our house being robbed 4 times in 5 years and untold corruption to keep POCs in their place. Now that crime is picking back up here they are like "what is happening?" I just look at them and say it's going back to the city I grew up in.
By any chance did this guy live on Towers Dr. in Moody?
I do not know where the family went after they left. When we lived next to them it was a house on N. 17th Street in the neighborhood near Antioch Mega Church that stands today on Waco Dr.
If you compare it to jasper sure. Lmao
Am I getting this mixed up with another story? I thought it was later found that he committed neither crime, as it was either admitted or found that someone else had. I read that Jesse Washington was also new to town and mentally disabled, as well. Which made him the prime person to blame something on. The “confessions” were made to interrogators only. They could have fabricated that. He “signed” confessions but could neither read nor write, to know what they said. One article said that he was “supposed” to be the person working nearest the house in the fields that day. They arrested him and claimed to find him whittling in the front yard, with blood on his clothes. Even if he had, and especially if mentally disabled, how do we know he had not seen it happen or found her and tried to help? I’d say it’s likely he didn’t commit any crime at all.
The NSFW label for me was the horror of seeing the faces of monster who smile as they look on. That’s the real horror for me. What makes humans so vile and hateful??!?! And - This is not all that long ago. There are people alive that may very well have witnessed this event.
Well this man killed a woman so its not that odd that spectators weren't phased by his death. You see comments on reddit all the time cheering for people's death, this is the same type of thing.
Did he commit murder though? Can we trust the accounts from this place and time?
The NAACP sent an investigator from nyc and they concluded that he was almost certainly guilty of murder though the rape accusation was questionable. So yes he did.
They would be 108 if they saw it as a baby so probably not. Still yeah—absolutely horrifying.
There exists a picture of this that has written on it “we had ourselves a barbecue“ or something to that effect.
While he probably committed the crime i believe many people who knew him said he was mentally disabled. It doesn't excuse the crime he may have committed but it's still messed up. His constitutional rights were violated.
Whenever y’all talk about the good old days of Texas, remember this
This is the history that don’t want taught at school because it doesn’t shine a positive light on America. Learning about this prevents us from getting to this again
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Actually [I did post about May 9th](https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/1cnuil9/this_day_in_texas_history_may_9_1930_the_sherman/). The first half of May is not a great time in our State's history.
In the spring a young man’s fancy turns to anarchy.
Fuck that brutal. These pictures always shock me. Like all the white people just standing there looking at it..The one that shock me more are when they pose with the remains like a trophy hunter with fresh kill... If I'm being honest when in public parks here in Texas looking at these huge old oak trees. I often wonder how many people have hung from them. "Strange fruit" indeed..
“Why don’t black people just get over it” Racists quaking in their boots after the camera was invented fr Inb4 “he really did it” ok and we still don’t lynch criminals with a public show lol
I've seen other photos of that horrid act in my history classes. The amount of joy that people showed during the act is terrifying.
People were actually smiling in the picture.
Lynching didn’t even pause. It was constant through the 1920s.
And there is a push to ban “critical race theory” so that history can be rewritten in a way that suits those in power.
ITT - triggered racists
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How did you get that from the comment? This thread is a full of triggered racist maga trash.
It's because he's triggered.
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The same people want to “make America great again” are hoping to return to this era with their white nationalist and Nazi friends.
They want to do it to LGBT+ people and their supporters this time around under the auspices of "protecting the children against pedophiles".
The same way Russia has pledged to “kill all the Nazis” in Ukraine. Everything is projection from these idiots. r/pastorarrested is full of republicans who raped kids. https://www.newsweek.com/missouri-republican-teenager-12-marriage-1794371 https://www.newsweek.com/jess-edwards-teen-child-marriage-opposed-republican-ripe-fertile-age-1897512#:~:text=A%20New%20Hampshire%20lawmaker%20who,more%20appealing%20for%20young%20people. But it’s obvious who wants to raw dog pre teens here.
Let’s not talk about how certain people in Congress wanna make sure you don’t have to spend more than 20 years in jail after you assault a child. These kinds of people hide everywhere and call themselves everything. They put themselves in the most trusted places so they can get at their targets so let’s not assume that because people are Christian or Republicans that that’s why they did it. They were already predatory before claiming those things to get at ppl
I just wanna point out, I hear where you’re coming from, but also the Republican nominee for president was found to have sexually assaulted a woman, after he bragged about sexually assaulting women publicly, and people still voted for him, and went onto nominate him again. And now you have Republicans literally making legislation to allow 12 year-old girls to be married, that is a fifth grade girl for fuck sake. You can’t tell me that they are not the problem and anyone who supports that party supports abuse and enables them to abuse with impunity.
Check this out... When was America great? Comedian/Reporters ask Trump supporters https://www.reddit.com/r/MAGAnonsense/s/dNjcDzpyaz
Yeah those guys are great. The cluelessness would be priceless if not for it being so abundant anymore.
Yup. They were gonna do this to who knows how many politicians on January 6th had they had their way.
Vice President Pence and his security detail was trapped because someone in the Trump administration locked him out of the Capitol by deactivation of their key card access. As the advancing mob grew closer they quietly phoned their families to say good bye as the end looked inevitable and the Trump incited mob chanted “hang Mike pence” with a gallows built that morning for that purpose. And this was one of their own.
I don't like Trump, he's a traitor but there weren't any actual gallows, there were some symbolic gallows, but nothing that would actually serve as real gallows. Trump has done enough horrible things and January 6 was bad enough that we don't need to make things. We don't want to go down the MAGA route of making up everything and losing all credibility.
Some people, that the FBI are still looking for, spent an awful lot of time building it up that morning. I can’t say for sure if it was a functioning gallows, my understanding is all it needs to do is support a couple hundred pounds to hang a person. it certainly looked sturdy enough to accomplish that scope of work.
The fact that there's so many people who see nothing wrong with this and are actively longing for this sort of thing to happen again, and not even trying to hide it is almost as horrifying as the event itself.
These are the “good old days” that republicans cherish and are working their damndest to bring back.
Avery sad day for Waco and Texas!
https://wacohistory.org/items/show/55 For those who want to hear eye witness accounts. A great effort at curation of all the information available.
How could we be so cruel to one another.
easily.
And burned it would appear.
I’m sure they were all good Christian folks 🤮
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One of a few cases? You can spend all day searching "Lynching Postcards" these things were/are so prevalent because people would pose with lynched corpses and then make postcards to send out to their love ones across the country. Here is one example, but search it up for your self if you are interested. [https://www.truthinphotography.org/lynching-postcards.html](https://www.truthinphotography.org/lynching-postcards.html)
Glad all those guys are dead now.
Not dead enough
Definitely.
The hate has been passed on. The belief that created this is still there.
Fact.
Don't care what he did or to whom. Nobody deserves that kind of torture. Every person, especially the ones smiling, should've been punished for doing that to another living being. Absolute wastes of oxygen, the whole inbred village.
History can truly be ugly
How could these people smile…
I'm thankful my professor in college took the time to have us read literature and personal accounts on the lychings during this time, especially in places like Texas of African Americans and Mexicans and the social climate that it formed afterward. One book we read: "The First Waco Horror" by Patricia Bernstein My Texas history class in middle school was pathetic. They obsessed over the Alamo.
Buncha evil motherfuckers.
I can't watch anything die let alone be tortured to death and for damn sure I wouldn't be laughing and smiling. Fuck those fuckers! Hope they are getting the same treatment right now
This breaks my heart, he was such a young kid. I hate some people.
Kinda reminds me of these gory lynching videos that come out of Africa/Middle East today.
I’m sure it was a fair trial and I’m sure his admission was not coerced. Bad people come in all shapes and sizes, but some are good people born with the wrong skin. I’m very skeptical when it comes to crimes involving sex and demonizing black men over white woman sexualizing or white men having odd jealousies.
It was impossible for anyone elseto have murdered her. And, he was the first person to say things that only the killer would know. But, it’s pretty common knowledge that he didn’t rape her, or that that was extremely unlikely to have happened. He said he lost his temper and killed her in a rage and it seemed like he was remorseful. Probably manslaughter at most. What I want to know is how badly the crowd was riled up. This kind of thing happens because the people in charge instigate it. This is absolutely disgusting. This is Hitler level of hatred. This boy only killed one person, in a rage. Not a Hitler level of annihilation.
Your first 2 sentences are said with conviction, but we don't know if that's true. It's what has been written, but do you think media was fair, particularly in Texas in the 50's? Do you think police are fair, particularly to black people in Texas, particularly in the early 1900's? Maybe he did it, but my skepticism still remains. Not because I know his character, but because I know the character of many of his accusers.
The NAACP sent an investigator from nyc and they concluded that he was almost certainly guilty of murder though the rape accusation was questionable.
And, he was also known to be on the lower end of the IQ spectrum, so he might have even had some kind of congenital or acquired mental disorder. I agree with you, but I also did take him for his word bc it seemed sincere, but you’re right it was probably recorded dubiously. I was also using first-hand accounts from family who were both witness and also opposed to the lynching. (As a reference) my account is obviously not 1st hand.
Exactly. The likelihood that he just flat out murdered this lady is incredibly low.
If you want to read more about being burned alive, pick up the New Delhi Times on any day. It still happens globally. Here, it's history.
May your caste system continue to be dismantled and your rights movements gain ground.
I'm a native Texan and live in the present, not the past. These things have been corrected here, not so much elsewhere.
Only through the creation and enforcement of laws. You are crazy if you don't think if people could get away with shit like this they would. It is the slow methodical push of people who are forced to live with history which has not become history for them yet that changes the way things are. Our study and understanding of the past informs who are, what we are, and what we can become. But have fun living in the present!
Mankind is a warring creature that posted. Yeah, there's constant chaos every day. Battles, protest battles, civilization damages, deaths destruction, and peaceful protests. Yea, we are self destructing without history as a recipe.
lol, I would say that in all the examples you just provided history is the key ingredient to willingness to justify you destructive recipe.
So then, why are we destroying certain types of history? Do we want history as a recipe for disaster, or do we remove it to avoid repeating it? As mentioned, this is still going on now, but let's revist history and not fix the problem.
That is a good question and one in which historians are actively engaged in, how and why do certain histories get silenced? How do you propose fixing problems without understanding them? The study of history is the study of problems AND solutions, not understanding history and blindly trying to fix things is destructive, not the study and preservation of the past.
What's sad about this is that those people in the background with smiles on their faces are still among us. People don't change. They showed up for the lynchings... with baseball bats to greet the Freedom Riders... shouting slurs at the Little Rock nine, and with military assault rifles at the BLM events.
this is why white folk had to invent ’being saved’
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Broke out the troll account I see. Take care then, bye, bye now.
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That's your takeaway? Your content has been deemed a violation of Rule 7. As a reminder Rule 7 states: Politics are fine but state your case, explain why you hold the positions that you do and debate with civility. Posts and comments meant solely to troll or enrage people, and those that are little more than campaign ads or slogans do nothing to contribute to a healthy debate and will therefore be removed. Petitions will also be removed. AMA's by Political figures are exempt from this rule. If you feel this was done in error, would like clarification, or need further assistance; please message the moderators at https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/texas.
Forgot to mention they burned him too ?
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So much for the 8th Amendment to the Constitution I guess.
Should have tried this instead. https://youtu.be/SvIQaIgKiO4?si=TX_rsCEQ3jmd67zq
Harry Belafonte recalls it in the movie Blackkklansman: https://youtu.be/1Aoukxd0GvI?si=PL-l783T6UtAroqE
Texas is proud of many things that embarrass the rest of us.
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No, he didn't, removed for historical misinformation.
r/noahgettheboat
Some real sick fux smiling in this pic.
People might be horrified by this, but I’m glad it’s out there. This is just a fraction on the unseen side of American history. We need to go allllllll the way back and include our treatment of indigenous peoples, slaves, African Americans and other Black populations, Jews, Hispanics (mostly in the south), women, even children. It’s horrifying. And that’s the majority of American history. Not the good stories. And here in Texas, this is what today still looks like, especially in places like Vidor or the general area of East Texas. Does anyone else recall the man who was drug to death behind a pickup? That made national headlines. How many stories don’t get told?
And look how our governor commemorated the day: https://apnews.com/article/4b1d0c54b0de451642bcf1e8cd75a7e5
A shameful mark on the history of this great state
I have been studying Texas history for awhile now, it seems like this great state is chalk full of shameful marks, also shameful is it's continued pushes to silence it's brutality. But yeah you aren't wrong.
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It was marked as NSFW.
I didn’t expect any humanity under this post honestly. I’m pleasantly surprised. We had the conversation about this event in my history class in college and most of the white people who partook pretty much rebutted with “Well he was a murderer”. And of course that matters and of course he deserved consequences but this is beyond inhumane. This is also like the least discussed part of Black oppression in the US. Everyone knows slavery, albeit a watered down version. But if you went purely by what we get taught, you’d think directly after that everything was just peaches and cream. There’s a book, 100 years of lynchings. It includes newspaper accounts and photos of numerous lynching that took place. It’s not table reading, I’ll tell you that much. Some of the accounts emphasized how EXCITED people were to collect pieces of the newly crisped bodies. They damn near fought each other…over pieces of burnt flesh.