The Last Lynching Victim in South Carolina
The
Last Lynching Victim in South Carolina
Brent M. S. Campney reviews William B. Gravely’s They Stole Him Out of Jail: Willie Earle, South Carolina’s Last Lynching Victim.
October 31, 2019, Black Perspectives
In They Stole Him Out of Jail: Willie Earle, South Carolina’s Last Lynching Victim,
William B. Gravely, professor emeritus at the University of Denver,
explores the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle in South Carolina, the
criminal investigations and trials
that followed, and the memory and legacy of those events. The
product of some forty years of research, the book builds upon an
impressive evidentiary base, including newspaper coverage by the Black
and white presses, interviews with participants and witnesses,
and letters and a notebook regarding the trial proceedings written by
the British novelist Rebecca West, who was in attendance. Unfortunately,
he notes, “no library, private holdings, attorney files, court records,
or archive has a transcript of the trial”
(168). Although a second-grader in Pickens County at the time of the
lynching, Gravely first learned of the case during a 1978 conversation
and soon turned his attention toward researching the incident. Given his
insider status, Gravely gained access to many
of the central players in the incident: “My first foray yielded
contacts with the jailer’s daughter, Willie Earle’s mother, two defense
attorneys from the trial, two journalists … , the prosecutor, a law
associate of the special state prosecutor, and two Black civil
rights activists affected by the lynching,” he writes (xvi-xvii).
In February 1947, an unknown Black assailant robbed and murdered a
middle-aged white taxicab driver and World War I veteran, Thomas Watson
Brown, on the outskirts of Pickens in a crime that outraged
white townspeople. Following the arrest of Willie Earle, who
denied any involvement, a mob of cabbies, determined to avenge the
death of their colleague, seized Earle from the jail, drove him to a
secluded spot outside of Pickens, and executed him in an orgy of
stabbing and shooting. In the immediate aftermath, local and
state authorities, including Governor Strom Thurmond, denounced the
violence as an assault on law and order. For the most part, their
opposition to the lynching was predicated on a desire to protect the
reputation of their state and to forestall federal intervention
into their affairs. After a “whirlwind-like dragnet” in the days after
the killing, officials rounded up thirty-one white men suspected in the
crime (xiii).
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