FROMTHEDESKOFTHEEDITOR

The Winter/Spring 2023 issue of 1619: Journal of African American Studies (JAAS) features the scholarship of members of the Central Connecticut State faculty in the departments of Journalism and Psychology.

Dr. Vivian Martin lends insight into the journalistic practices impacting the coverage of lynchings during the dark era of Jim Crow at the turn of the century. It was during this period in the African American sojourn in this land that racial oppression persisted after the Civil war years and was perpetuated by domestic white supremacist terrorist organizations throughout the entire country. Contrary to historical myth, lynchings were not confined to the southern states. It was committed across the country and was not limited to males. African American females were also victims of the crime.

The American press was both complicitous and a platform for outrage and anti-lynching mobilization depending upon the reporting. The press was used by some to feed perverted cultural “schadenfreude” in which the physical mutilation of African Americans was used as evidence of white supremacy on a visceral level. Depending upon the media and the medium, details of lynchings were a source of demented pleasure, feeding the supremacist’s psychological needs. Ultimately this type of reporting legitimized and enabled systematic racial violence.

On the other hand, the press became the vehicle for the mobilization of opposition and political campaigns. Notably, the American heroine, Ida B. Wells Barnett, skillfully used the printed press as a vehicle of organizing and raising awareness and awakening the moral consciousness of a broad base of Americans, white and black, domestically and internationally. Her reporting skill and effort was immensely effective in moving public opinion and creating a momentum that resulted in, for example, the formation of the nation’s premier civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1908. Dr. Martin’s article gives us professional insights on the role of journalism in the history of racial violence through the lens of her family history.

Dr. Candace Wallace and her colleagues at Hampton and Howard Universities contribute their research about another dimension of violence in the contemporary histories of African American communities. The issue of violence in the African American community perpetuated by young males is a direct socio-historical phenomena that correlates to events occurring as a result of the great migration and the rapid rural to urban migration in the twentieth century. This process along with the later crises of American economic de-industrialization, drug and criminal economic responses to losses of opportunity, housing, educational and economic inequality, and the availability of weapons all contributed to cycles of violence that continue to destroy the prospects of so many African American youth, but especially males.

Dr. Wallace and her colleagues approach this topic with questions about the mental health and attitudinal variables that impact African American males as both victims and perpetuators of violent crimes in their communities. Of particular interest are their questions about the impact of communalism on the proclivity towards violence among African American males. Do intake and cohesive communities make the difference? The research in their study provides us with data to support their important and intriguing conclusions to this and other questions.

Walton Brown-Foster, PhD Editor-in-Chief

January 11, 2023

How to Tell a Lynching Story: Mapping local news coverage to reveal ‘our national crime’

Vivian B. Martin

Growing up in the 1930s and 40s in the rural South Carolina Lowcountry, my mother overheard her father and a close family friend discuss how the friend’s relative was lynched. Knowing better than to inject herself into an adult conversation with questions, my mother took in the frightening information and lived with it as an understanding of what could happen to black people in her town of Smoaks. It was not until recently, as I worked with her on a memoir (Martin and Martin, 2022) that I went looking for evidence of such a lynching occurring in Smoaks, South Carolina. Aided by digitized archives, I quickly found an entryway into the past.

Double Lynching At Smoaks

J.B. SMOAK’S MURDERERS CAUGHT AND KILLED

Frank Samuels And Acquilla Simmons Victims

The Press and Standard (June 16, 1909)

Friday evening at 11’ o clock the citizens of the quiet community of Smoaks were startled by the report of volleys from at least one hundred guns, and they knew that the murderers of J. Benjamin Smoak had paid the penalty for their crime with their lives. The next morning’s light revealed the form of Frank Samuels and Quillie Simmons tied to two small pine trees a few yards from where it emerges into the woods about three hundred yards from the store of J.L. Smoak & Son.

” I always thought it had happened recently,” my mother said when I shared the news article and noted the event happened in 1909, a good 30 years prior to her first hearing of it. So powerful was the terror that it settled in local memory that made it seem like yesterday. The description of the aftermath on the front page of The Press and Standard, a local weekly based in Walterboro, the county seat about 20 miles away, left an image that startled me as I read it more than 100 years later. Much like the narrator in Richard Wright’s poem, I had “ stumbled suddenly upon the thing. Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms. And the sooty details of the scene rose”

As a former newspaper reporter now teaching journalism and researching the interplay of today’s news, audiences and public discourse, I had a lot of questions about what I was seeing and its travels in the community. This essay focuses on the newspaper coverage of the 1909 lynching and its relation to journalistic practices of the time, including approaches to telling lynching stories. The coverage, while avoiding racial epithets and characterizations, includes the expected basics but does not dwell on the identity of the mob. This might have been because the lynching is what one critic from a larger newspaper called a “common-knowledge lynching,” avenging a local murder with the tacit approval of the powers in the community. I am interested in the public discourse surrounding lynching at the time and how the Colleton coverage existed alongside it. Just a little over a week prior to the lynching, a conference in New York City, was the first meeting of would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Appeals such as anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s address, “Lynching, Our National Crime,” and other calls for change shared space on the page, both literally and figuratively, with the news coming out of Smoaks. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the sheriff and his deputies that allowed the lynching of an innocent man in Tennessee infused discussion in the public sphere in some places. Tracking the life of local news of lynchings and contemporaneous events might provide a sense of the competing discourses that would have shaped common knowledge and may help access more information about on-the ground interaction in the locales where these horrors occurred.

Exploratory in intent, my essay is aligned with efforts to better understand the entwined histories of journalism and lynching. The discussion of literature in the broader field of lynching studies is not intended to be comprehensive. Lynching research has become highly interdisciplinary, reflecting the complexity of the issues. Brundage (1993) revealed the importance of differentiating across mobs to understand the history of lynching. Comparing about 600 cases in Georgia, one of the most active lynching states, and Virginia, Brundage determined that mobs fall into four categories: the posse mob where a few dozen or a few hundred came together after a report of a serious crime; the terrorist mob, often associated with white supremacist groups, harassed more generally; the private mob was small and sometimes avenged perceived infractions that were relatively minor against family and friends; the mass mob could involve thousands of spectators and were the lowest number of lynchings in the South As might be suggested by some of the coverage I reviewed for Colleton County, newspapers covered different mobs in different ways, though as Brundage shows, time and place were also factors. Wood’s (2009) study of lynchings as public spectacles affirming white supremacy document how the overlap with other cultural practices, such as religious rituals and cinemas, helped legitimize lynching.

Hill (2016) demonstrates how some strands within lynching research have shifted toward a focus on how African American memory and culture have responded to lynching. His work discusses areas such as Black vigilantism, the period when Blacks lynched Blacks who raped and murdered in the community. His examination of African Americans responding to lynching in art and literature also highlights a newer wave in scholarship Ore (2019) examines lynching as a performative aspect of American identity and civic work since the colonial period when people in support of the British were lynched. She argues that such acts of drawing boundaries of belonging and not belonging can be applied to the rhetoric of present-day racial violence when the death of Trayvon Martin can be called a killing but not murder or the symbolic lynching of former President Barack Obama as he ran for office and during his time in the White House. Books on individual lynching cases have been one way to examine lynchings. In addition to his work on the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle (2019), the last known lynching in South Carolina, historian William Gravely has made oral history interviews conducted with journalists, lawyers, and others about the case. The contemporaneous voices of people who had some connection to the case is the void lynching researchers face today.

What we know of lynching is still very generalized. Photos of mutilated bodies and selfsatisfied spectators have become shorthand for the terror that occurred in the post-Reconstruction area and through the mid-20th century. That the photographs, now so ubiquitous, were circulated as postcards and in private photo collections rather than published in most newspapers, a function of technological limitations more than propriety, underscores how hidden much of the past is, despite what we know about infamous cases, such as the lynching of Emmett Till. Moreover, the nearly 4,800 lynchings identified between 1882 and 1968 (Tuskegee University archives), 73 percent of them African Americans, are probably an undercount given the lack of record-keeping and narrow definition of crimes considered lynchings Coroners, constables and other law enforcement officials did not keep records on the lynchings, and whites were not typically charged for the crime. Newspapers, the main documentation of lynchings for many decades, were quite biased.

In recent decades, journalists have begun to acknowledge that many newspapers in the country enabled the lynching of thousands of African Americans through routinized practices and prejudices. With descriptions of “brutish fiends” or “Gorilla” “negroes,” the assumption of guilt, and treatment of the mob as anonymous, and hence free to move right back into everyday community life with impunity, news reports came to have a predictable narrative. The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland examined some of that newspaper work from the first decades of the 20th century as part of its “Printing Hate” project. The Center notes that newspapers often published the date, time and place of lynchings as if the carnival was coming to town. Railroad agents sold tickets to lynchings along their route. In 2018, as the national monument to lynching victims opened not far from its offices, the Montgomery Advertiser ran a series of articles intended to make amends for the way it covered lynchings in its community. With the headline, “Our shame: a past for all to see,” the editorial board wrote, “We dehumanized human beings. Too often we characterized lynching victims as guilty before proven so and often assumed they committed the crime.” So routine were lynchings scores and scores a week at its height newspapers around the country often published random snippets on lynchings from elsewhere alongside routine crime news and quirky items from the police blotter. The Associated Press, which distributed local stories to papers throughout the country, in recent years, has conceded that it played a regrettable role in promoting racism across the country. As Wells-Barnett stated to the rights conference in New York City in 1909.

Several of the greatest riots and most brutal burnt offerings of the mobs have been suggested and incited by the daily papers of the offending community. If the newspaper which suggests lynching in its accounts of an alleged crime, could be held legally as well as morally responsible for reporting that “threats of lynching were heard”; or, “it is feared that if the guilty one is caught, he will be lynched”; or, “there were cries of ‘lynch him,’ and the only reason the threat was not carried out was because no leader appeared,” a long step toward a remedy will have been taken.

Although contemporary journalists are offering apologies in a general sense, scholars of journalism and communication have been slow to research how journalism may have enabled racial violence, or was at least complicit. Perloff (2000) outlines these gaps in scholarship, and by extension journalism education, in an essay he characterized as an intervention. Although the critique of scholarship into journalism and lynching has merit, there have been useful lines of inquiry. Scholars have taken on journalistic notions of ‘objectivity ‘skewing the representation of situations, including lynching. An influential example of this thread is Mindich’s (1998) study demonstrating how notions of impartiality created a false balance in lynching coverage. Mindich wrote, "On one hand, someone was accused of a crime; on the other hand, someone was lynched. But black guilt was assumed in almost every story.” (123). It took the work of Ida B. WellsBarnett, fueled with outrage but equipped with investigative technique, that exposed the misrepresentations in the white mainstream press. For her efforts, the New York Times called Wells-Barnett a “slanderous, nasty-minded mulattress” (1894).

How to tell a lynching story has challenged journalists ever since they have been writing them. Literary historians have been intrigued by journalists who drew on experience covering lynching and other events to inform their fiction Lutes (2007) is among those who argue that the reporters got closer to the truth than in their short stories and novels than was possible writing for newspapers. Novelist Theodore Dreiser, who spent his early writing career as a newspaper reporter and covered a lynching for the St. louis Republic, produced one of the most discussed works on lynching in literary history, and possibly journalism history as well. Dreiser’s “Nigger Jeff,” a short story about a reporter sent to cover a lynch mob in search of its victim, whom they eventually catch, is believed to be based on some of the details of the lynching he covered in 1893. The reporter ends up at the home of the lynched man and surreptitiously observes his mother in a corner, moaning in grief. The moment transforms the reporter, who had spent the evening hoping there would not be a lynching he would have to cover. He finds new purpose with the “knowledge now that it was not always exact justice that was meted out to all and that it was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret (Dreiser, 182).” The job before him was to pull together he scenes, the color, the emotions, and tell a story. ”I’ll get it all in,” he vows Critics see in the reporter’s approach, and that of the newspaper business he represents, moral failure. Sociologist Helen MacGill Hughes, who cites the story in her study of the rise of the human-interest story in the newspaper, underscores the reporter’s use of the mother’s mourning and the attendant emotion as an example of how the human-interest story displaced attention to structural injustice. But at that point, the reporter knows a story about the injustice of lynching is not the job. Dreiser did two versions of “Nigger Jeff” and filed three news articles while covering the lynching on which the fiction is based. Hopkins and Mulligan (2013) write that Dreiser repositions the facts, including the question of the lynch victim’s guilt, in the two fictional attempts, to better critique lynching, taking a stance he would not have been allowed as a late 19th century reporter.

Telling the Story

South Carolina has a brutal history of racial violence. It is the state where Ku Klux Klan attacks on African Americans led to federal trials in 1871. Notorious lynchings range from the killing of Frazier Baker, the first black postmaster in Lake City, and his family in 1897, to the lynching of Willie Earle, taken from his cell in Greenville by a mob looking to avenge the death of a taxi driver in 1947. With 160 lynchings between 1882-1968, according to the archives kept by Tuskegee University, South Carolina has the tenth highest number of lynchings in the nation Questions of why some states in the South had more lynchings than others are a puzzle scholars attept to unravel, but comparisons by state are difficult. Historian Terence Finnegan (2013), comparing South Carolina’s alarming but much smaller numbers with Mississippi, which had 581 lynchings in the same period, has hypothesized that South Carolina’s harsh post-

Reconstruction- era laws may have decreased white people’s sense that they needed to resort to extrajudicial measures. Many groups still took matters in their own hands, though some counties may have been less violent than others. Colleton County, with its collection of small towns or townships some newspapers referred to Smoaks as a hamlet is listed with 10 known lynching victims from 1877-1950 on the interactive map by the Equal Justice Initiative (lynchinginameric.aeji.org) in the county, several of them killed in double- lynching incidents. The number is higher than neighboring Dorchester (3) but lower than neighboring Orangeburg (11). Without examining the specific cases, it’s not possible to draw much insight from those numbers.

The coverage of the 1909 lynching in Colleton gives insight into the news networks in which the coverage was enmeshed as well as the competing discourses represented by the newspapers. Newspapers appear to have relied on telephone calls from a correspondent in Branchville. It is not clear if the correspondent worked for more than one newspaper. The coverage in the News and Courier, the daily, was the feeder for the weekly papers. The Press and Standard, the main local weekly, has some content not in the News and Courier. The Times and Democrat in Orangeburg, drew on much of its content from the News and Courier but reproduced the transcript from the inquest. Other newspapers typically ran shorter versions of existing content, mainly from the News and Courier.

The horrible chain of events began around 9p.m. May 29 with the shooting death of J. Benjamin Smoak, the newly married son of a prominent family, who was found on the ground in front of the family store. A mix of law enforcement officials and volunteers began the search for the killer, with the sheriff from Bamberg sending bloodhounds to sniff out clues. A heavy rain delayed some of that search. The likelihood of the murderer getting lynched was expressed early, with the Press and Standard June 2 article reporting, “The crowd was cool and determined, and had made up its mind that the murderer, if found, should never be brought to jail but would pay the penalty for his crime on the spot.” The wording here is similar to those in other lynching reports that sometimes announced a forthcoming lynching outright, without attaching names. Such headlines seemed to get ahead of the event itself, almost scripting the outcome. The counter argument here would be that, without a strong will by public officials to avoid a lynching, it would have been inevitable and usually occurred. As will be discussed, in South Carolina and elsewhere there are instances where the local will to avoid a lynching led to cooperation that kept the intended victim out of the hands of the mob.

The June 2 issue was the first opportunity for the Press and Standard, the weekly based in Walterboro, to publish news of the murder. The newspaper was owned by W.W. Smoak, a prominent businessman and later, legislator whose family controlled and held the top positions for three generations. The relationship to the dead man is uncertain and not immediately discernible, though it was no immediate family. The Press Standard ran the story on its front page in the far-left column of a six-column front page. The lead read:

One of the most shocking and cold blooded murders ever committed in Colleton County was that of J. Benjamin Smoak Saturday night at Smoaks. The crime was committed about nine o’clock and the murderer, after looting the cash drawer, made good his escape.”

By the time the article ran, Smoak was already buried. The original article includes particulars of the robbery: $96 was looted from the cash drawer, including several checks made out to the business, which served as. The full load from the shot entered Smoak’s upper chest, and although people reported hearing shots, the paper states the noise would not have caused much attention because “the shooting of guns at that time of night was a somewhat common occurrence.” A modern reader used to nonstop coverage of violent crime would expect the June 9 issue to have extensive coverage on what the June 2 issue described as the “one of the most shocking and cold blooded” ever committed in the county. But the only reference to the murder of Smoak is a Proclamation in which Governor Martin F. Ansel announced a $100 reward for information helping solve the murder. Smoak is not mentioned by name.

What is pretty clear, given the eventual lynching on June 11, is that much was going on in the community, circulated through oral networks, during the week following the first report. Frank Samuel(s) and Aquilla (Quillie) were rounded up after Ben Minus, an African American man who worked for the murdered Smoak, shared suspicions that caused Smoak’s father to hire Minus to spy on the suspects. Minus claimed to have seen the two suspects count coins and bury the checks in the stable on the farm where Samuels lived. Mr. Smoak got the constable and deputies and they proceeded to make arrests, but the mob took over. As is typical of such coverage, the crowds never seem to have any identifiable faces. The first report on the lynching appeared in the Jun 12 issue of the News and Courier:

Double Lynching in Colleton.

Two Negroes Hanged and Riddled with Shot Near Smoak’s.

Officers on the way to Walterboro with four Prisoners Charged with the Murder of Mr. Benjamin Smoak on May 29 are Overtaken by a crowd of a Hundred Men

Two of the Negroes are Set Free and the Other Two are Hanged to a Tree and Filled with Lead.

Branchville, June 11. –Special: At a late hour to-night a crowd of about one hundred farmers and other citizens of Colleton County, took two negroes away from the officers of the law, hung them to trees near the railroad track, and fired round after round into their swinging bodies. The negroes, who were killed, were Frank Samuels and Quillie Simmons, and the crime for which death was meted out to them was the murder on May 29 of young Mr. Benjamin Smoak, a member of a prominent Colleton family, and a merchant of the town, which bears his name.

The News and Courier supplies facts for the other newspaper accounts that show up in the weeklies publishing a few days later. The newspaper was a daily and apparently had a contact or correspondent in Branchville, about 10 miles from Smoaks, in the neighboring county and site of the world’s first railroad junction. Other newspapers, such as The State in Columbia, indicated a Branchville correspondent, with information sometimes headed as “By Long Distance Telephone.” The Press and Standard, whose coverage of the lynching was excerpted near the top of this essay, had the later publication schedule as a weekly; its coverage has more local detail. Neither publication uses the racist epithets or characterizations often found in lynching coverage. Notably neither has direct attribution; it is not clear how the reporters know what they claim to know. Earlier 20th century journalism did not observe rules of attribution as strictly as journalism today, but lynching stories are notoriously silent on such documentation. Along with passive sentence constructions, there is a complicity evident that is quite common in reports on lynching. The Press and Standard, explaining how the victims were marched over near where Smoak had been murdered and tied to two small pine trees, states, “The command to fire was given; and the souls of Samuel and Simmons were hurled into eternity.” The writer’s description of the crowd, even the presence of “cooler heads” trying to persuade the group to let the legal system take its course, indicates the writer was a witness or had a source quite close to the action, but, typical of lynching stories, nobody in the mob seemed to have a name.

The reader is told that possibly 100 one hundred or more people fired shots at the bodies hanging from the pine trees. The description is frightening. What does one do after taking part in something like that? Do people turn around and speak to one another, congratulate one another for hitting the bullseye, brag? Do some hold a gun but fail to shoot? A reader imagines a chaotic scene, but the paper reports an aftermath of this ritual that is even more disturbing.

Quietly the crowd dispersed and soon no trace of them was left. The size of the mob was variously estimated at two hundred fifty to five hundred persons. They came from the neighborhood and from Bamberg and Orangeburg counties.” (Press and Standard, June 16, 1909).

A reader in 2022 might take some comfort in knowing that there were journalists who gave a raised brow to newspaper reportage on lynch mobs with persons unknown. The State newspaper, based in Columbia, was outspoken on lynching and sometimes criticized its peers. Turning a knowing eye on the reports from the other papers and its Branchville correspondent, it ran a biting editorial on page four under the heading: “A Common-Knowledge Lynching,” excerpted here.

There is one item sent The State by our Branchville correspondent that especially interests us. He says, “The negroes made a confession that they were the guilty ones.” To whom was this confession made? And how does anybody know it was made? The only person that would know whether or not the negroes confessed must have been a person that was present at the time of the lynching. Yet we are told the members of mob was unknown. How could any one assert that the negroes confessed unless he himself was present and part of the mob, or else who had talked with a confessed member of the mob? It would certainly be interesting to know how the secret of the negroes’ confession came to the public ear.

If everything is as plain sailing as it seems to be, there should be little difficulty in securing the arrests of the people guilty of putting these two negroes to their death. If people generally know all about the affair and know even that these negroes confessed, then somebody must know some of the men who defied the law and took the prisoners from the law. The same persons so certain that the prisoners were guilty of the crime charged against them would also be appropriate persons to whom to go to get other evidence as to the identity of the mob.

The notion of the “Common-Knowledge Lynching” may be conceptually useful here. The Press and Standard held the lynching close, without further commentary beyond the June 16 coverage. The only time the lynching is noted is in a local news column (“News from Smoaks” July 8), the July 14 issue, in which the author, signed “Wild Bill,” writes, “The excitement which eminated (sic) from the lynching of Frank Samuel and Aquila Simmons has somewhat subsided, and the folks of Old Smoaks are again pursuing a quiet and even tenor of their way.” It was as if the writer he was reporting on a fashion trend that had everyone in a tizzy. The column, which starts with a brief mention of the dry weather and its effects on crowds, reports on picnics and other social affairs. The identity of key members of the lynch mob that disappeared into the night is clearly not a mystery for Press and Standard. While larger newspapers circulated more widely such as The State questioned the status of the supposed investigation into those guilty of the lynching, this was not a local concern, common knowledge being satisfied.

Coverage from Smoaks does reveal details that suggest a more controlled mob than was true in some lynching incidents. Initially, four men were rounded up and interrogated as suspects, but two were allowed to go after the mob determined their innocence. Ben Minus, who worked for the murdered man, was, paid to spy on the suspected murders for the father of the murdered man. He was arrested under suspicions amid some of the alarm but released. In some situations, merely knowing the lynch victims could have put people at peril. The Press and Standard understandably has more details about Samuels and Simmons. Both newspapers attempted to address the issue of guilt. The Press and Standard, with the advantage of a later print schedule, included the transcript about the inquest where the two accused were declared guilty. The jury, consisting of white men from longtime Colleton residents, heard testimony for eight people, white and African American, some who testified seeing Samuel carrying a singlebarrel gun in the vicinity of the store gun the afternoon of the murder. The News and Courier, in a second-day article (June 13) titled “Lynched Negroes Confess,” (June 13), wrote, “from a reliable source it was learned today that the victims confessed they are the guilty parties.”

Toward the end of its June 16 article, The Press and Standard positions itself to speak for the community: “It is the opinion of everyone in the community that the right parties were captured, even the negroes expressed themselves as being satisfied on this point.” Although this claim is quite bold, it is possible that there was a strong sentiment by people in the community, including African Americans not wanting ill will to spread. Samuel and Simmons could have brought more trouble on the African American community. Acceptance of the lynching might also have been just what Blacks concerned told white people to survive. But some Blacks may have felt exactly as described. The Press and Standard wrote, “Samuel bore a bad reputation and is said to have organized a secret society for the protection of its members. One of the tenets of this society being that no information should be given out on any condition as to any crime they committed.”

The Bamberg Herald, 22 miles from Smoaks, stated the lynching was thought to be the first in Colleton County, a claim in other papers. The claim is easily refuted today by examining statistics. Several lynchings had been recorded up to this point, including one in 1895 in which an African American suspected of stealing a Bible and furniture from the church, was tied to a buggy and dragged. He and his mother were lynched at Broxton Bridge. His wife was able to escape. Counter to their usual complicity, newspapers led a public outcry, and the white men involved, including a local doctor, were arrested, tried, but acquitted. The incident may be a reflection of what Brundage identified as different categories of lynchings and differing public response. Drawing on the taxonomy in Brundage (1993), the mob lynching Samuel and Simmons might have been viewed as a form of civic participation. The small, private mob at Broxton Bridge would have had less warrant. The newspapers called that lynching “ugly” and “horrible.” The headline in the Dec.20, 1895 Laurens Advertiser was:” Only Way to Stop It. Hang the Perpetrators of Such Horrible Cruelty!” As an aside, my mother grew up hearing of this lynching as well, sometimes conflating it with the 1909 lynching in her memory.

Lynching in 1909

Coverage of the 1909 Colleton lynching appeared in several states, but these items, taken from wire services, were typically published with little context unless the crowds were especially large or the location prominent. The item in The Akron Beacon in Ohio, squeezed in among other snippets of crime news, is the story I have been discussing:

BRANCHVILLE, SC

A telephone message from Smoaks, ten miles from here, states that Quillie Simmons and Frank Samuels, negroes charged there, in the murder of Ben Smoak two weeks ago, were lynched by a mob of over 500.

In 1909 there were shifting winds in which communities, even in the Deep South, sought to distance themselves from the association with lynching. Running parallel to the Colleton lynching, from May 19-June 23, was the case of Ed Bynum in Lexington, near the state capital of Columbia, 75 miles from Smoaks. The case drew publicity partly because of what some saw as an improbable ending. Bynum was a “cropper,” who decided to opt out of farming fields controlled by a white landowner. When he tried to get out of the arrangement, he got in a dispute with the man over control of the field. When the white man sent other African Americans in to take over the crops, Bynum shot at them. He also fired at the sheriff who tried to serve him papers, causing injuries to the sheriff’s face, breast and right hand. Bynum immediately went on the run and, according to the Lexington Dispatch, “a posse of three hundred men” were “scouring the country for him.” Asserting that Bynum was a “desperate character and has been in trouble before,” the paper predicted, “if he is caught a lynching will surely follow” (May, 19, 1909). Bynum, described as “a bright mulatto about six feet tall,” evaded the crowds for three days, hiding in the woods without food, and living in fear. Through a mix of wit and assistance from family and officials looking to avoid what usually happens, he was able to negotiate a surrender to a white friend who helped expedite his returned and allowed his safe holding in the state penitentiary. Just over a month after the assault, he had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years, which he survived.

No blood other than the sheriffs was shed, but there was a war of words between the Lexington Dispatch and The State, the newspaper based in Columbia. An editorial in The State chided the Lexington’s projection of a likely lynching, noting the hypocrisy of almost advertising it even as the Dispatch declared Lexington to be a city of law-abiding citizens. The State’s writer recalled a lynching some 20 years ago in which Lexington officials could not save an African American from a mob. The Dispatch held that the State was unfair in its assumption that past lynchings meant that the city could not protect Bynum from lynching and needed the state’s intervention.

The exchange reflected ongoing national discussion about the responsibility law officials have to protect prisoners from lynch mobs. Just days before the Bynum affair erupted, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Joseph Shipp, a sheriff from Tennessee, and five of his deputies” aided and abetted” in the lynching of a prisoner in its care in 1906. The mob lynched Johnson after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a stay of his planned execution. There had been a growing view that Johnson was innocent; the evidence was flimsy and the victim less certain in her assertions. Shipp’s case was the first and only time the high court held a criminal trial.

The Tuskegee archives list 82 lynchings in the United States in 1909, a number now viewed as probably an undercount due to disputes over how to define a lynching Such violence occurred in nearly every state. The North hosted big-spectacle lynchings such as one in Cairo, Illinois, Nov. 11, 1909. William James, an African American, was accused of the rape and murder of a white woman, Annie Pelley; after shooting his body into pieces, the hungry mob is reported to have lynched a white man in jail for killing his wife. The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Hartford Courant, all selective about the lynchings they covered, put the Cairo story on the front page. The lynchings were reportedly witnessed by as many as 10,000 people. The mob reportedly lynched another Black man implicated in the Pelley murder after they hunted him down. Newspapers went out of their way to note that women were the first to pull the ropes when James was hanged; the act was reported as making the mob’s emotions uncontrollable. The events triggered anti-lynching legislation in Illinois.

A Legacy of Trauma

Newspaper archives offer increasing opportunities to read about lynchings from around the country, but if we are to better understand how journalism and community were entwined, we need to work on a smaller level to trace the coverage across newspapers and related coverage. This essay reflects my efforts to work out a methodology. It uncovered more questions than answers about the community in the aftermath of a lynching but suggested that tracing other cases might help discern patterns. Lynchings in neighboring counties, particularly where an African-American newspapers might have been present, could add more differentiation The concept of the “common-knowledge lynching might provide a framework for future analysis.

In thinking about how I first came to the Colleton lynchings, through work with my mother on her memoir, I realize even more deeply now that the threat of racial terror is woven through many of the stories she tells. It does not matter that she never knew the details of the specific lynching explored in this paper. In her memoir, she tells the story of a white neighbor who shared with her father that he was with a white crowd looking for an African American who had committed some infraction. As they all stood by a swamp, the neighbor saw the man emerge quietly from the swamp and looked him right in the eye. He let the man slip away without saying a word to the rest of the group. This is not the kind of story that would show up in newspapers from the time, but it reinforces how little we know about mobs and small-town lynching, and why we do need to study the journalism of lynching more closely to find better ways to work with the remnants we do have. Telling a lynching story was difficult for everyone. It still is.

Vivian Martin, PhD, is Professor, Department of Journalism, Central Connecticut State University

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