The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, known as the Lynching Memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama. Robin White, lynched outside of Wetumpka on July 2, 1901, was one of at least 4,400 victims of lynching in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Ted Vaden)
We mark our nation’s 250th birthday on Saturday. Thursday will be the 125th anniversary of a lynching in Elmore County.
That story, halfway between the Revolution and today, doesn’t reflect our ideals. But it shows our reality. One where American violence proved stronger than justice. Where racism exerted its centuries-long veto over our ideals.
It began with a petty dispute. In 1901, Robin White and his brother Abe, both of whom were Black, farmed property near Tallassee in central Alabama. They had a white neighbor named John Thomas, who let his chickens roam over the country, destroying the Whites’ vegetable gardens.
Thomas refused to pen his birds. So on July 1, 1901, the Whites, exhausted by their neighbor’s intransigence, began shooting at the chickens. Thomas, who heard the gunfire, grabbed a firearm and started shooting at the brothers, who fled. Thomas soon told white men in the neighborhood that his neighbors tried to kill him. Local officials arrested Robin White. A mob began to gather.
On the morning of July 2, 1901, White and three other men started the roughly 20-mile journey from Tallassee to the Wetumpka jail. After the coach got underway, the white mob began to follow. About 12 miles from Wetumpka, the mob overtook the carriage and dragged Robin White about 100 yards into a nearby wood.
Dave Parker tied a rope around White’s neck and to a nearby tree.
White was 27 years old.
It was one of the thousands of lynchings white Americans carried out from the 1880s through the 1950s. But then something unusual happened.
Nimrod Denson, a judge in Wetumpka, incarcerated members of the mob. Prosecutors managed to secure a confession from George Howard, one of the men who killed White. Howard identified the killers, leading to further indictments.
A jury convicted Thomas and two other men, Marvin Fuller and John Strength, of killing White. It was the first time in Alabama history that white men had been convicted for lynching a Black man. If the story ended there, it would be a horror partly redeemed by the integrity of local officials.
But the story continues.
Almost as soon as the sentences came down — life for Howard; 10 years in prison for Thomas, Fuller and Strength — the white community turned on the judicial process. They deluged Gov. William Jelks, an acidic racist even by the standard of the time, with letters slandering the Whites and begging mercy for convicted murderers.
Denson, facing the local pressure, abandoned his duties and told Jelks that “if further punishment is insisted upon, the just administration of the law in the future will be jeopardized.”
In June 1902, less than a year after Robin White’s murder, Jelks pardoned Howard, Fuller and Strength. (For unknown reasons, Jelks did not pardon Thomas. In 1906, a falling tree killed Thomas as he worked in a convict gang.)
The men who stole Robin White’s life returned to Tallassee as heroes. Strength later served a term as Elmore County’s sheriff. Howard lived to the age of 92. Howard and several other lynchers are buried in a churchyard not far from the place where White was murdered. White’s grave is unknown.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s the American promise. The Declaration of Independence says when government becomes “destructive of these ends,” the people may rebuild it “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
This is the American reality: White’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness ended in an Elmore County wood. Because a white man lied.
Neither his family nor the countless Americans destroyed by lynching had any hope of justice, or a country of safety and happiness. They weren’t “real Americans” in the eyes of white people. They were minorities in a land where most white Americans tolerated racial terror. Many embraced it.
Today there are Americans who think we can achieve our country’s promises by ignoring our nation’s faults. They want lynching, slavery and segregation out of school curricula. In fact, they would prefer we don’t mention race at all. It’s “divisive.” Or negative. Or not inspirational.
But we’ll never get anywhere better without confronting this violent strain in our character, one that holds that some Americans are more legitimate than others. It inexorably pulls us away from democracy and toward injustice, oppression and barbarity.
When I think of Robin White, I think of a transparently evil system that took a young man’s life.
And I also think of a country where masked men can pull immigrants off the street with zero legal accountability. Where the nation’s high court destroys Black political power with a facetious suggestion that racism doesn’t exist. And where many Americans have starkly different sympathies for white and Black Americans encountering the justice system.
So I think of Robin White. I think of the hateful faces that were his last sight on Earth. And how the victim and the killers all knew the law, the state and the country would bow to white rage.
I think of Robin White. And I hope for the day when the laws are applied equally. When democracy is a genuine fact. And when America’s sacred promises are not conditional.
From Alabama Reflector Post Url: Visit
Author: Brian Lyman