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HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Saturday 04/30/05
Section: A
Page: 1
Edition: 3 STAR
Written By: Thomas Korosec,
Staff
WACO - Of the nearly 500 lynchings that took place in Texas before the
crime abated in the 1930s, the "Waco horror " is among the most notorious.
On May 15, 1916, Jesse Washington, a retarded black farm hand, was
mutilated, tortured and hanged over a bonfire in the Waco town square as a
crowd of 15,000 watched and cheered. Minutes earlier, the 17-year-old had
been convicted in a brief trial of the rape and murder of a white woman, a
crime to which authorities said he confessed.
Neither the county sheriff nor presiding judge did anything to stop the mob
from dragging Washington from the stately domed McLennan County Courthouse,
according to historical accounts. The mayor and police chief watched the
gruesome spectacle as Fred Gildersleeve, Waco 's most successful commercial
photographer, took pictures that he sold as souvenirs.
Several church leaders and the Baylor University faculty were among the few
in the prosperous cotton city of 30,000 to condemn the lynching, for which
no one was ever arrested or tried.
Today, people from those same institutions have taken on a task that has
proved similarly unpopular in Waco : marking the 89-year-old event in a
public way.
"Something like a memorial would do a lot to resolve this whole story,"
said Patricia Bernstein , a Houston author whose recently published The
First Waco Horror examines the Washington murder and how it became the
centerpiece of the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign.
"This history keeps erupting, at least twice in Waco politics before I came
along," said Bernstein , who is married to Alan Bernstein , deputy national
editor at the Houston Chronicle. "Over and over for 89 years at least a
part of the white community has been trying to hush it up. But it won't
stay hushed."
Plan to take action
On Wednesday, after a lecture by Bernstein , members of the predominantly
white Seventh & James Baptist Church and the traditionally black Antioch
Baptist Church said they would form a joint committee to mark the lynching
with a plaque or more elaborate memorial.
"I think there's a process of exorcism that might come from it ... facing
the evil," said Mary Darden, 52, a doctoral student at Baylor who was among
the 120 church members at the lecture.
"People don't want to deal with it because it is going to hurt and
embarrass us," said Michael Babers, 36, a sixth-grade teacher and member of
Antioch Baptist. "You cannot get better unless you first admit you did
something wrong. I'm going to do what I can."
Many in the audience, including several high school students who showed up
for extra credit but ended up becoming enthralled, said they had never
heard of the lynching.
Others, including elementary school teacher Waymon Debose, said they knew
of it through a local black folktale.
"People say the tornado that hit Waco in 1953 supposedly followed the path
of the lynch mob," said Debose, recalling an event that blacks in Waco came
to see as divine retribution. The tornado, which cut a 23-mile path through
the region, passed through the center of downtown, killing 114 people of
all races.
In the past seven years, black elected officials have twice attempted to
erect memorials to the Washington lynching. Both raised emotions in this
central Texas city of 114,000 residents, 22 percent of whom are black,
before ultimately failing.
In 2002, County Commissioner Lester Gibson offered a resolution to
"acknowledge and offer an expression of regret" on behalf of the county and
ask residents to "reflect on this profound travesty of justice."
Gibson, the only black commissioner of the five, proposed posting the
resolution next to a courthouse mural painted in 1970 depicting a hanging
tree. County officials were debating at the time whether to restore the
mural.
"The county was as responsible as anyone, and as a commissioner, I'm in a
position to acknowledge this," Gibson said.
What stirs him most was that the lynching appeared to be condoned by
officials in Waco . The crowd was not riffraff and lowlifes but the
so-called "better element."
Although the artist is dead and nobody knows for certain why the hanging
tree was painted, Gibson said he sees it as an icon glorifying that era.
"My thought was, `Let's acknowledge what happened and apologize,' but
nobody else agreed with that," he said. Gibson's motion was met with
silence, and it died for lack of a second.
`Let's move on'
Commissioner Joe Mashek said he heard at the time from a distant relative
of Lucy Fryer, the woman Washington was accused of killing, who was
appalled that officials would consider an apology.
Mashek said Washington was tried and convicted, then he became the victim
of a crime.
"Let's move on, that's the way I feel," said Mashek, who said he sees no
connection between the hanging-tree mural and the Washington lynching.
Lawrence Johnson, a black lawyer who served on the Waco City Council, said
he was moved to read the 1916 newspaper accounts of Jesse Washington's
killing into the city record in 1998 after seeing one of Gildersleeve's
photos at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn.
Johnson said he gathered little support at City Hall for placing a plaque
or passing a resolution denouncing the incident.
Looking to the future
City Manager Larry Groth, who is white, said he is not certain the
Washington lynching needs to be memorialized.
"I don't think we should be judged by an event in 1916," said Groth, a Waco
native.
He pointed to the election last year of the city's first black mayor, the
late Mae Jackson, who died in February after being hospitalized for chest
pains.
Groth said he discussed the matter with Jackson.
"It wasn't something she wanted to push," he said. "She wanted to look to
the future."
McLennan County native William Carrigan is a history professor at Rowan
University in New Jersey and author of The Making of a Lynching Culture:
Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas 1836-1916, which was published
last year.
He said Waco moved from boasting about the Washington lynching and others
to silence after the city became the subject of the NAACP's international
shaming. Newspapers in Austin and Houston, and as far away as New York and
Paris, denounced "the Waco Horror ."
"In a way the silence was good," Carrigan said. "They were no longer proud
of it."
Carrigan said he is not surprised some people today would rather let the
matter rest.
"It's difficult and touchy to bring up a matter someone is now ashamed of,"
he said.
Despite a history of 492 documented lynchings in Texas between 1882 and
1930 - ranking Texas third in the nation - no city in the state has erected
a public memorial acknowledging the racial violence.
The Rev. Delvin Atchison, pastor of Antioch Baptist, said there is
hesitation in the black community as well.
"Some people say, `Why bring that mess up again?' You have a black city
attorney, a black city secretary. Race relations have progressed. There is
a thinking that things are going well, why bother bringing this up."
Keeping the past alive
He disagrees, however.
"I've seen racism to that degree, and if a crowd grabs that contagion, it
grows and grows," the pastor said as members of both congregations sat down
for dinner. "It's important that we examine it so we can never go down that
road again."
The Rev. Raymond Bailey, pastor of Seventh & James, concurred.
"We still have mob violence. What causes ordinary, decent, religious
persons to act in such inhuman ways? I'd hope we find out what stirred the
hatred and fear, and what stirs those today."
Carrigan, the historian, said a broader anti-lynching memorial would likely
be an easier sell in Waco than one focusing on the Washington lynching
alone. Just as Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial credits people who aided the
Jews, Waco 's site might pay tribute to the many documented histories of
lawmen who stood up to lynch mobs, he said.
"Waco would come out looking like they changed and reformed," Carrigan
said. "If they hem and haw, drag their feet and prolong the debate, it's
going to look like a bad reputation is deserved."
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