By Hasan Kwame Jeffries, The Ohio State University
The year 1917 had been a terribly trying year, and the summer wasn’t even halfway over. In May, in Memphis, Tennessee, a Black man, Ell Persons, who earned a living as a woodcutter, was accused of killing a white girl simply because he lived near where her body had been found. He was arrested twice and released both times because there was no evidence tying him to the crime. But the third time, things took a turn for the worse.
The Lynching of Ell Persons
The third time Ell Persons was arrested, he was savagely beaten until he confessed. As word of his admission spread, whites vowed to lynch him. They made no secret of their plan—they even alerted the local newspaper, which announced that Persons would be lynched the next day.
At the designated time and place, at least 1,000 white people gathered. They watched as the chief instigators doused Persons with gasoline, and they cheered as the ringleaders set him on fire. Remarkably, some of the spectators complained that too much accelerant had been used because the fire consumed Persons’s body so quickly; they preferred a slower burn. When the flames died down, Persons’s charred remains were distributed to the crowd. Those unable to snag one of the ghastly souvenirs did not leave empty-handed. A professional photographer provided a keepsake by selling picture postcards of Persons’s severed head.
Exactly one year earlier, 17-year-old Jesse Washington suffered a similar fate in Waco, Texas. The farmhand had been accused of raping and killing a white woman. The all-white, all-male jurors who sentenced him to death deliberated for only four minutes. Their bloodlust extended to the mob of 10,000 that had gathered outside the courthouse. As they escorted Washington out of the building, they seized him from deputies, doused him with coal oil, hung him from a tree, and slowly lowered him into a fire.
This article comes directly from content in the video series African American History: From Emancipation through Jim Crow. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
A Message for Black People
Even though Washington burned to death, the mob wasn’t satisfied. Lynching wasn’t just about punishing individuals. Lynching was also about sending a message to Black people that death was the price to be paid for violating Jim Crow laws and customs, no matter how major or minor the offense, and no matter the guilt or innocence of the accused. So, after posing for pictures with the boy’s smoldering body, the mob dragged his corpse to nearby Robinson, Texas, a town with a sizable Black population, and tied it to a utility pole for the whole community to see.
The lynching in Waco was shocking, even by Texas standards—a state that witnessed more than 300 of them, the third highest of any state, during the 40 years lynching was most common. But this wasn’t the worst act of racial terrorism to have occurred in the months preceding the NAACP’s New York City march. That ignoble distinction belonged to East St. Louis, Illinois.
Honoring White Privilege
East St. Louis was a small, industrial city on the other side of the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. It was mostly white, but the African American population had risen sharply and suddenly in recent years. In 1917, the number of Black residents neared 12,000, double of what it had been just seven years earlier.
The increased Black presence meant greater competition for jobs, which infuriated white workers, who insisted that employers honor their white privilege by refusing to hire their Black counterparts. But companies like Aluminum Ore didn’t hesitate to hire Black workers to replace striking white ones.
White workers pointed to their deaths as evidence of the threat that African Americans posed. They also used it as an excuse to rampage through the Black community.
On July 1, 1917, a white man drove through East St. Louis’s Black side of town, shooting indiscriminately into homes. He escaped unscathed, having caught the residents off guard. Two white men in an identical Ford motorcar driving through the Black community a few hours later were not so lucky. Black residents opened fire on their vehicle, killing both.
An “Orgy of Human Butchery”
The terror began the morning after the shootings, when white men started attacking Black people downtown. From there, the violence spread, intensifying and escalating quickly. Whites torched Black homes and businesses and shot African Americans attempting to escape the burning buildings. They lynched other Black people as they tried to flee the city. Quite a few African Americans also drowned when they tried to swim or raft across the Mississippi River. Black journalist Ida B. Wells, who had been chronicling racial terrorism for nearly two decades, described the affair as “an awful orgy of human butchery”.
Black people fought back, but there wasn’t much they could do to stop the onslaught; they were outnumbered and outgunned. The official death toll was 39, but the actual count easily surpassed 100.
Common Questions about White Supremacy and Lynching
The third time Ell Persons was arrested, he was savagely beaten until he confessed. As word of his admission spread, whites vowed to lynch him. They made no secret of their plan—they even alerted the local newspaper, which announced that Persons would be lynched the next day.
In 1917, the number of Black residents neared 12,000, double of what it had been just seven years earlier. The increased Black presence meant greater competition for jobs, which infuriated white workers, who insisted that employers honor their white privilege by refusing to hire their Black counterparts. But companies like Aluminum Ore didn’t hesitate to hire Black workers to replace striking white ones.
White men started attacking Black people downtown. From there, the violence spread, intensifying and escalating quickly. Whites torched Black homes and businesses and shot African Americans attempting to escape the burning buildings. They lynched other Black people as they tried to flee the city. Quite a few African Americans also drowned when they tried to swim or raft across the Mississippi River.
