Rope Around Neck of Ernest Glenwood, of Dooly County (1919)

One where the local newspaper tries to claim he was only "given a sound thrashing."

Not buying it.

Macon Telegraph (Georgia)
Saturday, 4 October 1919 - pg. 3 [via GenealogyBank]

FIND LOST NEGRO IN RIVER

Rope Around Neck of Ernest Glenwood, of Dooly County.
AMERICUS, Oct. 3. -- Mystery surrounding the disappearance of Ernest Glenwood, a negro, living near Lily, in Dooly county, was cleared up yesterday when his body was found in the Flint river and recovered by Tom Shirer, a white fisherman. Glenwood disappeared September 22, when, taken in custody by three masked men, and carried into the woods at night. John Graham, another negro, was with Glenwood when he was seized and carried off, but Graham was not molested.

It was charged that Glenwood had been circulating improper propaganda among Dooly county negroes, and it is believed he was given a sound thrashing by citizens who seized him and afterward released. How he came to meet death in the river is a mystery, although when found, the body had a rope about the neck, while a stout cord was tied around the right wrist. Several other negroes implicated in the circulation of the objectionable propaganda, were first whipped and then ordered to leave the county, since which time none of them have been heard from.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage wrote about this incident in Lynching in the New South (1993), citing a 4 October 1919 Atlanta Constitution (Georgia) news article:

Blacks who showed insufficient subservience to racial protocol in myriad ways suffered at the hands of small mobs...In September 1919, a mob lynched Ernest Glenwood, a farmhand in Dooly County, Georgia, for circulating "propaganda." The black man, who had been trying to organize black workers to refuse to work for 60 cents a day, was overpowered by three white men. They tied his arms together, forced him to jump into a river, and then riddled his body with bullets as he struggled for air.

A simple search on Google will give you the statistics. The Tuskegee Institute kept track of lynchings in America from 1882 - 1968. There were 581 in Mississippi, 531 in Georgia, 493 in Texas, 391 in Louisiana, 347 in Alabama, and so on. Total from all states: 4,743. That's more than one lynching and victim a week.

I feel a little like I should try to explain why I would give the horrible acts – those committed by the supposed criminal, as well as those committed on the supposed criminal – voice on this blog. There are no (at least to my knowledge) statistics showing the accuracy of the lynchers. How many times was an innocent person hung, riddled with bullets, and mutilated in the name of "justice?" I mean, we probably agree there are innocent people sitting in jail right now – with supposed checks and balances in place. Imagine when there were none. Shouldn't those innocent people be remembered?

Now, make no mistake, sometimes the lynching party "punished" the right person. As in, sometimes the true perpetrator was indeed apprehended – and then disposed of, often in a barbaric fashion. Even if you take the literal "eye for an eye" death penalty approach, I would not be surprised if that would have been an applicable punishment in only an infinitesimal number of cases. People were lynched for stealing, people were lynched for "insubordination," people were lynched for literally being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And let us not be cowards and leave out the racism debacle that lingers to this day. So another reason for giving voice to these past atrocities is in the same vein of "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

As a family historian, I am saddened to think (1) these revolting deeds took place, and (2) while statistics are easy to find, the names and stories of the individual victims are much harder to locate. A list of lynching victims will unfortunately never be complete. I hope that in a small way, posts such as these will serve as a memorial to those who were victims of Judge Lynch and his frightful law.