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As attendees and participants in lynchings, Southern white children were taught to accept and embrace traumatic violence and the racist narratives underlying it At one Kentucky lynching, young white children between six and ten years old brought wood and tended to the fire in which the victim was burned325 Boys especially were expected to actively engage in lynching; their roles expanded as they got older until, as young adults, they took on a direct role in the torture and murder326 Lynching was characterized as a civic duty of white Southern men that brought praise rather than sanctions from community elders and institutions
327SHERIDAN, ARKANSASOn Tuesday, October 6, 1903, a mob of masked men took Ed McCollum, a Black citizen of Grant County, Arkansas, from the county jail in Sheridan The men tied him to a tree on the lawn of the county courthouse in the town’s center square and shot him to death, leaving his body “riddled with bullets”266 Mr McCollum had been in the county jail since the previous Saturday for wounding a local constable during an arrest
267 Newspaper coverage of the lynching was terse and matter-of-fact, a reflection of how common such extrajudicial killings of African Americans had become during this time and in this regionThe town of Sheridan remained a hostile environment for African Americans in the following decades, but some found work at the local sawmill and built a small, resilient Black communityIn May 1954, four days after the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v Board of Education banned racial segregation in public schools, Sheridan’s school board unanimously voted to integrate its junior high and high schools
268 Under the vote, twenty-one Black students would join six hundred white students in upper school that fall and were guaranteed a discrimination-free experience in athletics, cafeteria service, and school dances269 Younger Black students would continue to attend the local two-room segregated lower school270 The district’s swift move toward integration, which made Sheridan the first community in the South to take such action after Brown, was likely influenced by the fact that the town was spending nearly $5000 per year to maintain segregation by busing Black high school students to a segregated school twenty-five miles away271Just one day after the school board’s historic vote, hundreds of Sheridan’s white residents organized a protest meeting in the high school gymnasium
In response, the school board unanimously rescinded its integration resolution, citing a “sincere desire to be representatives of our patrons in school matters”272 Unsatisfied, several hundred white citizens circulated a petition calling for the resignation of the entire school board; all but one member ultimately stepped downJack Williams, owner of the local sawmill and landlord for most of its employees, then approached Black families living on his property and demanded that they let him move their wooden shack homes to Malvern, twenty miles to the west, or he would evict them and burn their homes to the ground Of course, the Black sawmill workers moved to Malvern, and much of Sheridan’s Black community followed
273Recently, James Seawood, a Black man who attended Sheridan’s segregated elementary school as a child, recalled marveling at the white school’s huge building, marching band, and football team from atop the sawmill’s lumber stacks before returning to his own two-room school with two teachers and outdoor toilets Mr Seawood’s mother was the last Black teacher in Sheridan Just before they left town, they watched a bulldozer dig a large hole and push the entire school into the ground, then cover it up, wiping out all evidence of its existence
274Much of Sheridan’s racial history of lynching, segregation, and violent intimidation has also been buried The town remained completely white for decades, and its public schools did not desegregate until 1992, when the school districts of two small interracial communities nearby consolidated with the larger district Even then, Sheridan’s white parents and students yelled racial epithets during high school sporting events against interracial teams In 2014, less than 2 percent of the town’s residents were African American
275In United States v Cruikshank, decided March 27, 1876, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment “prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another”73 In other words, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment provided protection only against actions of the State, not against individual violence, and the power of the federal government was “limited to the enforcement of this guaranty”74 As a result, the Enforcement Act was a dead letter: African Americans in the South were to be left at the mercy of white terrorists, so long as the terrorists were private actors
(Thomas Nast/Harper's Weekly, Sept 5, 1868)“It is in the highest degree improbable that there was not a consistent, controlling directing purpose governing the convention by which these schemes were elaborated and fixed in the constitution Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites,—a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites
Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone”91On August 7, 1930, a large white mob used tear gas, crowbars, and hammers to break into the Grant County Jail in Marion, Indiana, to seize and lynch three young Black men who had been accused of murder and assault Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19 years old, were severely beaten and hanged, while the third young man, 16-year-old James Cameron, was badly beaten but not killed Photographs of the brutal lynching were shared widely, featuring clear images of the crowd posing beneath the hanging corpses, but no one was ever prosecuted or convicted
”74 As a result, the Enforcement Act was a dead letter: African Americans in the South were to be left at the mercy of white terrorists, so long as the terrorists were private actors.(Thomas Nast/Harper's Weekly, Sept. 5, 1868)“It is in the highest degree improbable that there was not a consistent, controlling directing purpose governing the convention by which these schemes were elaborated and fixed in the constitution. Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites,—a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.”91On August 7, 1930, a large white mob used tear gas, crowbars, and hammers to break into the Grant County Jail in Marion, Indiana, to seize and lynch three young Black men who had been accused of murder and assault. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19 years old, were severely beaten and hanged, while the third young man, 16-year-old James Cameron, was badly beaten but not killed. Photographs of the brutal lynching were shared widely, featuring clear images of the crowd posing beneath the hanging corpses, but no one was ever prosecuted or convicted.192 The haunting images inspired writer Abel Meeropol to compose the poem that later became the song Strange Fruit.193
