The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP

CHAPTER 7. “The News Will Go Far”: The Immediate Aftermath

CHAPTER 7 “The News Will Go Far” The Immediate Aftermath For wherever the news of it goes—and the news will go far—it will be asserted that in no other land even pretending to be civilized could a man be burned to death in the streets of a considerable city amid the savage exultation of its inhabitants. —New York Times 127 T HE reaction to the Waco Horror across the state of Texas, across the country, even outside the country, was overwhelming. It was as if the Associated Press accounts of the lynching carried with them a sizzling current of revulsion and disgust. Newspaper readers were becoming accustomed to reading about southern lynchings, but this one, most people acknowledged , was something special. The Dallas Morning News covered the incident as a news story, but did not publish an editorial, perhaps because an elderly black man had been thrown out of a second-story window of the Dallas courthouse, dragged along the city streets, and hanged from a telephone pole only six years earlier.1 But both of Houston’s major dailies excoriated Waco without any reservations. The Houston Post called what had happened a “shocking exhibition of mob rage.” The editorial begins: “There has not occurred in Texas within the Post’s knowledge such a savage outlet of unrestrained mob passion as that which attended the burning at the stake Monday of the negro boy, Jesse Washington, on the public square in Waco in the presence, it is said, of 15,000 persons. From no angle viewed, can there be the least excuse, much less justification, offered for it.”2 The Post goes on to express particular anger over “the shame and humiliation that has been brought upon the State” and comments that the inhabitants of Waco enacted “the role of veritable demons in tormenting to death the condemned prisoner.”3 The Houston Chronicle was even harsher and also anticipated the world’s condemnation of the state because of what the people of Waco had done: “It is with gloomy forebodings that we await the stinging lash of criticism and reproach —criticism thrice hard to bear because it is merited, reproach thrice difficult to endure because it is justified. Not a word of defense is there to offer ; not an extenuating circumstance to plead.”4 The Chronicle notes that the criminal had already been condemned to die with remarkable swiftness: “What could the mob hope to do that the state had not already done except to satiate that blood lust and morbid antipathy which have no place in civilized communities ?” The Chronicle editorial writer also expresses the fear that other communities will use the Waco lynching as justification for more of the same: “‘They did such a thing in the cultured, reputable City of Waco,’ men will say. ‘Why should not we do likewise?’”5 The Chronicle editorial writer foresaw that regional pride, so important to southerners at the time, would come under intense attack: “Georgia, that we scolded so excitedly because of the Frank affair, what will Georgia have to say? New York, that we ridiculed because of the Thaw case,6 what will New York have to say?” The only response Texans could make to any criticism, says the Chronicle, would be “to bow our heads in shame.” How, the writer continues, could the United States hold its head up among the nations of the world when such an enormity had been committed on American soil? “We have denounced the Germans for certain alleged atrocities in Belgium: we have called upon the world to ostracize Turkey for her treatment of the Armenians; we have worked ourselves into horrified repugnance at the French revolution for more than a century; we have pretended to be humane, Christian and tolerant and have called upon others to emulate us . . . Now we stand before the world, confessedly involved in one of the most revolting tragedies of modern times; a tragedy which for sheer barbarism has seldom been paralleled in American history.”7 The editorial writer was particularly struck by the fact that the deed was not done in the dead of night, but in broad daylight, before an audience of “40,000” people, in plain and open defiance of the law, and that no one made any attempt to stop it. Chapter 7 128 The Austin American expressed disgust and horror on a par...