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

CHAPTER 2. “Active for Good”: The Beginnings of the NAACP

CHAPTER 2 “Active for Good” The Beginnings of the NAACP [Every citizen] must be active for good or he will be counted for evil. —Moorfield Storey 29 A S the deluge of blood from lynchings and pogroms against blacks washed across the South during the early twentieth century, with occasional broad streams flowing up into the Midwest, most people not directly involved were content to sit back and watch, some with tacit approval, others with a muttered “tsk-tsk” or a quickly forgotten pang of disgust over the morning newspaper. There were a few individuals, however, who viewed the mistreatment of blacks with a rising sense of outrage and who had already come to believe that moral revulsion should be followed by action.1 The key actors in this chapter of the story had been observing the ebb and flow of lynchings, in particular, with growing disquiet. But the single event that finally stirred them to organize was an ugly race riot which occurred, shockingly, in Springfield, Illinois, the birthplace of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, just a few months before the centennial celebration of his birthday. The Springfield riot was sparked by two incidents—the murder of a white mining engineer by a black man on the night of July 4, 1908, and the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man on the following August 13.2 On the night of July 4, a sixteen-year-old girl named Blanche Ballard woke up suddenly about 1:00 a.m. and realized that a man was sitting or lying at the foot of her bed. The girl screamed and the man fled, but Blanche’s father, Clergy Ballard, caught up with the intruder in the front yard and the two men struggled. The family found Clergy collapsed and bleeding from stab wounds. Before he lost consciousness, he whispered that his attacker had been a black man. Clergy Ballard died the next day. In the other case, Mabel Hallam claimed that she had been raped in her home on the night of August 13 by a black man while her husband, a streetcar conductor, was working the late shift. On the basis of the flimsiest of evidence, two black men, Joe James and George Richardson, were accused of committing these respective crimes and jailed. On August 14, a mob began to gather at the local jail, threatening to lynch both men. The sheriff decided to move the two prisoners out of town until the populace settled down. He called on a wealthy local citizen Harry Loper, proprietor of Springfield’s “largest and most popular restaurant” and owner of one of Springfield’s first automobiles, to provide a car for the getaway.3 The plan succeeded. The prisoners were taken in Loper’s car to a waiting train and carried to the jail in Bloomington, Illinois, sixty-seven miles from Springfield. The infuriated mob, however, learning that the prisoners were gone and that Loper had helped them escape, burned Loper’s car and then destroyed his restaurant. From there the mob proceeded to the black business district and advanced from building to building, destroying, pillaging, and burning as they went. When that project was completed, they continued into a residential area, where they committed their worst crimes. Scott Burton, a middle-aged black barber who had sent his family away and stayed behind to defend his home, was captured, beaten, and hanged from a dead tree near a saloon. After he was dead, the mob stripped and mutilated his corpse and riddled it with bullets. The following evening, the mob attacked the home of William Donnegan, an eighty-year-old, well-to-do black man who was severely crippled by rheumatism. The mob dragged Donnegan out of his house, beat him with bricks, cut his throat with a razor, and tried to hang him from a small tree in front of the school across the street. He died the next day. Both Burton and Donnegan were comparatively well off and lived in largely white neighborhoods. Donnegan had a white wife. The mob seemed to single them out because they were doing well and represented to whites tanChapter 2 30 gible evidence that Negroes were getting too “uppity.” A number of white citizens later put the motivation of the mob into words: “Why, the niggers came to think they were as good...