They Stole Him Out of Jail: Willie Earle, South Carolina’s Last Lynching Victim by William B. Gravely (review)

They Stole Him Out of Jail: Willie Earle, South Carolina’s Last Lynching Victim by William B. Gravely is an important local history of the last lynching in South Carolina. This history illustrates how the seamless corruption of security forces, judiciary limitations, and jury nullification combined to protect lynchers. The split between the FBI and the state judiciary created space for the lynchers to manipulate the system and avoid punishment.

Someone robbed, stabbed, and beat a white taxi driver, Thomas Watson Brown of the Greenville Yellow Cab Company, in February 1947. Brown claimed it was a large black man. Police arrested Willie Earle, who was five feet, nine inches tall, 150 pounds, and a drunken veteran, claiming that he was the perpetrator. A mob of taxi drivers broke Earle out of jail, with no resistance from the jailer, on February 17, the day Brown died from his injuries. They beat Earle so hard that they split the butt of a rifle; they repeatedly stabbed him and finally blew half of his face away with a single-barrel shotgun. Later federal investigation showed that the police probably misidentified Earle, and only circumstantial evidence connected him to the attack.

Earle’s death set off a political firestorm, leading to a federal-state turf war and overt, smirking jury nullification. The case received an enormous amount of press attention in the North. Inexplicable mistakes and decisions by the state prosecutors, as well as white supremacy, led to a jury refusing to convict the confessed, grinning, open members of the mob despite overwhelming evidence.

Gravely has made masterful use of his sources. He utilizes multiple manuscript collections, memoirs, African American press accounts, white local newspaper accounts, the letters and notebook of renowned British journalist Rebecca West, court documents, and interviews with Earle’s mother, Tessie Earle, and several others. The deaths of some of the major players left gaps that were hard to fill about motivation and the coordination of the accused lynchers’ stories. Gravely is an accomplished scholar and author, a professor emeritus at the University of Denver. He is also a native of Pickens County, South Carolina, where the lynchers murdered Earle, which gave him certain advantages in accessing interviews with witnesses.

Gravely’s writing is engaging and lyrical. The first chapter hooks the reader. The author weaves his analysis throughout the chronological text, keeping the state-federal fight between J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the state of South Carolina judicial system front and center. The masterful use of language and the clear writing style lead the reader through the court proceedings.

This work has a few weaknesses. The chapter “Discovering Willie Earle” discusses Earle’s life and character, but in that chapter, only two pages discuss Earle’s character and life, his epilepsy, and his arrests in 1946 for drunkenness. The most salient, and tragic, sentence in this chapter explains the mob fury: “The specter of the violent black male dwarfed any reasonable effort to find out about the real Willie Earle” (p. 92). Earle’s veteran status needs more attention. The epilepsy is given short shrift by the author.

The reader will come away with a clearer understanding of how Jim Crow, judicial competition, white supremacy, and corruption prevented the enforcement of rights for African Americans against lynching in the South. This work ties local history in South Carolina to the national and regional racial movements of the time, making it important for both historians and interested casual readers.