Star Creek Papers

Portrait of Washington Parish

Portrait of Washington Parish This page intentionally left blank M ore than fourteen hundred Negroes have been lynched since 1904, the date of my birth. I remember the month of June, 1913, because of a recurrent nightmare that left me, night after night, screaming with a terrible fear. The nightmare faithfully reproduced, night after night, a cartoon which I had seen in a Negro magazine, The Crisis. In the drawing, and in the dream, several Negroes were depicted hanging from a tree, while "Lynch Law," caricatured as a gorilla-like creature with bloody fangs, a rope in one hand and a torch in the other, approached to light a funeral pyre beneath the taut black bodies. The dream had one elaboration of the cartoon: the monster always turned upon me, and I could never move a muscle to escape. I am willing to leave to the psychiatrists an explanation of the subconscious setting of that nightmare. For me it was the beginning of what may mildly be described as "an interest" in the institution of lynching. That interest has led me to follow closely the immense literature on lynching in newspapers, periodicals, and books; to observe quite carefully the various efforts to enact an anti-lynching bill; and to consider the phenomenon in its relation to the social setting, as well as within the framework of my own emotional reaction to it. It is difficult not to regard a lynching as an abstraction, a happening that does not really concern you, an incident involving men, both victims and mob members, whom you do not know, will never meet, and who exist apart from your own circle of experience in a little lynching world of their own. Despite my own background, it was so with me; 3 4 The Star Creek Papers or, at least, it was so until the eleventh day of January, 1935. Early on that Friday morning, in the Washington Parish jail at Franklinton, Louisiana , occurred the death of Jerome Wilson, described by the Coroner 's jury as "death at the hands of a person or persons unknown." The death of Jerome Wilson was the first lynching of 1935. I had not known the victim, but I knew his father and his mother, his brothers , his sisters, his uncles, aunts and cousins. For a brief period I had lived in a cabin three miles away from Jerome Wilson's home. I do not now know who the men were who lynched Jerome Wilson, but I have moved in a community where, doubtless, I have seen one or two of them daily. Under these circumstances it is difficult to maintain either an intellectual or an emotional abstraction toward the incident; it is neither a cold entry in a lynching list, fit for future placement on a graph, nor a cause for a protest parade one thousand miles away. Jerome Wilson was the son ofJohn Wilson, who married Tempie Magee. His paternal grandfather was one Isom Wilson, who married Mandy Daniels, a mulatto woman, soon after the Civil War. Isom and Mandy had eleven children, ten of whom are living today. First Isom, and then each of his four boys in succession became independent land owners. His seven girls married men who bought or "homesteaded" land in the Northern section of Washington Parish. In the early Summer of 1934 the descendants of Isom and Mandy Wilson included ten living sons and daughters and seventy-seven living grandchildren, forty-three of whom had married and established families of their own. Isom Wilson's four sons were named Samuel, John, William and Simon. A community of land-owning Wilsons grew up around the Bethel Church, and in 1914 the community had added to it a threeroom Rosenwald School built principally by contributions from the Negro farm owners in the neighborhood. During Reconstruction days Isom Wilson was a leader in local Republican politics. The fact that his sons continued his political interest, until the disfranchisementof Negroes by the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1898, is remembered by local white persons as the only black mark on the record of the Wilson family. A few Negroes are still registered as Republican Portrait of Washington Parish voters, although they are not allowed to participate in the Democratic "White" primaries. The Bethel community is dominated by the Wilson family. There are adjoining Negro communities where Negro owners also predominate , and the second generation of Wilsons...