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

Introduction

Introduction In April 1995, Lawrence Johnson, black city councilman from Waco, Texas, visited Memphis to attend the National Conference of Black Mayors. While he was there, he took the time to see the National Civil Rights Museum. Built around the remains of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in 1968, the museum is designed, like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., to take the visitor on a journey. The museum leads visitors through the history of the abuse heaped on black Americans over more than three hundred years and the long, grinding struggle to win equal treatment. Visitors see the tarnished hulk of a burned Freedom Riders bus from the 1960s and a complete re-creation of a Woolworth’s lunch counter where young black students protested segregation by “sitting in” while they were beaten, taunted, and splattered with ketchup and mustard. One can even step into an actual Montgomery, Alabama, city bus and hear a recording of a bus driver angrily ordering black riders to “move to the rear.” But in one corner of the museum, in a display about the lynching of almost five thousand Americans, most of them black, between 1880 and 1930, Lawrence Johnson spotted a photograph that sears the sight of the viewer. The picture Lawrence Johnson saw is infamous among historians who study early-twentieth-century America. It has appeared in many books about lynching and in at least one history of Waco. This photo is still not well known to most Americans, though it should be as familiar as the flag raising on Iwo Jima in 1945, the image of the Hindenburg airship bursting into flame over Lakehurst , New Jersey, in 1937, or the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a naked, weeping Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm bomb in 1972. The picture Lawrence Johnson saw, taken by Waco commercial photographer Fred Gildersleeve , is one of the few extant photographs of a lynching caught in progress rather than after the fact.1 At first, the picture appears to be nothing more than a group of hundreds of men crowded into a city square, almost all of them wearing the flat-crowned 3 straw “boater” hats that were popular in the summer of 1916. This ocean of flatbrimmed white hats is lapping against a scraggly little tree in the center of the square. Only when you look closer do you see a fuzzy area in the center of the picture , below the tree, like a ribbon of smoke. And then, through the smoke, you can just make out . . . a leg, a foot, an elbow. A naked human being lies collapsed at the bottom of the tree on top of a smoldering pile of slats and kindling . Around his neck is a chain, which stretches up over a branch of the tree. A man in a white shirt with a dark fedora mashed down on his head stands by the folded-up body, yanking on one end of the chain. He is wearing a heavy glove on the hand that holds the chain because it has been heated by the fire and is hot. This self-appointed executioner may have been caught in the act of jerking the blistered creature below the tree upright against the tree trunk in order to display him to the mob. Or perhaps he has just lowered his victim back into the fire. In the meantime, another man in white shirt and light-colored hat is poking and prodding the dying man with a stick or rod of some kind, almost as if he is trying to turn the body on the fire. The onlookers watch intently . Some appear to be smiling or shouting encouragement to the torturers. After standing transfixed for a moment before the picture, Lawrence Johnson read the caption and learned to his amazement that this particular lynching had taken place in Waco, Texas, his hometown, on May 15, 1916. The caption also explains that the mayor of Waco, who watched the entire episode from an excellent vantage point on the second floor of City Hall, was concerned that the lynchers might damage the tree but expressed no concern for the human being who was stabbed, beaten, mutilated, hanged, and burned to death before his eyes.2 Lawrence Johnson had lived in Waco all of his life but had never heard of the lynching of Jesse Washington. When he returned home, he went to the library and found the whole story...