A Southern Tradition: Lynching Black Veterans

Erik Loomis:

Veterans Day: A perfect time to remember one of our national legacies, white people lynching black soldiers and recently returned veterans.

SNIP

A month after World War I ended, Private Charles Lewis returned home to Tyler Station, Kentucky, where a mob of masked men lynched him on December 16, 1918. Private Lewis was wearing his uniform when he encountered Deputy Sheriff Al Thomas, who attempted to arrest him for robbery. Private Lewis denied guilt and pointed to his uniform, declaring that he had been honorably discharged and had never committed a crime. The two men argued and Private Lewis was charged with assault and resisting arrest. Private Lewis was awaiting transfer to the Fulton County Jail in Hickman, Kentucky, as news of his challenge to white authority spread and a mob of 75 to 100 people formed. At midnight, masked men stormed the jail, smashed the locks with a sledgehammer, pulled Private Lewis out of his cell, tied a rope around his neck, and hanged him from a tree. The next day, hundreds of white spectators viewed Private Lewis’s dead, hanging body, still in uniform. At least 10 more black veterans were lynched in 1919 alone.

But Colin Kaepernick is the traitor.

 

Tyler Station doesn't exist on state maps any more, but Fulton County is in the far southwestern corner of the state, on the Mississippi River.

 

According to this archive, 142 black people were lynched in Kentucky, along with 63 white people.  That puts us ahead of West Virginia, Virginia, even South fucking Carolina.  Kentucky lynched more black people than North Carolina.  More than Oklahoma. More than Missouri. More than Indiana.

Only eight states lynched more black people than Kentucky did, and they are all of course deep-south shitholes.

While Kentucky doesn’t have quite as many lynchings on record as other states in the South, it does have some of the most gruesome and heinous accounts of lynchings that took place during this time. Reports indicate that 205 people were lynched in the state during this time frame and 142 of them were Black. They all met with unbelievably inhumane deaths. A glimpse of just how much terrorism Blacks faced in Kentucky can be found in the March 25, 1871 letter sent to the U.S. Congress asking for protection from the Ku Klux Klan for the newly-freed African Americans in Kentucky. In the book Racial violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940 Dr. George C. Wright says “the letter was from Colored citizens of Frankfort & vicinity, signed by Henry Marrs, a teacher; Henry Lynn, a livery stable keeper; N. N. Trumbo, a grocer; Samuel Damsey; B. Smith, a blacksmith; and B. T. Crampton, a barber.” The document contained a list of 116 incidents of beatings, shootings, hangings, tarring and feathering, and other violence that had taken place around the state.

No of course we didn't learn about this in school, or even college. The civil war was about industrialization and states rights. Lee was a hero, Gone with the Wind was nonfiction, Jim Crow who?.  There were whispers, but only about the heinous rapes of white women that those men must have committed to earn lynching.

And that was Kentucky public education in the 1970s.