The lynching of Anthony Crawford

Anthony Crawford was fifty-six, the son of people who had been enslaved, and one of the most prosperous Black farmers in Abbeville County - 427 acres, sixteen children, a founder of his church and of the school his children attended. Prosperity of that kind was the provocation.

On 21 October 1916 he went to town to sell cottonseed, disputed the price a white merchant offered, and called him a liar. He was attacked with an axe handle, arrested for his own protection, released, and then taken by a mob. They beat him, kicked him, dragged him through the streets of Abbeville behind a wagon, hanged him from a pine at the fairgrounds and fired into his body.

Afterwards the county gave the Crawford family a deadline to leave. They scattered north and the land went. What happened in Abbeville was a lynching and also a transfer of property: the terror that killed Anthony Crawford also took four hundred acres out of his children's hands, which is how a great deal of Black land in the South changed owners.