The lynching of Elbert Williams
20 June 1940Brownsville and the Hatchie River, Haywood County, TN
Elbert Williams helped start a NAACP branch in a county where no Black citizen had voted in half a century. He was taken from his home at night and pulled from the Hatchie River three days later.
No Black resident of Haywood County had voted since the 1880s. In 1939 a group in Brownsville founded an NAACP branch and began registering Black voters; Elbert Williams, who worked at a laundry, was one of its founding members.
White officials and businessmen answered with warnings, then with force. Other organisers were driven out of the county. On the night of 20 June 1940 the police chief and a group of men took Williams from his house in front of his wife Annie. His body was pulled from the Hatchie River three days later, weighted and marked by violence. A coroner's jury recorded death "at the hands of persons unknown".
He is generally recorded as the first NAACP member killed for civil rights work. The FBI investigated in 1940 and a federal grand jury returned no indictment. The Justice Department reopened the case under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act and closed it again without charges, the men involved long dead. Brownsville dedicated a marker and a grave for him in 2015; he had been buried in an unmarked plot for seventy-five years.
Sources
- June 20, 1940: NAACP Leader Elbert Williams Lynched in Brownsville, TennesseeA History of Racial Injustice, Equal Justice Initiativecalendar.eji.org
- LynchingTennessee Encyclopedia, Tennessee Historical Societytennesseeencyclopedia.net