The burning of Henry Smith
1 February 1893Paris, Lamar County, TX
Henry Smith was paraded through Paris on a float, tortured on a scaffold built for the purpose and burned alive before a crowd of around ten thousand. It set the pattern for the spectacle lynching.
Note: Describes prolonged torture and burning before a crowd, and the trade in souvenirs.
Henry Smith, a young Black man described in the records as mentally disabled, was accused of the murder of three-year-old Myrtle Vance, the daughter of a Paris policeman. He was captured in Arkansas and brought back by train.
What happened on 1 February 1893 was organised rather than spontaneous. Excursion trains brought spectators in. Smith was paraded through the town on a decorated float, then taken to a scaffold built for the occasion on the prairie, where he was tortured with hot irons for something close to an hour before being burned alive. Contemporary accounts put the crowd near ten thousand. Photographs were taken and sold, a phonographic recording was made, and pieces of the scaffold were carried away as souvenirs.
The deliberate theatre of it - the advertising, the special trains, the souvenirs - is what made the killing a turning point. It was reported across the country and abroad, and it gave the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells and, later, the NAACP its most damning evidence: that this was not frontier justice but public ritual, attended by families, and that no one would be charged.
Sources
- LynchingHandbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Associationtshaonline.orgOn the Smith burning and its effect on the anti-lynching movement.
- Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (3rd edition)Equal Justice Initiative (2017)eji.org