The lynching of Jesse Washington
15 May 1916City Hall square, McLennan County, TX
Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old farmhand, was seized from a Waco courtroom and burned alive outside City Hall before a crowd of some 10,000 people. Photographs were sold as postcards.
Note: Describes torture, mutilation and burning.
Jesse Washington was seventeen, a farm labourer in Robinson, Texas, when he was accused of killing Lucy Fryer, the wife of his employer. His trial on 15 May 1916 took a single morning, and the jury of twelve white men deliberated for four minutes. As the verdict was read, spectators took him from the courtroom.
He was dragged by a chain down the courthouse stairs, through the streets of Waco, mutilated, and burned over a bonfire outside City Hall while a crowd - some 400 in the alley at the start, growing into the thousands at the square, with contemporary accounts claiming as many as 15,000 - watched from the street and from office windows. A local photographer took pictures and sold them as postcards.
The NAACP sent the suffragist Elisabeth Freeman to investigate. Her report, published by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Crisis as "The Waco Horror", was one of the first pieces of national investigative work on a lynching, and it helped turn the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign into a mass movement. No one in Waco was prosecuted.
Sources
- Washington, JesseHandbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Associationtshaonline.org
- Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (3rd edition)Equal Justice Initiative (2017)eji.org