The lynching of Willie Earle
17 February 1947Bramlett Road, near Greenville, Greenville County, SC
A mob of taxi drivers took Willie Earle from the Pickens County jail and killed him. Twenty-six of them signed confessions; an all-white jury acquitted every defendant.
Willie Earle was twenty-four, from Greenville, arrested in February 1947 after a white taxi driver, Thomas Watson Brown, was robbed and fatally stabbed. He was held in the Pickens County jail.
On the night of 16 February a convoy of Greenville taxi drivers drove to Pickens, and the jailer handed Earle over without resistance. They took him back toward Greenville, beat and stabbed him, and shot him with a shotgun on Bramlett Road.
What followed was unusual: Governor Strom Thurmond condemned the killing and called for prosecution, the FBI took statements, and twenty-six of the thirty-one men charged signed confessions describing their own parts in it. The trial lasted ten days. The defence called no witnesses and offered no evidence; its closing argument told the jurors that Willie Earle's life was not worth as much as a white man's. The all-white jury acquitted all thirty-one. Rebecca West covered the trial for The New Yorker and described it as the end of something - it was the last lynching recorded in South Carolina - but no one was ever punished for it.
Sources
- February 17, 1947: White Mob Lynches Willie Earle Near Greenville, South CarolinaA History of Racial Injustice, Equal Justice Initiativecalendar.eji.org
- Earle, Willie, lynching ofSouth Carolina Encyclopedia, University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studiesscencyclopedia.org