What Christians Can Learn from the Racially Charged Murder of Jesse Washington

Today marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most horrific episodes of racial violence in American history: the mutilation and public burning of Jesse Washington. It happened in my adopted hometown of Waco, Texas.

Historians call the late 19th and early 20th century the “nadir” of American race relations. The American South was ravaged and destabilized by the Civil War. The corrupt and abusive system of chattel slavery had formed the social structure of much of the pre-Civil War South. Emancipation had wrecked that structure.

For many whites, violence against “insolent” blacks seemed warranted in the war’s disorienting aftermath.

We Can’t Move On 

It wasn’t a coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan was founded right after the Civil War, or that “lynching” became much more common in the post-Civil War South than it had ever been before. White Southerners were grasping to reassert order in their upside-down region. To be sure, the whole nation was experiencing its share of racial strife: the Klan of the 1920s was as big in the northern states as the South, for instance.

But the South has a special burden to carry with regard to those racial “nadir” decades. As my Baylor colleague James SoRelle has noted, more than 3,000 lynchings happened in America between 1889 and 1918. The vast majority of the victims, like Jesse Washington, were African Americans, and the vast majority of lynchings happened in the Southern states.  

If you’re from the South, you don’t have to dig around too much to find hideous examples of racial violence from around the turn of the 20th century. But you do sometimes have to dig. My native hometown of Aiken, South Carolina, witnessed the lynching of three members of an African American family, the Lowmans, in 1926. I didn’t learn about that lynching until I was in my doctoral program at the University of Notre Dame.

I can understand why some might not be eager to discuss controversial topics like these lynchings. Shouldn’t we just move on, some might ask? Others would say—rightly, in my view—“No, we can’t move on.” Not until the history of racial violence in America is more fully acknowledged.

Hometown Horror 

The steps leading to Jesse Washington’s lynching began when the body of a white woman named Lucy Fryer was discovered. Fryer had been killed by blows to the head. Authorities identified Washington, a 17-year-old field hand at the Fryers’ farm, as the chief suspect. Scholarly studies have debated how likely it was that Washington was involved with the crime, but the evidence against him was mixed. It included a confession of guilt from Washington, but there were no eyewitnesses to the murder. Washington’s lawyers offered no defense of their client.

A hastily summoned all-white jury convicted Washington of the killing. Then a mob of whites seized Washington and lynched him before a lunchtime audience of thousands in downtown Waco. They cut off parts of Washington’s body, hung him from a chain, and slowly burned him to death. A photographer took pictures of the loathsome scene, providing rare visual documentation of an actual lynching.

Reactions to Washington’s execution ran the gamut from hearty approval to disgust and revulsion. The typical media response was to concede that Washington likely had committed the murder, but that such vigilante violence against blacks had to stop. One African American writer in Waco repeatedly denounced the episode, even suggesting Lucy Fryer’s husband had perpetrated her killing. This accusation led to the writer’s arrest for libel. The Houston Chronicle called the lynching “bestial cruelty.” The acting president of Waco’s Baylor University said that he had condemned the incident in a university chapel service. Although a number of white Waco pastors reportedly spoke out against the lynching, some in Waco’s African American community found their reaction disappointingly muted. 

In the absence of police action against the perpetrators, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched an investigation of Washington’s execution. Leading African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of the NAACP’s journal, wrote: “Any talk of the triumph of Christianity, or the spread of human culture, is idle twaddle so long as the Waco lynching is possible in the United States of America.”

Scars that Last 

As Christians, what should we learn from the “Waco horror” of 1916? As Jemar Tisby wrote recently for the Reformed African American Network, “awareness” is an essential component of racial reconciliation. He pointed to the need for more attention to the “racial history of the United States.”  

Tisby is right. To be sure, I can understand why some may balk at dredging up the past. Some may fear such painful memories will sow more bitterness and violate gospel unity between Christians of different ethnicities. Pastors, in particular, have to decide for themselves and their churches how best to handle historical and contemporary issues of racial strife.

But at some basic level, we need to acknowledge and lament episodes such as Jesse Washington’s lynching. If we do, they may help us take a sober, nuanced look at current concerns related to racial tension, such as the regular shooting deaths of black youths in America’s cities. These cases are made more complex when the African American victim, as with Washington, may have been guilty of a crime.

Incidents like Jesse Washington’s lynching make it clearer why many Americans today are so indignant about cases like the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Context matters. Whatever one thinks about Ferguson, it was not a one-off situation to those who know the deeper past of our racial history.

A public spectacle like Jesse Washington’s dismemberment and burning leaves social, psychological, and spiritual scars that last for generations. Jesse Washington’s body took the brunt of a kind of venomous hatred you can’t easily put into words. What the mob did to him said something profound about the status of whites, and the status of African Americans, in our country’s history.

We need to remember.