"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," wrote W.E.B. DuBois, editor of the NAACP's newspaper.On the afternoon of May 15, 1916, renowned Waco photographer Fred Gildersleeve set up his box camera on the second floor of City Hall, aiming it at a small tree below.
Under the tree, men were stacking wooden boxes for a fire. A crowd of hundreds, then thousands began to swarm.A roaring mob rushed to the scene from the courthouse, carrying a black teenager and mutilating him with knives. The men slipped a chain over the tree and began dangling the boy over a fire, to the cheers of a crowd estimated at 15,000. The orgy of torture would continue for more than an hour, ending with the decapitated body dragged through town.Gildersleeve had gotten advance word of the lynching of 17-year-old Jesse Washington, who was on trial that day for murdering and raping a white woman.The 35-year-old photographer joined the mayor and police chief in the mayor's office to watch the afternoon's spectacle. A faithful chronicler and booster of Waco, Gildersleeve was planning to sell postcards of the event.
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| http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jgl01 |
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