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17. Street Car Lynching

The extent to which racial violence was practiced in America is difficult to establish prior to 1882. At that time the Chicago Tribune began monitoring lynchings. For the next 80 years (until 1968) they recorded 4,743 persons as been lynched in the United States.

The term lynching does not just include death by hanging. It came to include beating, burning, drowning, shooting, and torture. Though many racial killings went unreported in remote locales, those that were documented reveal that more than 70 percent of the victims – 3,446 – were African-Americans.During these same years, 531 persons were reported lynched in Georgia, which ranks second only to Mississippi with 581 victims of lynchings.

There is both a history and a geography to southern lynching. Between 1882 and 1930, when the vast majority of lynchings in the Deep South occured, the greatest concentration was centered on the lower Piedmont region, known as the Black Belt. Dominated by cotton plantations, this broad band running from Georgia through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana so over 80 percent of the victims of lynchings who were black.

Columbus is located in the middle of this Black Belt, . Research has shown that southwest Georgia and southeast Alabama running along the Chattoahoochee River were amongst the worst areas for mob violence directed against African Americans. Indeed, this region ranks second only to the Mississippi Delta. 

 

Tuskegee lynching map.

One of the few documented lynchings durien slavery occured in Columbus. A slave named Jarrett was accused of attempted rape of a rural white woman in August 1851. Brought to the city, the towns leading citizens were convinced that Jarret was innocent. However, a rural mob arrived, took him by force and hung him. This lynching established a pattern that continued through the city’s history. Specifically, a black man was arrested, tried and convicted, but lynched anyway. Lynching mobs often came into the city, revealing a tension between rural and urban whites. It also revealed that thought residents may have rejected mob violence they did little to stop it. Finally, most lynchings in the South occured during hot weather. 

1869: Jesse Layton and Will Miles, double lynching on Broadway at Twelth Street.

1900: Simon Addams who's weighted body was thrown into the river.

1910: Alfred Phelts (white jailor) was shot to death defending the jail from a mob seaching to lynch Henry Taylor, a black man charged with assulting a white woman. Hailded as a martyr in newspapers across the nation, the city issued a resolution condemining mob violence.  

1912: T. Z. McElhany. Acquitted that day in the accidental shooting of a 12-year-old white child, in Teasy McElhany (African American, aged 14), was kidnapped from the court by twenty-five men. Hijacking a streetcar at the corner of 10th Street and Second Avenue, they took T.Z. to the end of the line at the base of Wynn's Hill. They riddled his body with bullets. Two men were tried, neither convicted.

Submitted by Amanda Rees, April 21, 2017.

Referecnes and Further Reading

Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck. Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings. University of Illinois Press, 1992.

 

Wynn, Billy. Lynching on Wynn’s Hill. Southern Exposure, Fall and Winter 1987, pp. 17-24. (originally published in the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer)

Wynn, Billy. Racial Violence in the Chattahoochee Valley. Speech delivered at the Columbus Public Library on May 3, 2007 as part of the “Red Clay, White Water, and Blues” local history series.