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The Lynching of Jesse Washington And the Rise of the NAACP
Texas A&M University Press
April 2006
252 pages
ISBN: 1585445444
Trade Size (reprint)
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Historical | Non-Fiction Biography
In 1916, a crowd of ten to fifteen thousand cheering
spectators watched as seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington, a
retarded black boy, was publicly tortured, lynched, and
burned on the town square of Waco, Texas. He had been
accused and convicted in a kangaroo court for the rape and
murder of a white woman. The city's officials watched
Washington's torture and murder and did nothing. Nearby, a
professional photographer took pictures to sell as mementos
of that day. The stark story and gory pictures were soon printed in The
Crisis, the monthly magazine of the fledgling NAACP, as part
of that organization's campaign for antilynching
legislation. Even in the vast bloodbath of lynchings that
washed across the South and Midwest during the late 1800s
and early 1900s, the Waco lynching stood out. The NAACP
assigned a young white woman, Elisabeth Freeman, to travel
to Waco to investigate, and the evidence she gathered and
gave to W. E. B. Du Bois provided grist for the efforts of
the NAACP to raise national consciousness of the atrocities
being committed and to raise funds to lobby anti-lynching
legislation. Drawing on extensive research in the national files of the
NAACP, local newspapers and archives, and interviews with
the descendants of participants in the events of that day,
Patricia Bernstein has reconstructed the details of not only
the crime but also its aftermath. She has charted the ways
the story affected the development of the NAACP and
especially the eventual success of its anti-lynching
campaign. She searches for answers to the questions of how
participating in such violence affected the lives of the mob
leaders, the city officials who stood by passively, and the
community that found itself capable of such abject behavior
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