Nearly 89 years later on April 25, 120 residents of Waco met to discuss erecting a public memorial in the town to the “Waco Horror,” as the Washington lynching was called by the NAACP at the time. Members of two prominent Waco churches, faculty and students from Baylor University, and local high school students were in attendance. Patricia Bernstein, an author who has written a book on the lynching of Washington, was invited to speak. Following her presentation church leaders announced that they would form a joint committee to campaign for the memorial. Despite the history of lynchings throughout Texas, no city in the state has erected a public memorial to the victims of racist terror. Many of the high school students and others who examined the photographs of Washington’s lynching and listened to Bernstein speak last month said that they had not previously known about the lynching.

“This history keeps erupting,” stated Bernstein to the Houston Chronicle. “Over and over for 89 years at least part of the white community has been trying to hush it up.”

“Some Waco residents—including a late black mayor—have argued that the lynching need not be officially mourned and that Waco should look to the future,” stated an editorial in the May 4 Houston Chronicle. “Other residents, including a joint committee of black and white churches, are calling for a memorial to spell out what happened and apologize for it. The instinct to atone is the right one. Waco today is far beyond the city whose citizens lynched.”

Washington, who had just been convicted by a jury that took four minutes to find him guilty of killing the white woman he worked for, was removed from the courthouse. The lynchers chained him around the neck and dragged him through the city square to a tree under which they had piled wooden boxes and trash from nearby businesses. They doused his body and the pile of trash with coal oil. They threw the chain over a limb of the tree. After lighting the pit on fire and cutting Washington with knives, they jerked him into the air and lowered him into the fire repeatedly.

The scene was recorded by the city’s most prominent photographer, Fred Gildersleeve, who had been advised ahead of time that the lynching would take place. He set up his camera in the second story window of the mayor’s office at City Hall to take souvenir photos. Of the pictures he took, six were made into postcards and circulated throughout the states for several years to come.

In 2000 these postcards were displayed at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and then toured around the country in the exhibition “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.”

The photos clearly recorded the participants. Elisabeth Freeman, a white suffragist dispatched by the NAACP to Waco immediately after the lynching to investigate the incident, found out and recorded the names of the leaders—a collection of prominent citizens and those in the employ of the city’s elite.

The NAACP, then led by W.E.B. DuBois, published the facts about Washington’s brutal murder, including photographs, in a special eight-page spread in the July 1916 issue of the organization’s journal, Crisis. The NAACP then launched a national campaign against lynchings.

No one was ever prosecuted for this crime. No lawyer would even take the case. Two of the ringleaders went on to long careers with the police.

The only person to serve jail time in connection with the lynching was Black journalist A.T. Smith, assistant editor of the Paul Quinn Weekly, the journal of one of Waco’s two Black colleges. He was arrested and convicted of criminal libel after he reprinted a story from the Chicago Defender. The June 10, 1916, Defender article claimed that Washington was innocent and that the dead woman’s husband had been arrested for her murder. Smith was sentenced to a year’s hard labor on the county road crew.  
 
Organized, state-sanctioned terror
The Jim Crow system was imposed in the decade after the end of the Civil War through counterrevolutionary terror. In many states throughout the South, Radical Reconstruction governments, which included ex-slaves, free farmers, and others, sprang up after the defeat of slavery. They began to press for the expropriation of the land of the ex-slave owners and its division among freed slaves and other small rural producers. “Forty acres and a mule” became their slogan.

Fearing the rise of a united working-class in which Black and white artisans and industrial workers would come together as a powerful oppositional force, allied with free working farmers, the industrial capitalist class in the north engineered the defeat of this rising movement.

Through state-sponsored terror the rural poor and working class in the South were forcibly divided along color lines. A system of extensive segregation was legalized.

Racist mob and vigilante violence was a key element of this. Until the defeat of Jim Crow through the mass civil rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s, it was hard to find a local sheriff throughout most of the South who didn’t double as the local organizer of the Ku Klux Klan

Official statistics rank Texas third, after Mississippi and Georgia, in the total number of lynching victims. Of the 468 persons officially recorded as having been lynched in Texas between 1885 and 1942, 339 were listed as Black, 77 white, 53 Hispanic, and 1 Native American. In 1885 alone, official records report 22 mobs lynched 43 people in Texas. Many such incidents never made it to the record books.

The same year that Washington was killed in Waco, Anthony Crawford, a successful Black cotton farmer in South Carolina, was killed for allegedly cursing a white businessman in a dispute over the sale price of his cotton. After being released from jail, Crawford was cornered by a mob and lynched. His property was then seized by the banks.

The union movement was also a target of this campaign. Among the victims of lynchings during this period were also union organizers. In 1910, Castengo Ficcarotta and Angelo Albano, Italian immigrant workers in a cigar factory in Tampa, Florida, were lynched after workers at the plant defended their strike from company strikebreakers.  
 
 
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