Clemson family remembers state's last lynching victim
Thursday marked 64 years to the day since a lynch mob took Willie Earle from a Pickens County jail cell and killed him in a remote area of Greenville County.
Historians believe Earle was the last black man to be lynched in South Carolina. His racially motivated homicide spurred action to pass anti-lynching laws and spurred Gov. Strom Thurmond to order that the perpetrators be brought to justice.
It is also credited with giving rise to groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Earle's family still lives in the Clemson area, and his grave ? unmarked until 1997? is at Abel Baptist Church in a historically black community in Clemson.
"Willie Earle was my father's stepbrother," said Eloise Earle of Clemson, "I was just an infant when this all happened, but I heard my parents talk about how terrible it was."
Eloise Earle said Earle's mother, "Grandma Tessie" Roseman Earle, was deeply affected by his death.
"She never got over it," she said. "It caused distress for the whole family, but particularly for her. Several of Willie's sisters had breakdowns in later years because of the strain of this awful thing."
Printed accounts of the time ? including Greenville papers carefully preserved at the Pickens County Museum and a May 1947 issue of Time magazine ? show that the attack on Earle galvanized much of the nation, rubbing raw the wounds of discrimination against blacks during the Jim Crow era.
The case started with a fatal attack on another man, taxi driver Thomas W. Brown, who was white. Brown was a disabled World War I veteran and the father of three. On Feb. 15, 1947, he was robbed and stabbed repeatedly by a passenger.
Some accounts suggest Brown may have been carrying more than one fare that snowy night. Greenville police said Earle was involved in the stabbing and robbery. He was arrested and was moved to Pickens County because of the racially charged atmosphere in Greenville.
Earle was an epileptic and may have been slow to grasp concepts when asked a direct question, said Eloise Earle. Members of his family never believed he was guilty of the crime of which he was accused.
"Grandma Tessie saw him in Liberty the night the taxi driver was stabbed," Eloise Earle said. "She worked at a cafe there. It never made sense to her that Willie would want to murder anyone."
On Feb. 17, as Brown lingered within hours of his own death in a Greenville hospital, a mob made up mostly of taxicab drivers bought liquor and drove to the Pickens County Jail. According to reports at the time, the mob of white men removed Earle from the jail at 3:30 a.m. The jailer, J. Ed Gilstrap, said he turned Earle over to the mob because its members had guns. Asked who was in the mob, Gilstrap said he was not sure.
With Thurmond's urging, Greenville County sheriff's deputies and city police within days had rounded up 31 men alleged to have been involved in the lynching. By March a grand jury returned indictments against all 31 in the murder of Earle.
At the trial, prosecutor Samuel Ruth Watt of Spartanburg produced signed statements by 26 of the defendants citing names, places, times and levels of involvement of men accused in the lynching. Nine of them named Roosevelt Carlos Hurd as the triggerman, an allegation Hurd denied. The statements all agreed that Earle was beaten with fists and gun butts, cut with knives, then shot several times in the head with a shotgun.
Earle and Brown died within hours of each other.
Judge James Robert Martin instructed the jurors in points of the law, charging them to deliberate until they reached a verdict. After deliberating for five hours, the jury, made up of 12 white men, acquitted all the defendants.
Earle's grave at Abel Baptist remained unmarked for years because his family feared reprisals from those who believed he did kill Brown.
Today, a gravestone donated by a University of Denver religious studies professor, Will Gravely, marks Earle's final resting place. Eloise Earle said Gravely, a Pickens native, had recalled the case from his youth and never got over it. She showed the professor where the spot was, near a large oak tree and among other graves from the 1940s.
"He's here alone," she said. "His parents are not buried here."