MASS LYNCHING TRIAL IN SOUTHERN U.S.A. OVER SLAUGHTERING NEGRO

Grey River Argus, 23 May 1947, Page 5

MASS LYNCHING TRIAL IN SOUTHERN U.S.A. OVER SLAUGHTERING NEGRO

Jury Acquits 28 Taxi-drivers

(Rec. 8.40) NEW YORK, May 21. For the first time in the history of the Southern States of America there has been a mass trial of persons for a lynching. At the end of the trial a County Jury, at Greenville, South Carolina, to-night, acquitted all of the twenty-eight defendants of charges connected with the death of a Negro. Twenty-one of them had besn accused of murder, and of being accessories after the fact. All of the 28 charged with being accessories before the fact, and were also accused of a conspiracy to commit murder. The judge ordered the immediate release of all of' the defendants; It was the biggest lynching trial in the history of the Southern States. The prosecution alleged that thirtyone white men, twenty-eight of whom were taxi-drivers, assembled at the gaol in Greenville early on the morning of February 18, and there coerced the night turn-key into delivering to them Willie Earle, a twenty-five-year-old Negro, who had been imprisoned on the previous day on a charge of fatally stabbing a white taxi-driver in a Greenville hold-up. The men then drove, in a fleet o|, cars and taxi-cabs, to a lonely stretch of road. They dragged Earle from a car. They beat him, and knifed him and then fatally shot him. Twenty-six of the men subsequently made statements allegedly admitting the lynching, and identifying a taxi-driver who fired a gun that killed Earle. The trial of thirty-one accused began on May 12, but by order of the judge, three of the accused were acquitted. The prosecuting lawyer, Mr Samuel Watt, declared: “The accused had been hell-bent on defying the law in hatching a lynching, in the darkness, under the very roofs of your homses and churches, while you slept. It is your town! Il is your country! Do you approve of these things?” The defence asserted that the accused were “victims of an incurable malady of meddlers’ itch.” The judge, in his charge to the jury, declared: “I instruct you that under your oaths as jurors, you are not to allow any so-called racial issues to enter into your deliberations.”