100 years ago, Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old black farm­hand accused of mur­der­ing his white female employ­er was lynched on the steps of the Waco, Texas cour­t­house (pic­tured), moments after Washington’s tri­al end­ed and only sev­en days after the mur­der had occurred. The grue­some lynch­ing took place in front of law enforce­ment per­son­nel and 15,000 spec­ta­tors, none of whom inter­vened to end the vio­lence. Washington, whom reports indi­cate may have been intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled, ini­tial­ly denied involve­ment in the mur­der, but then pur­port­ed­ly con­fessed to police. A mob of 500 vig­i­lantes searched the coun­ty prison in an unsuc­cess­ful attempt to find Washington, whom the sher­iff had moved to oth­er coun­ties for his safe­ty. An esti­mat­ed 2,500 peo­ple — many car­ry­ing guns and threat­en­ing to lynch Washington — packed the court­room dur­ing the short tri­al. As the jury read the guilty ver­dict and before the judge could record its death sen­tence, a man report­ed­ly yelled, ​“Get the n****r,” and the crowd descend­ed on Washington, car­ry­ing him out of the cour­t­house with a chain around his neck, while oth­ers attacked him with bricks and knives. The inci­dent became a turn­ing point in anti-lynch­ing efforts and con­tributed to the promi­nence of the NAACP. Ignored for decades, Washington’s lynch­ing recent­ly gained local atten­tion and prompt­ed a con­dem­na­tion by the Waco City Council and McLennan County com­mis­sion­ers in 2006. Studies have shown that coun­ties that his­tor­i­cal­ly have had high num­bers of lynch­ings con­tin­ue to have high­er lev­els of homi­cide, police vio­lence against racial minori­ties, dis­pro­por­tion­ate sen­tenc­ing of black defen­dants, and more fre­quent use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. A 2005 study in the American Sociological Review found that the num­ber of death sen­tences, and espe­cial­ly the num­ber of death sen­tences for black defen­dants, was high­er in states with his­to­ries of lynch­ing. ​“What the lynch­ing proved about our com­mu­ni­ty was that African-American men and women were not viewed as humans or equal cit­i­zens,” Peaches Henry, pres­i­dent of the Waco NAACP said. ​“While they no longer hang peo­ple upon trees, we do see sit­u­a­tions where African-American lives are not val­ued.” McLennan County, where Washington was lynched, ranks among the 2% of U.S. coun­ties that are respon­si­ble for more than half of all death sen­tences in the United States. 

(J.B. Smith, “​‘Waco Horror’ at 100: Why Jesse Washington’s lynch­ing still mat­ters,” Waco Tribune, May 15, 2016. Caution: Source arti­cle con­tains graph­ic images and descrip­tions. Photo by Jerry Larson.) See Race.

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