S11, E5B: The B-Side/The Politics of a Crime
Series 11: The Collateral Damage of Revenge in Science
This is a continuation from S11, E4B: The B-Side/”Strange Fruit" and the B-Side of S11, E5: Ignition Timing part of Series 11: The Collateral Damage of Revenge in Science.
Welcome to the B-Side
Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game
“Hurricane”, Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy
The Politics of a Crime
This B-Side continues the examination of Elisabeth Freeman’s 1916 report, ‘The Waco Horror’. She explained why it was found politically necessary by some unscrupulous individuals to bring Washington back to Waco to be lynched.
"They brought the boy back to Waco because a lynching was of political value to the county officials who are running for office. Every man I talked with said that politics was at the bottom of the whole business. All that element who took part in the lynching will vote for the Sheriff. The Judge is of value to his party because he appoints the three commissioners of the jury, and these commissioners pick the Grand Jury.”
“The Waco Horror”, Supplement to the Crisis, July 1916
There is an important distinction to be made here. A lynching is not the same as a lawful execution and it was explicitly outlawed in Texas by this time - presumably for emphasis.
The District Judge of the Criminal Court is R. I. Munroe, appointed by Governor Campbell. He is a low order of politician, and a product of a local machine. His reputation for morality is bad, and his practice at the Bar has been largely on behalf of the vicious interests. The Sheriff of the county, S. S. Fleming, is a candidate for re-election, and has made much political capital out of the lynching.
ibid.
An advertisement in the Waco Semi-Weekly Tribune [owned by Judge McCullum] shows Fleming’s populist rhetoric:
"Mr. Fleming is diseased with a broad philanthropy. He believes in the equality of man. He carries with him in the daily walk of his officialdom none of the 'boast of heraldry or the pomp of power.' He is just as courteous, just as obliging, just as accommodating as Sheriff as he was when selling buggies and cultivators for the hardware company. He presents to the voters for their endorsement the record made by him and his corps of splendid deputies."
ibid.
One of those deputies was Barney Goldberg and I will piece together what he told Elisabeth Freeman:
"Lee Jenkins is the best deputy sheriff, but he is under Fleming. If Lee Jenkins had had it, it would never have been, but we are working for the man higher up and must take our orders from him.'
ibid.
Freeman remarks that Goldberg would be out of a job if Fleming was not re-elected. The competition for office was a man called Buchanan, who had been responsible for the death of three Black people, which was seen as a ‘credit’, which explains much about the voting public in Waco at the time.
"The boy, Jesse Washington, was asked what he thought about the mob coming after him. He said, 'They promised they would not if I would tell them about it.' He seemed not to care, but was thoroughly indifferent."
ibid.
So what was Washington told would happen if he confessed and likely could it have been that he really understood the peril?
Freeman had approached Judge Munroe for an interview and this is how that initial exchange was reported:
"I TRIED to talk to the Judge. I met him on the street and said, ' I want to talk with you about something very important He asked, 'What is the nature of it?' I said, ' I want to get your opinion of that lynching.' He said, 'No, I refuse to talk with you about that. What do you want it for?' I said, ' If you refuse to talk with me, there is no use of telling you what I want it for.'
ibid.
A Breakthrough?
P.A. Gilderslee, the local photographer had been given prior notice of where the lynching would occur and although photographs of such events had been taken before, they had been of the corpses after the fact. The photographs he produced in this case were of a lynching in progress and they had been widely distributed as postcards.
After a careful study I began to wonder if the conversation Freeman had with the photographer was her breakthrough to speaking with Judge Munroe and through him, Sheriff Fleming and others.
Although Gilderslee was initially reluctant she got to speak with him. I think she caught him off guard and also that this is perhaps where she saw a way to get interviews. She recorded this comment from him:
"We have quit selling the mob photos, this step was taken because our 'City dads' objected on the grounds of 'bad publicity,' as we wanted to be boosters and not knockers, we agreed to stop all sale.”
ibid.
The publicity was perceived to be hurting the town and that was information she could use. She approached Judge Munroe again.
"When I met him the second time, with different clothes on, he did not recognize me. I put on a strong English accent and said I was interested in clippings from New York papers which showed that Waco had made for itself an awful name, and I wanted to go back and make the northerners feel that Waco was not so bad as the papers had represented. Then he gave me the Court records."
ibid.
This was a major coup although it is unlikely that she was able to take much pride in out-generaling him. Had she been openly sceptical of Washington’s guilt would have blown her cover in Waco and she may have learned nothing new. To have expressed it in a report without an alternative theory would have discredited her efforts and the story would have pivoted away from racial injustice to the fact that Washington was the only suspect.
There is no doubt that if evidence to the contrary ever existed neither Freeman or anybody else would have been given access to it. Her objective was to raise awareness and perhaps prevent the unjust treatment of other Black Americans. So she put the barbaric treatment of Washington upfront and made it obvious that no human deserved it.
She tacitly challenged the attitudes that would feel normal to most readers, giving them the chance to see the consequences of racism and how perpetuators could be dehumanised. Here the report subtly reminds the reader that guilt was not necessarily the prerequisite to a lynching:
Our investigator [Elisabeth Freeman] continues: "I went to the newspaper offices. They were all of the opinion that the best thing to do was to hush it up. They used it as a news item, and that finished it. The Dallas News did not cite anything editorially because not long ago they had done something quite as bad and the boy was not guilty."
“The Waco Horror”, Supplement to the Crisis, July 1916
It would be easy to think of her as a pragmatist with the common sense to know when to keep quiet, but when you read the interviews what, comes across is how courageous she was.
With the exception of the Tribune, all the papers had simply used it as a news item and let it drop. The Tribune is owned by Judge McCullum, who says anything he pleases. He is nearly blind.
When I read the article to him I said, 'I would like to ask you, if that had been a colored woman and a white boy, would you have protected that woman? '
Clearly a dead woman can’t be ‘protected’ and she obviously meant, exacted retribution for the woman’s death.
He answered, 'No. '
'If it had been a colored boy and a colored woman?’
‘No. We would not have stopped the ******s doing anything they wanted to.'
'Do you think they would?' [i.e. exacted retribution]
'No.'
'Then, they prove their superior civilization.'
“The Waco Horror”, Supplement to the Crisis, July 2016
It’s difficult to have a sense of the audacity. Elisabeth Freeman was alone in Waco, Texas; a place where at least 2000 people were involved in extreme brutality and perhaps another 13,000 witnessed it - half a town had degraded themselves in the process. A town where some of the children not only looked on but were involved in the dismantling of the corpse for souvenirs.
It is almost impossible to read this and other accounts of the time without realising that the jury had to have been intimidated into arriving at a hasty conclusion. What would have been the consequences for any jury member who might have dissented?
One of their number was a convicted murderer with a suspended sentence hanging over him; we can reasonably speculate he was there for the sake of being compromised. The jury had only deliberated for four minutes to reach it’s verdict - yes Washington had confessed, but what of his treatment in custody to extract that confession with no representation present?
Elisabeth Freeman’s broad argument on injustice did not depend upon whether Washington was guilty. She seems to have instinctively known what had to be made explicit to make changes possible and what should be planted for the reader to think about later.
Unlike many modern journalists she had a keen sense of where the real story was. Her example also shows that it is not incompatible with journalism to have an agenda, provided the truth is not tailored to the cause. That’s why her account can withstand close scrutiny over a century later.
Next: S11,E7B: The B-Side/A Timetable for Injustice
This ‘B-Side’ is a free example of how I plan to put out paid content in the near future. The idea is that these will be mainly counterparts to free articles, where I go into more depth, talk about the background work or share digressions that perhaps have value to some. See The B-Side Explainer for more information.