“They got that nigger they arrested for killin Elias
Waldrop at the jail,” Will told his friend. “I heard that he had been peddlin
his wares all day in Huntsville and was jumped and robbed on his way home, and
that nobody knew who’d done it,” Ed Jones replied.
2 “They’re pretty certain it was this nigger named
Horace Maples,” Will insisted. “Well, if he did it, I guess they’ll hang him,”
Ed finished.
3 “Yeah, the way Silas Worley and Jim Mitchell tells
it, they’re gonna hang him tonight!” Will continued. “How can they have a trial
that quick?” Ed asked.
4 “I didn’t say nothin bout no damn trial,” Will
grinned. “Everybody’s gatherin up at the courthouse now,” Will explained.
“Don’t you wanna go?” he demanded.
5 Ed cleared his throat but couldn’t bring himself to
say anything. He wanted to see the murderer of the peddler brought to justice,
but he was very uncomfortable with the thought of a mob taking the matter into
their own hands.
6 “I’ve got a lot of work to do around here today,” he
finally said. “Are you scared, Ed?” Will asked with an air of incredulity. “A
nigger has killed a White man, and the whole town’s in an uproar, and you’re
just gonna stay at home and tend to your chores?” he demanded.
7 “Well, I guess it won’t hurt to go down there and
see what’s goin on,” Ed reluctantly agreed. “Well, let’s go before we miss all
the fun,” Will encouraged.
8 It was early September, but it was still hotter than
a firecracker in Alabama. The sweat was dripping down Ed’s back, but he wasn’t
sure whether it was the heat or the nervous energy that this affair had
generated that was responsible for it.
9 When they finally reached the courthouse square,
there were hundreds of people milling about. “I think that just about everybody
in town is here!” Ed exclaimed. “And you’d ‘ve missed it, if I hadn’t insisted
on us coming!” Will smiled.
10 “What is Silas doing with that torch?” Ed pointed.
“They’re gonna smoke that son of a bitch out!” someone shouted.
11 Sure enough, within a few minutes, black smoke was
billowing into the air from the place in the courthouse where the jail was
located. Ed pushed through the crowd, so that he could get a closer look at
what was happening. As he got closer, he could see the soldiers of the National
Guard surrounding the courthouse; but most of them appeared to be more
interested in eating, drinking and cleaning their weapons than in what was
going on around them.
12 “If’n you release that nigger to us, we’ll let you
put out that fire!” Ed heard someone shout at Sheriff Rodgers. Ed saw the
sheriff duck inside of the building, and then Horace Maples emerged a few
minutes later. Ed could see the look of terror on the Black man’s face.
13 Then the crowd surged forward, Horace disappeared
from his view. He could see that there was a commotion where the man had been
standing a few minutes before, but he didn’t see Horace again until he saw Jim
Mitchell and Jim Armstrong hoisting him into the air with a rope around his
neck.
14 They tossed the rope over the low-lying branch of a
large oak tree and pulled until Horace was dangling in the air. He had
obviously suffered a pretty severe beating at the hands of the mob, because he
was covered in dirt and blood. Ed watched in horror as he kicked a couple of
times and then went limp.
15 “I told you they was gonna hang that son of a
bitch!” Will proclaimed when he finally caught up with his friend. Ed nodded
and swallowed hard. “They sure did,” was all he could manage.
16 It was a sight that Ed Jones would never forget.
Indeed, he would recount the story of the lynching to his great grandnephew in
vivid detail seventy-five years later.
17 And, although the deed and its perpetrators were
largely whitewashed at the time, a federal grand jury reported that something
should be done to stop this form of vigilante “justice” from being carried out
on a regular basis in the South. They also went on to signal their willingness
for mob leaders to be punished for their part in what had happened.
18 In an ironic twist, the report was delivered to one
Thomas Goode Jones, a federal judge who had been appointed to the bench by
Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Jones was a former Confederate soldier
and governor of Alabama, and he ruled that those who had participated in the
lynching had violated federal law.
19 Even so, the wheels of change turned slowly in the
South and racial prejudice ran deep there. Unfortunately, what had happened to
Horace would happen to other Blacks across the region, and Thomas Goode Jones’
ruling would be ignored for several more generations.
20 Now Edward was the brother of John Deemer Jones.
21 Deemer married Ticie Bynum, and they had children: Elsie,
Clayton, Ruby, Vicie and Jasper Eli (known as J.E.).
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