The Lynching of Willie Earle: The Last in South Carolina

In the early hours of February seventeenth, nineteen forty-seven, a convoy of taxicabs left Greenville and drove toward the Pickens County Jail. Inside the jail was Willie Earle, a twenty-four-year-old Black man who had been arrested on circumstantial evidence in the stabbing of a white cabdriver named Thomas Brown. Earle had not been tried or convicted of anything.

The drivers forced the jailer to hand Earle over, put him in one of the cabs, and drove him to a stretch of Bramlett Road outside Greenville. There he was beaten and shot. His body was left in a field. He had no weapon, no trial, no sentence. He had a night in jail and then a mob.

More than one hundred fifty men were questioned in the days that followed. Thirty-one were charged, twenty-eight of them cabdrivers. Twenty-six of those thirty-one had given written confessions. The trial opened in the Greenville County Courthouse in May of that year, and Rebecca West, writing for The New Yorker, covered it in one of the longest pieces the magazine had published to that point, nearly seventeen thousand words, titled Opera in Greenville.

The records of what exactly was said inside that cab are reconstructed from trial testimony, and the full sequence of events on Bramlett Road has never been entirely accounted for. What the testimony established was enough.

After two weeks, the defense called no witnesses. The all-white jury deliberated for five hours and thirteen minutes and returned a verdict of not guilty on all counts, for all thirty-one men. The courtroom gallery reportedly applauded.

The national reaction was fury. The lynching of Willie Earle and the acquittal that followed helped accelerate federal civil rights policy. It was the last recorded lynching in the state of South Carolina. A marker near this courthouse acknowledges what happened here.