The Waco Horror: May 15, 1916
Near Waco, Texas
What happened in Waco on May fifteenth, nineteen sixteen, is documented in photographs, in the records of the NAACP, and in a special issue of the magazine The Crisis. It is one of the most thoroughly documented acts of racial violence in American history, and for decades one of the most suppressed. Jesse Washington was a seventeen-year-old Black farmhand who had been convicted of murder after a one-hour trial in which the jury deliberated four minutes.
The murder he was convicted of was real. What followed his conviction was not justice. A mob dragged Washington from the McLennan County courthouse before he could be taken to a jail cell.
The mayor of Waco and the police chief were present. Between ten thousand and fifteen thousand people gathered. Washington was killed publicly in front of Waco's city hall in a prolonged act of organized terror.
A local photographer named Fred Gildersleeve documented it, and the images were sold as postcards. Elisabeth Freeman, an investigator hired by the NAACP, came to Waco days later and conducted interviews. She concluded that Washington had in fact committed the murder he was convicted of, and also that virtually no one in the city's white establishment expressed remorse for what had followed.
W. E. B.
Du Bois published her findings in a July nineteen sixteen special issue of The Crisis, which he titled The Waco Horror. The Crisis had a circulation of roughly thirty thousand at the time, and the report was distributed to hundreds of newspapers and members of Congress. No participant in the killing was ever prosecuted.
Historian Amy Louise Wood later wrote that Washington's death was a defining moment in the history of lynching, because the photographic documentation gave the anti-lynching movement a way to counter those who denied or minimized what was happening across the South. The City of Waco passed a resolution condemning the killing in two thousand six, and the mayor issued a formal apology a century after the fact, in two thousand sixteen. The apology named what happened and could not undo it.
