The Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington
Near Waco, Texas
On May fifteenth, nineteen sixteen, in the city of Waco, one of the most documented and horrifying acts of racial violence in American history took place in broad daylight, in front of the courthouse, before a crowd estimated at ten thousand to fifteen thousand people.
Jesse Washington was a Black teenager, seventeen or eighteen years old, accused of the rape and murder of Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in nearby Robinson. He had confessed, the circumstances of that confession, obtained without counsel, remain disputed by historians. At trial, an all-white jury deliberated four minutes before returning a guilty verdict.
Before Washington could be remanded to custody, members of the crowd seized him from the courtroom. He was beaten and stabbed as he was dragged through the streets. He was castrated. Then, in the plaza in front of Waco City Hall, a chain was placed around his neck. He was doused with oil, hanged, and set on fire. Members of the mob raised and lowered his body over the flames repeatedly for nearly two hours. His fingers were cut off as souvenirs. Photographs were taken, some printed as postcards. Not a single person in the mob was prosecuted. Texas law prohibited lynching. It did not matter.
The NAACP, then only seven years old, dispatched suffrage activist Elisabeth Freeman to Waco to investigate. Her account, illustrated with those photographs, was published as an eight-page supplement to the NAACP's magazine in July nineteen sixteen. The organization called the event the Waco Horror. The report became a cornerstone of the national anti-lynching campaign that the NAACP would wage for decades.
For generations, the event was largely suppressed in local memory. In February twenty twenty-three, following a seven-year community effort, a historical marker was finally installed outside Waco City Hall, the very site where Washington was killed. It is a beginning, not an end.
