Facing our history: The 1929 lynching of Willie McDaniel 

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Mecklenburg County lynching victims Willie McDaniel and Joe McNeely are commemorated at the National Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial has 805 hanging steel rectangles representing every U.S. county where a documented lynching took place.

A young Black tenant farmer named Willie McDaniel was found dead in June 1929, the morning after arguing about pay with his white landlord. 

His death, and that of Joe McNeely in 1913, have been deemed racial terror lynchings – killings outside the legal system, meant to terrify an entire community – by the national Equal Justice Initiative.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project, in collaboration with EJI, seeks to tell the truth about these lynchings – to understand how this violent history shapes our lives today, to encourage sharing these stories, and move toward reconciliation.

This is the first in a five-part series about McDaniel from the CMRP. Put together from more than 50 newspaper articles, census and genealogical records, it challenges reports of the time and asks what wasn’t in them. 

On July 24, The Post will host a free, public, panel discussion – “Knowing, and Healing, Through History” – 6-7:30 p.m. at Allegra Westbrooks Regional Library, 2412 Beatties Ford Road. RSVP here.

A free, public soil-collection ceremony for McDaniel will be held at Reedy Creek Park & Nature Preserve at a date to be announced. See ItHappenedHereCLT.com for details. There’s also a short original film with artist Hannah Hasan from filmmakers Loyd Visuals, versions of each man’s story (audio and text), and a place to declare support.

About noon on June 29, 1929, a fair day that would get up to 85 degrees, Willie McDaniel drove a two-horse wagon up to the house of Mell Grier.
 With him was George Hurd. Both were Black farmers, renting land from Grier in northeast Mecklenburg County. 

They were coming to pick up flour Grier brought back from Charlotte – and McDaniel, 22, had a couple of questions to ask.

He had moved earlier in the year with his wife, Sallie, from South Carolina – where his parents and grandparents had farmed since at least 1870 – to Grier’s farm. 

That farm sprawled across about 450 acres of fields, woods and streams connected to Reedy Creek. Grier, 51, was a prominent white farmer in Crab Orchard Township, from a family whose weddings and parties appeared routinely in newspaper society pages, a family that owned hundreds of Mecklenburg acres for a century, likely longer.

McDaniel pulled the horses to a stop. 

Witnesses, testifying later before a coroner’s jury, and a police summary – all of which was reported in the two daily newspapers of the time – described what happened next. 

McDaniel asked: Was Grier going to pay him for the hauling he’d done for him?

Grier answered. No.

Was Grier planning to pay Sallie for blackberries she had picked for Grier? 

Again, Grier said no. 

McDaniel turned and said something quietly.   

Grier demanded he repeat it. One witness testified that Grier said he’d have no “muttering.” 

Grier picked up a heavy rock and threw it at McDaniel. The two grappled, then separated.

Grier sprinted back into his house. McDaniel ran away, toward his own home, half- to three-quarters of a mile away. 

Grier returned to his porch with a shotgun and took aim, but didn’t shoot. Two witnesses said his niece pushed his gun away, though he would tell the coroner’s jury something different. Then he followed McDaniel, shotgun in hand.

To put 1929 in context: Black residents of Mecklenburg – about 30% of the population – were seeing some progress. Charlotte’s first Black high school, Second Ward, opened in 1923, with Brooklyn flourishing around it, and newly renamed Johnson C. Smith University was drawing people to Biddleville. 

Black citizens held business and sales jobs, but farming was still the leading job category for Black males (the 1930 Census divided statistics by race and gender, but grouped all workers 10 and up). And of the people who owned or rented farmland, just 7% owned. Most rented, like McDaniel, or worked for wages – a power structure that echoed pre-Civil War times. 

Charlotte’s two daily newspapers were white-owned, white-edited and aimed at a white audience, a fact reflected in what they covered, and how. Two Black-run weeklies existed, but their archives are incomplete for this time.

Just three weeks before McDaniel drove up to Mell Grier’s house, for example, the daily papers covered the gathering of the largest crowd in Charlotte history – 75,000 (according to the Charlotte News) to 150,000 people (the Observer), cheering a spectacle: the 39th annual Confederate Veterans Reunion parade. 

The Observer’s banner headline on the reunion’s opening was “City Surrenders to Confederate Army.”

Both papers deemed the reunion a glorious success, consistently framing the Confederacy as a heroic effort. In one Charlotte News story, a veteran commander demanded historians “adopt a fairer view” by making clear the Civil War had been “a veiled economic war of industrial greed against the Agricultural South.”  

But it was reporter LeGette Blythe, in the Observer’s front-page parade story, who was most evocative, describing at length the brave young soldiers who’d marched off to war, now feeble; their beautiful sweethearts, now frail – and the “old black uncles” now thrilled by the jubilant festivities. 

Blythe closed his June 8 story with a vision: “a vision wherein the relentless tyrant time has been conquered and these old white-haired darkies are permitted in another land to croon lullabies to their little white ‘chilluns’ and serve in their own inimitable way mint juleps to ‘Marse Jack’ and ‘Marse Robert.’”

The servants Blythe envisioned did not demand pay. 

They did not mutter. 

They did not resist.

Shortly after the confrontation on June 29, Mell Grier approached tenant Fred Moseley’s cabin. 

He wanted to search it for McDaniel. When he did, and didn’t find him, Moseley asked why Grier was looking for him. Grier’s answer, Moseley testified: “You’ll find out.”

About 3 p.m., three hours later, Grier came into the office of Rural Police Chief Vic Fesperman, the chief said later. The office was uptown on Trade Street, about 8 miles from the farm. 

Grier told Fesperman he and McDaniel had been in a fight, and he wanted to take out a warrant. Fesperman advised him not to press the matter further and Grier “decided he would not bother,” according to Fesperman – though another story said “a relative” had already convinced Grier.

If so, why would he have gone there?

Tenant farmer Jim Edmonds testified he searched for McDaniel into the evening. Then he went to Grier’s house, asking Grier “to patch things up and let Willie come back.” 
He said Grier answered: “He’ll come back all right.”  

Edmonds said his dogs began to bark about 11 p.m. that night. He got up and went to the door of the cabin he shared with the McDaniels but saw and heard nothing. 

About 6:30 the next morning, a Sunday, a young Black girl came to Edmonds, saying she’d found McDaniel, lying at the edge of a cotton patch and woods near his barn. 

She thought he was sleeping. Edmonds sent her back to wake him up. 

Next: A discovery, and ominous words.

For CMRP, longtime Charlotte journalists Gary and Helen Schwab researched the killings of Willie McDaniel and Joe McNeely, drawing from work done by EJI, local historians Michael Moore, Tom Hanchett, Pamela Grundy and UNC Charlotte professor Willie Griffin. They dug into scores of newspaper accounts of the time, genealogical records, coroner’s reports, deeds and court records.

Also in the series:

Part 2: Facing history of terrorism: Ominous words, another killing

Part 3: A quick verdict, then new clues to McDaniel lynching 

Part 4: A shocking exhumation, and more speculation on lynching

Part 5: ‘No further delusions’ on Willie McDaniel lynching

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