Facing history of terrorism: Ominous words, another killing

THE CHARLOTTE NEWS

A headline from the first story in Charlotte newspapers about Willie McDaniel’s death, in The Charlotte News, July 1, 1929.

Editor’s note: This is the second in a five-part series. 

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

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project, in collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative, seeks to tell the truth about two racial terror lynchings in Mecklenburg – of Willie McDaniel and Joe McNeely – and to memorialize these men.

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 Willie McDaniel will be held at Reedy Creek Park and Nature Preserve at a date to be announced; see ItHappenedHereCLT.com for details.

The story so far: Tenant farmer Willie McDaniel and his white landlord Mell Grier argued, then grappled, on June 29, 1929, after Grier refused to pay McDaniel for work he did. The next morning, a girl found McDaniel’s body, not far from his cabin.

What happened in the hours between the mid-day confrontation on Saturday and the finding of Willie McDaniel’s body Sunday morning?

Mell Grier told a coroner’s jury that after McDaniel fled from him, he never saw McDaniel again, dead or alive. But that directly contradicted Rural Police Chief Vic Fesperman’s recounting.

Fesperman told the Charlotte News that Joe Grier telephoned him Sunday about the death. Joe was Mell’s older brother, who lived uptown, 10 miles from the farm. Fesperman said Joe and Mell had been told by Black people about McDaniel’s body, but decided to wait to go to it until police arrived – “in the event,” as the News put it, “that anything like an ambush had been prepared.”

When Fesperman arrived, he said, he walked with both Griers down to McDaniel’s body, where they found “a large group of negroes” surrounding it.

Drs. C.S. McLaughlin and L.B. Newell were called in to examine the body.

Tenant Jim Edmonds, who said he had looked for McDaniel all Saturday, testified that on Sunday, after the body was discovered, he went to Mell Grier to get “the straight” of what happened. Grier had been the last person he’d seen with McDaniel, he told him, and he’d had a gun.

Grier, he testified, told him: “Uncle Jim, I didn’t do it. He brought it on himself.”

The first newspaper story about the death came Monday, July 1, in the Charlotte News, headlined “Mystery Over Death of Negro Near Newell.” 

It called the cause of death a “secret closely guarded by officials,” and noted Fesperman “would not disclose” the doctors’ report. 

The death made the front page on Tuesday – when prominent white attorney Jake Newell announced that McDaniel’s friends had hired him to pursue the case. 

They believed, Newell said, that Willie McDaniel had been lynched.

Also Tuesday, Fesperman revealed the doctors’ report, saying they noted injuries on McDaniel’s wrists – “as if his hands were tied,” said the News – and neck, “as if he had been hung.” The Observer described these as slight wounds and bruises. No mention was recorded of “fractured skull,” a phrase that appeared on the coroner’s death certificate, in addition to the note of his broken neck.

The Observer quoted Fesperman saying: “He was hung. His neck is broken. We don’t know who did it or how it happened, but we’re still working on it.” 

But Fesperman said considerably more than this on Tuesday, according to an Associated Press story: He said he was convinced “a party of men had hanged the Negro and then carried the body to the thicket, leaving it there.” 

Neither the Observer nor News quoted him on that. 

At the time, Charlotte had one documented lynching: A white mob had shot Joe McNeely to death in 1913. City officials and newspapers then had talked more about the damage to the city’s reputation than the terror inflicted on Black people. 

On Wednesday, July 3, Observer reporter LeGette Blythe – who’d covered the Confederate Veterans Reunion three weeks before – headed to the Grier farm. So did attorney Newell. Both walked around and talked to tenants and neighbors.

Blythe returned with a theory.

He identified a white oak 150-200 yards behind Grier’s barn, and wrote in his July 4 story that “clues strongly indicat(e) that a lynching party took Willie McDaniel … hanged him and then dragged his body across a cotton field and left it face downward near the negro’s own barn.” 

Also in Blythe’s story: The doctors’ report had “disclosed … he had been struck a heavy blow on the head,” though “it was announced” the blow “was not sufficient to cause death.”

Blythe’s theory suggests other questions: When could this have been done? Jim Edmonds testified he searched all day into the evening for McDaniel and couldn’t find him. 

If it was done after nightfall, where had McDaniel been all afternoon? Neither newspaper addressed those questions.

Blythe finished his story on a chilling note: The death had reminded neighbors of another mysterious killing.

Dive deep into Charlotte newspaper archives and a plausible explanation appears: In March 1896, three local papers – the Charlotte Democrat, Mecklenburg Times and Daily Charlotte Observer – reported the death of a Black man named Craig Kirkpatrick, saying the person last seen with him was Sam Grier, son of “Melville Grier.”

Kirkpatrick’s body had been found, neck broken, in the woods between his home and that of Melville Grier, near

Newell, in Crab Orchard Township – 33 years and three months before Willie McDaniel’s body was found, neck broken, on the edge of woods between his home and that of Mell Grier, near Newell, in Crab Orchard Township.

The Melville Grier of 1896 was not the man renting farmland to Willie McDaniel in 1929. News stories and other records indicate this was instead James Melville Grier, whose son Sam was 23 in 1896. James Melville Grier was Mell Grier’s uncle (Sam was his slightly older cousin).

In the back of Kirkpatrick’s head was a bullet from a .38 pistol, which reportedly broke his neck.

In four days, with no witnesses, a coroner’s jury ruled Sam Grier alone committed the crime – and Sam, newspapers reported, “has disappeared.” 

Someone had tried to burn Melville Grier’s barn, the Observer wrote, and it was supposed that Sam believed it was Kirkpatrick, and “settled accounts with him by putting the bullet into his neck.” But the coroner’s jury decided Kirkpatrick’s footprint did not match a print found at the barn, “and it is not thought that he set fire to it.”

A month later, a Mecklenburg grand jury indicted Sam Grier for murder. Papers repeatedly cited his alleged reason for killing Kirkpatrick, but mentioned nothing of Kirkpatrick’s announced innocence, as they continued to report Sam Grier was nowhere to be found.  

Census data and news stories suggest he moved to Texas, then Alabama. Archived court records show no indication he was ever brought to trial. Apparently, no case was ever made for how Craig Kirkpatrick was killed – or by what person, or persons.  

In McDaniel’s case, a coroner’s jury, gathered on July 5, 1929, was about to try to determine what killed him – and who. 

Next: A verdict, then a letter from “A White Man.”

For the CMRP, longtime Charlotte journalists Gary and Helen Schwab researched the killings of Willie McDaniel and Joe McNeely, drawing from work done by EJI and local historians Michael Moore, Tom Hanchett, Pamela Grundy, and UNC Charlotte’s Willie Griffin, then adding more and new resources. 

Also in the series:

Part 1: Facing our history: The 1929 lynching of Willie McDaniel

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

Facing our history: Te 1929 lynching of Willie McDaniel

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