A shocking exhumation, and more speculation on lynching

GARY SCHWAB

Pinewood Cemetery now, on “city ground,” where records show Willie McDaniel was buried in 1929, though his grave is unmarked. Joe McNeely, the other man EJI documented as lynched in Mecklenburg County, is also buried at Pinewood in an unmarked grave.

Editor’s note: Fourth 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.

The Charlotte Post believes this is important history. On  July 24, The Post will host a free, public, panel discussion – “Knowing, and Healing Through History” – 6-7:30 p.m. at the 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: In 1929, Willie McDaniel’s body was found the day after an altercation with white landlord Mell Grier over being paid for his work. A coroner’s jury ruled he died of a broken neck “caused by a person or persons unknown.” His widow has petitioned for his body to be exhumed.

Why exhume and reexamine McDaniel’s body? 

Attorney Jake Newell explained that Black people told him they believed McDaniel had been shot, the Observer reported. Neither police nor the coroner, doctors nor reported testimony, to this point, had mentioned a shooting. 

A Black woman, unnamed in reports, told him on the day of the coroner’s hearing, Newell said, that she knew for a certainty McDaniel had been shot, and that one side of his body was bloody when discovered. 

A Black man who lived in the area, also unnamed, told Newell he didn’t know anything about the killing “except I heard the shot,” and that the sound had come from the woods below McDaniel’s cabin the afternoon of the altercation between McDaniel and landlord Mell Grier, Newell said.

Then, said Newell, there was the statement of Jim Edmonds, who shared the McDaniels’ cabin on the Grier farm: Edmonds believed McDaniel had been shot.

When he first found McDaniel’s body and turned it over, Edmonds said, he noticed “many small wounds from which water and blood were oozing," on his face and "about the neck and shoulder," the Observer reported. "These wounds, (Edmonds) was convinced, were caused by shot from a shotgun.”

Edmonds said he did not tell this to the coroner’s jury because he was afraid. But, the News reported, he said he did tell the authorities the day McDaniel’s body was found and pointed out the possibility that “a load of shot or a bullet had entered the throat leaving a mark which was taken for rope mark.”

Those authorities “overruled that idea when the doctors found that the neck had been broken,” the News reported.

Such an "overruling" ignored two major possibilities: One is that bullets or shot (pellets from a shotgun) can break bone (as a bullet was judged to have broken Craig Kirkpatrick’s neck in 1896). A second and clearer possibility is that McDaniel might have been shot and had his neck broken, in some other way. 

And might those things have been done by different people and/or at different times?

This idea — that a broken neck might have caused his death, but he might also have been shot — either didn’t occur to newspaper reporters, or they never stated it clearly. 

The Observer reminded readers the doctors had found wounds that “were entirely superficial and did not contribute to his death.” If McDaniel had been shot, as “several negroes” said, the Observer concluded, then he “came to his death from a gunshot wound instead of having been hanged.” But the question was not either-or. 

Could the injuries noted by the doctors — described in various stories as “cuts,” “bruises,” “scars,” “marks,” “abrasions,” “lacerations” and “slight wounds,” some on neck and wrists but some over an eye, on an arm, a knee, his forehead — align with what the unnamed Black woman and Edmonds said? Could those injuries have been shallow shotgun pellet wounds – as Edmonds said he believed them to be? Was McDaniel shot, just not fatally? Could the breaking of his neck have come separately?

What might that mean? To answer this, the exhumation had to address whether it was possible McDaniel was shot at all — not just whether a shot broke his neck. 

At 10 on the cloudy Sunday morning of July 7, one week after Willie McDaniel’s body was found, scores of people, Black and white, including Sallie McDaniel and other tenants from the Grier farm, gathered at Pinewood Cemetery.

Three feet of dirt were removed from his grave, and the coffin, a cheap wooden one the undertaker billed to the county when he buried McDaniel without telling his family, was pulled from the ground, then opened.

The crowd was shocked. 

His body was unclothed, only a single piece of heavy brown wrapping paper around him, with excelsior — wood shavings, used to pack goods or stuff upholstery — packed into the coffin’s corners.

The Black people in the crowd, the Observer reported, were “especially horrified.” An older Black woman who identified herself as a McDaniel cousin was visibly upset: She said she took a suit and other apparel to the undertaker’s and was promised he would be buried in them.  

The crowd watched as McDaniel’s body was laid onto the lid of the coffin to be examined. A new doctor to the case, William Wishart, stepped up. The two who initially examined the body, Drs. C.S. McLaughlin and L.B. Newell, were also there.

Wishart conducted his examination, "probing the wound" at McDaniel's neck, the News reported, then said the neck abrasions were not deep, that they were not the result of being shot, and that his findings concurred with the original post-mortem – the neck was broken in a way that suggests he was hanged. The News' sub-headline said "No Indication of Death by Shooting."

The Observer's headline was "Broken Neck Caused Negro's Death, Autopsy Reveals." It added a sub-headline “No Gun Shot Wounds Found on Body,” but also specified that Wishart saw “only the wounds testified to” in the first doctors' examination — which included “superficial” injuries. 

Neither story addressed whether any of his non-fatal wounds could have been the result of being shot. Nor was there any mention of the fractured skull, the "heavy blow," the “severe gash” in prior stories.

Later in July, the Philadelphia Tribune, a Black-run newspaper, ran an Associated Negro Press story saying the exhumation did not show any "bullet wound," but that it did confirm both a broken neck and "evidence that he had been severely beaten."  It gave no more details.

This day, exhumation finished, McDaniel’s body was wrapped up — again in only brown paper, with excelsior — and returned to the coffin. 

Sallie McDaniel said she had hoped to return her husband’s body to Richburg, South Carolina, near where his father and siblings still lived, but she couldn’t afford to. Instead, she watched as he was buried for the second time.

She placed wild daisies on her husband’s grave.

This day’s News reported new “speculation” that “a small mob” hanged McDaniel, and that an unidentified man on the coroner’s jury had floated the idea it was “some organized group.”
Mecklenburg’s legal system was not yet finished with Willie McDaniel. 

NEXT: The case heads to the grand jury.

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

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

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

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