‘No further delusions’ on Willie McDaniel lynching 

LOYD VISUALS

An aerial photo of part of Reedy Creek Park & Nature Preserve. The location of Willie McDaniel’s death cannot be determined with certainty, but much of the land his landlord owned in June 1929 – where McDaniel rented farmland and a home – eventually became part of the park and preserve. Mecklenburg County has agreed to install a marker there to memorialize him.

Editor’s note: Last 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 series, drawn from work done by EJI; local historians Michael Moore, Tom Hanchett, Pamela Grundy and UNC Charlotte’s Willie Griffin; scores of newspaper accounts of the time, genealogical records, coroner’s reports, deeds, court records; and more.

On July 24, The Post will host a free public panel discussion – “Knowing, and Healing, Through History” – from 6-7:30 p.m. at Allegra Westbrooks Regional Library branch, 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,” and an exhumation reiterated that cause of death. 

On Monday, July 8, 1929, the day after the exhumation, John Carpenter announced he would take Willie McDaniel’s case to the county grand jury. 

Carpenter, the county solicitor (essentially a prosecutor), made clear his reasoning: 

“The people of Mecklenburg County have a right to have it cleared up. The good name of the county demands it.”

Tuesday’s Charlotte News reiterated its editorial opinion. “Let Us Have No Further Delusions,” its headline said, then “there has been a lynching in Mecklenburg County. We have to accept that ugly fact.”

On July 10, arrests began. 

Carpenter announced a Black man had been arrested – for something unrelated, Carpenter said, “but we believe he knows something” about McDaniel’s death. Carpenter suggested other people also would be arrested. Indeed, the next day, police made more arrests. But not of suspected killers.

Instead, they arrested McDaniel’s wife, Sallie, and five other Black tenants of Mell Grier’s farm, locking them into separate cells as “material witnesses” for the grand jury.

By this time, multiple news stories reported officials claimed Black people living on the Grier farm “know something,” yet were “scared to death,” “terrified” – intimidated by “some influence which makes them fear for their own personal safety.” 

The Charlotte News wrote: “All the ear marks of a lynching bee were evident, except that no one, including the negroes who were on the place, would admit having seen or heard of a crowd.” 

If the News deemed it a lynching, was it difficult to imagine why people might be afraid, or remain silent?

Rural Police Chief Vic Fesperman suggested “sensational developments are expected,” according to the News: The arrests were the result of “a wholly unforeseen clue.” 

Carpenter got specific with the Observer: Sallie McDaniel told him she had seen a man the night of June 29 – when her husband had gone missing – fleeing through the woods. 

She said that man left behind a green “hand stick” – likely meaning a cane. 

The Rural Police had the hand stick. That evening, they and Jake Newell, the attorney hired by McDaniel’s friends, said they believed it might have been used to twist a rope around, and break, Willie McDaniel’s neck.
On July 11, the 18 white men serving on the regularly scheduled Mecklenburg grand jury session began to look at the McDaniel case. 

Grand jury sessions are closed, so no records of testimony exist, and reporters of the time could only list witnesses they were told appeared. Stories said several tenants and Observer reporter LeGette Blythe, who’d written of his theory McDaniel was hanged on a tree behind Grier’s barn, testified that day.

The Star of Zion, a Black-run weekly paper, ran an editorial in that day’s edition, the only story in its available archives that mentions McDaniel. (No Charlotte Post archives are available for this time.)
Its headline asked: "Who Killed Willie McDaniel?"

The editorial noted his body was found on Grier's farm and "it is said McDaniel had an altercation with the farmer ... and was seen running from the direction of his boss in apparent great fright."

It asked: "Let us reverse this case. Suppose the shoe had been on the other foot? Would Willie McDaniel be at liberty?" 

Rural Police Chief Vic Fesperman announced July 12 that he was now investigating two possibilities. 

First was what the News called “the popularly accepted view that McDaniel was lynched by a small mob enraged at his having attacked Mell Grier.” 

This had not been reported in those terms before. If that was correct, who could have found out about the argument and pulled together a "small mob" so quickly?

The second theory: McDaniel might have been “having trouble with his negro neighbors,” an idea that had been raised, then seemingly discarded, the week before.

Fesperman walked into the grand jury room on July 13 carrying the green hand stick – the thing Rural Police and Newell had heralded as the possible solution to the whole case, just days before. But anything he revealed to the grand jury “could not be ascertained,” the Observer wrote – and the green hand stick was never mentioned in news stories again.

Over the next three days, the grand jurors went to the Grier farm, saying they hoped to uncover new information – though what they thought they could find two weeks after the body was found was not specified – then returned to the courthouse to hear more testimony. 

On July 17, after hearing from more than 25 witnesses, foreman W. Edgar Price told the News that what the grand jury couldn’t seem to find was a motive.
The next day, the grand jury adjourned, saying it would take up the McDaniel case again next session. Jurors said they were disappointed not to solve – or even find a clue to – the case, but the next day’s Observer story said they “admitted their satisfaction in knowing that they had done everything in their power to clear up the mysterious killing.”

The reportedly satisfied men on that jury were Price, H.B. Benoit, P.L. Bundy, W.R. Cornell, P.F. Davis, M.F. Ellis, W.E. Grier (who does not appear, in available genealogical or newspaper records, to be related to Mell Grier), G.W. Gurley, A.G. Hemby, J.F. Holbrook, G.M. Ketchie, George D. Kilgore, S.W. Maxwell, George H. Moore, S.C. Nixon, H.H. Tarleton, S.R. Wilson and M.W. Woodside.

Judge Thomas J. Shaw from Greensboro presided. Shaw also presided over the grand jury investigation of the lynching of Joe McNeely in 1913 — an investigation that also held no one accountable.  
The Mecklenburg grand jury reconvened Sept. 30, but its eventual report did not mention Willie McDaniel. Six weeks later, on Nov. 14, foreman Price said the grand jury would take up the McDaniel case the next day, its closing day. 

But on Nov. 15, the grand jury did not reopen the case.

The Observer explained that the “alleged lynching case” could not be reopened because “one witness was near death and the others moved to South Carolina.”

It did not name these witnesses. But of the white people listed as testifying in July, records show all were still in Charlotte and remained there for years.

Of the six Black tenants jailed as witnesses – some of the people newspapers had described as intimidated by "some influence which makes them fear for their own personal safety" – none of their names as reported in those papers appear in the 1930 Census, in either of the Carolinas. 

Two days later, an Observer editorial congratulated the grand jury for the “effective and apparently conscientious work” it did “to clear up various crimes, such as the Willie McDaniel homicide.”

For the year 1929, Iredell County native Monroe Work documented for Tuskegee Institute seven lynchings of Black people across the United States – with apparently not a single prosecution. Willie McDaniel's death was not included in his count. 

For 1930, Monroe Work documented 20.

No suspect was ever named in McDaniel’s murder. And – as is true of more than 99% of racial terror lynchings after 1900, according to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Lynching in America report – no one was ever convicted of any criminal offense in his case.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project is hosting a free, public soil collection – date to be announced on its website – to memorialize McDaniel at Reedy Creek Park & Nature Preserve, where a historic marker in his name will be erected.

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 4: A shocking exhumation, and more speculation on lynching

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