Forum remembers Mecklenburg County’s lynching history

HERBERT L. WHITE | THE CHARLOTTE POST

Moderator Justin Perry makes a point during a forum on Mecklenburg County’s history of racial terror lynchings July 24 at Allegra Westbrooks Regional Library in Charlotte. The forum was sponsored by The Post and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project.

Storytelling is a valuable tool in racial justice.

A community forum on Mecklenburg County’s lynching history commemorated a pair of documented lynchings in the 20th century – the lynching of Joseph McNeeley in 1913 and Willie McDaniel in 1929. The July 24 forum,

“Knowing and Healing Through History,” sponsored by The Post and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project, drew more than 60 people at Allegra Westbrook Regional Library, including McDaniel’s descendants.

“There were folks who died and marched and sacrificed for many of the privileges that I hold, and it is a responsibility to continue the fight in every generation,” said Mecklenburg County Clerk of Superior Court Elisa Chinn-Gary, a panelist and the Remembrance Project’s community engagement chair. “I also believe that by telling stories, we unveil more stories. I have had the process myself to examine what families call a hushed history, to look back and to examine the things, the stories, the rumors, and begin to research them and see if there is validity. 

“I also think that there is something that I've had an opportunity to experience called posthumous restoration. These gentlemen didn't just lose their lives. They lost their earthly possessions; they lost their future. They lost their dignity … they lost their humanity.”

The lynchings are the focus of the Remembrance Project’s campaign to raise awareness of lynching in Mecklenburg and the racial climate that led to such attacks across the United States. McDaniel’s death was the focus of a five-part series in The Post.

McNeely was dragged from his hospital bed and shot to death by a white mob on Aug. 26, 1913, in front of Good Samaritan Hospital – the site of Bank of America Stadium – after an altercation with a white police officer. 
McDaniel was found dead on June 30, 1929, after arguing with Mell Grier, a white landowner, over payment for work. McDaniel’s body was discovered near his rented home in northeastern Mecklenburg at the site of Reedy Creek Nature Preserve by a Black girl. His neck was broken. 

No one was tried for either death.

“The Remembrance Project documents lynchings from 1865 to 1950 – what I would call the peak period of lynching,” said Dan Aldridge, a professor of Africana studies and history at Davidson College, and author of "Becoming American: The African American Quest for Civil Rights, 1861-1976. “It starts in the 1890s and it coincides with the disfranchisement of Black voters and the reassertion of white supremacy in the South after the end of Reconstruction. The culture of lynching and the culture of control of Black people politically, culturally, socially and through terror are deeply intertwined.”

Media during that period also set a narrative of white supremacy by whipping up fear of social, economic and even sexual subjugation by Black people. The result was often deadly confrontations.

“The media here in North Carolina in particular, was very complicit in trying to shape public opinion against Black people,” said Fannie Flono, a retired Charlotte Observer journalist and author of “Thriving in the Shadows: The Black Experience in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.” “If you knew anything about the Wilmington race massacre back in the late 1800s when Wilmington was one of those places where Black people were actually progressing – in fact, were kind of a great example of what could happen if the whites in the area had allowed Black people to progress at their own pace without trying to keep pulling them back. 

“… [I]n order to keep them down, the white people conspired against them and actually had the only documented political coup in this country, in Wilmington, overthrow the government that a lot of Black people were involved in, and ran them out of town.”

In a social and political climate where race and history are ignored or threatened with erasure, sharing the story of lynching not only takes on urgency, but it’s also necessary to reconcile the nation’s transgressions. 

“If there is something that we can do to restore that, it’s our duty, responsibility and honor to take part in that,” Chinn-Gary said. … “I would say the ultimate goal is to eliminate racism in all the ways that it manifests itself, and that can’t be done without truth-telling.”

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