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Part
of the "Executing
Justice: America and the Death Penalty"
Series
Executing Justice: America and the Death Penalty
Monday, February 24 / 7:00 / Free
UCSB
Buchanan Hall 1910
The last
known race-based lynching in South Carolina occurred on February 17,
1947 when a 24 -year old black man, Willie Earle was abducted from
the Pickens County Jail, taken across county lines and executed outside
West Greenville by gunshots to the face by a vigilante mob of white
men. Earle had been arrested but not yet charged for an attack on
Thomas Watson Brown, a white cab driver from Greenville who died of
stab wounds later the same day as the lynching. Over the last two
decades, Professor Gravely, who, in 1947 was a 7 year old boy living
next door to the sheriff in Pickens, has been collecting private and
public records, commentaries and recollections of this event and of
the subsequent trial of the 31 defendants accused of the crime, the
largest group ever brought to trial for a lynching in American history.
This slide presentation tells the story of the investigation, the
trial and the executive responses of Governor Strom Thurmond and of
President Harry Truman's Committee on Civil Rights in the aftermath
of these events. Professor Gravely's talk raises questions about local
and national responses to atrocity, the nature of individual and collective
memory, about Jim Crow, criminal justice and vigilantism, and the
galvanizing impact of the lynching of Willie Earle and the subsequent
trial and acquittal of the suspected perpetrators on an activist citizenry
and a nascent Civil Rights movement.
William B. Gravely is professor emeritus of religious studies in the
department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver. He has
authored numerous publications, including Gilbert Haven, Methodist
Abolitionist: A Study in Race, Religion, and Reform, 1850-1880
and, most recently, "Race, Truth, and Reconciliation in the United
States: Reflections of Desmond Tutu's Proposal," Journal
of Religion & Society, Volume 3, 2001. He served as Associate
Editor for the Afro-American Religion Documentary Project, centered
at Princeton University and funded by the Eli Lilly Foundation. Currently
he is working on a book entitled, Farewell to "Strange Fruit"
-- The Lynching of Willie Earle (1947), for which he has received
support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
This event is presented by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
and the UCSB Law and Society Program with support from the Critical
Issues in America Program as part of the series Executing Justice:
America and the Death Penalty.
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