Motivations for and community reactions to lynchings in the 1930s
Kester discusses some of the lynchings he investigated for the NAACP and other organizations during the 1930s. He describes several incidents in detail and explains the motivations behind them. His remarks reveal how southerners, white and black, reacted to this form of racial violence.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Howard Kester, July 22, 1974. Interview B-0007-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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What were some of the other lynchings you investigated? How many did you
investigate?
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Well, I was thinking about that today. I would judge in the neighborhood
of between 20 and 25 for the ACLU, the NAACP, The Workers Defense
League, mostly for the NAACP. And one of the most atrocious ones occured
near Duck Hill, Miss. The Neal lynching was bad enough, . . . in between
what, in Mississippi, is known as the prairie and the delta, is an area,
or was, now I haven't been there in 25 or 30 years, known as the Piney
Woods. It was an area of very poor whites.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
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North Mississippi?
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Yeah, and they didn't . . . that's where the clay eaters were to be
found. You drive down a country road and you'd find these holes on the
side of the road from which the people would secure clay. The clay
contained minerals which the people thought helpful toward their health.
It was also the big corn liquor area in Mississippi, and it was
controlled almost completely by white people. It was controlled by white
people, and one Negro man, I can't give you his name at the moment,
decided that if it was good for white folks, it ought to be good for
Negroes, and so he started a still, and the white folks just rose up in
revolt, and they took this man and chained him
after they caught him, to a large pine tree. There he was bound with a
chain, as close as I am to you, and they chained him to the tree, and
they started tormenting that poor thing with blow torches, and they said
you could hear the man scream for five miles and finally somebody picked
up a five gallon can of gasoline or kerosene and poured it on him. And
an Episcopal Minister was with me to make this investigation, Charlie
Hamilton of Aberdren, Mississippi.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
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Did you ever investigate any other lynchings?
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Yes, Arthur Raper and I investigated the lynching of a small Negro boy
not far from Nashville, and neither one of us knew that the other one
was investigating. A small boy was accused of molesting a girl in a
community near Nashville. The parents, of course there was a real
possibility of trouble, you know, being accused of molesting a white
child or white woman, or something of that sort, and Alva Taylor,
Barnett and various other people became interested in this thing being
investigated and arranged for a meeting, I think, and I can't be
certain, but I think it was in the Court House in Nashville where the
reports were to be made. And what the family of this little Negro boy
felt, was that he would be the object of terror and maybe lynching, and
they sent him to his uncle's home in Nashville. And the uncle's home was
right across the street behind the dormitory, the men's dormitory on
Fisk campus, but the mob broke in there and got that child and hung him,
if I am not mistaken, on the flagpole at the Court House. I investigated
it, Arthur was there and I didn't know that he was investigating it, and
of course I was glad because it confirmed everything that I said and
vice versa.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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When you went into these places, how did you go about getting
information? Besides going to the hamburger joints . . .
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Sometimes you'd find somebody . . . hear somebody who was outraged by
what had happened.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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White person?
- HOWARD KESTER:
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White person, and I'd always go to the Negro folk and talk to them.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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Who would you go to to talk to in the black community? Is that where you
got most of your information . . . from blacks?
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Blacks and whites. Sometimes it just fell into my lap. For example, it
was reported that the farmers, cotton farmers in Warren County were
forcing Negroes to pick the cotton at a price much much lower than they
could get in other counties, but they couldn't get away. This was in
Georgia. Warrenton is the County seat, and Alice was with me. It was not
too far from where she was raised as a child, and we thought we'd go
down to see the old plantation and maybe meet some of the older people
who were there when she was a child, which we did. And we went to the
hotel and registered, and after we came out I wanted to get acquainted
with the town, you know, a little bit. A man passed us . . . well
dressed, and he stopped, he went by us and he stopped and started
walking toward us. I sensed it and he came back to where I stopped . . .
Alice and I had stopped, and he came back and said "Aren't you
Alice?" He had been the manager of the plantation on which
Alice was raised. Well there was nothing we could do but go over to his
home for dinner, which we did, and while Alice was with his wife he told
me the whole story about what was going on in Warren County. I didn't
ask for the story, he just gave it to me of his own free will. I can't
remember his name, and that is one reason why I relied so much on
Alice.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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To remember people's names?
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Names and faces and many things. If there were 15 people sitting in this
room, she could tell you where each one of them sat and what each one of
them said. Now that is the God's truth, it's amazing, really incredible,
and when I would go off on these long trips and would come back one of
the first things she would do would be to tell me about who had been
there, what they said, and all about them.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
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She kept you in touch with things?
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Yes, Yes.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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How did she feel about the amount of traveling you did? You were on the
road an awful lot.
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Well she was very lonely and sometimes I can hardly forgive myself, but I
doubt if she would have had it otherwise. She was dedicated to our work.
Anyway, while she was in the kitchen talking to this man's wife, he took
me out on the front porch and we sat together in one of those swings,
and he told me the whole story. He was the Mayor of the town and the
head of the Ku Klux Klan, and I felt almost miserable, and I had to ask
him why he was telling me the story. He said, "Well, I'm
telling you, because I am very proud of it."
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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What kind of patterns did you see in the lynchings that you investigated?
What caused them, who was responsible for them, what class of
people?
- HOWARD KESTER:
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Well, a cross section of the community - some well to do, poor people,
whites, there was a strong feeling, as you will find in some of my
papers that if a Negro had a job and a white man didn't, that was wrong,
and he should be gotten rid of. So, but often times the entire community
including some of the highly placed people in the community participated
in these things.