This is not a happy, feel-good story. The story is prompted by a trip, a pilgrimage, I recently took with a group from Murray’s St. John’s Episcopal Church to Montgomery, Alabama to visit the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
We also made a wonderful side trip to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church from which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott along with Rosa Parks and others. There we stood in his small church office where much of the planning was done for the historic boycott, and we marveled at the sanctuary where that young twenty-something year old pastor thrilled his congregation with sermons of peace and faith and justice.
At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, metal, coffin-like structures listed those victims who had been lynched in various states around the South. Although thankfully no names were listed from Calloway County, I was saddened that one lynching had indeed taken place in my home county of Webster County on May 31, 1908.
Leading up to this tragic incident on December 27, 1906, all of the black residents of Wheatcroft, a tiny hamlet in the western part of Webster County, some twenty of them, were literally railroaded out of town. They left and never came back. On March 20, 1908, a little over a year later, the black citizens of Benton in Marshall County were warned to leave town. “You’ve had your time,” read the note tacked to the door of a black community leader by 25 masked men on horseback. “We will give you until the next new moon to get out. We mean it.”
Then, on March 14, 1908, Smith Childers, the deputy city marshal of Providence in Webster County, was shot and seriously wounded by a black miner named Jake McDowell, age 51. Childers had visited McDowell’s neighborhood the previous evening and committed sexual assault against a young black girl. McDowell said that Childers walked up to him on the streets of Providence “and threatened him with violence if he said anything about the previous evening’s occurrence.” Childers pulled a pistol, but McDowell grabbed it as it fired. At the same time, McDowell pulled his own pistol and shot Childers twice. Childers survived the wounds.
McDowell surrendered immediately and was rushed to the jail in Dixon ”for fear of mob violence. After only four hours in Dixon, he was transferred to the Henderson jail. A lynch mob of some seventy-five men formed in Providence immediately and headed to Dixon. A group of young black men banded together as well to protect McDowell.
McDowell was kept in Henderson until late May when he was transferred back to the Dixon jail. In the early morning hours of May 31, 1908, a mob of about fifty masked men dragged McDowell from the Dixon jail, took him a half mile outside of town and shot him to death. None of the fifty were every convicted of the crime.
According to the statistics gathered by the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites. More than 73 percent of lynchings, defined as murder by a group by extrajudicial action, in the post-Civil War period occurred in the Southern states.
When I saw the name Jake McDowell on the coffin-like metal structure for Webster County at the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, it did something to me. I grieve for Mr. McDowell and his family. I grieve for the young girl who suffered from sexual assault. And I grieve for the victims of terrorism in our world today.
Duane Bolin is Professor Emeritus of History at Murray State University. Contact Duane at jbolin@murraystate.edu
