They Stole Him Out of Jail: Willie Earle, South Carolina's Last Lynching Victim by William B. Gravely
English | March 5th, 2019 | ISBN: 1611179378 | 336 pages | EPUB | 3.13 MB
Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury.