Series focuses on Charlotte lynching victim Willie McDaniel

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein declared June Anti-Lynching Awareness Month. On Friday, Stein ordered all state facilities to lower the U.S. and state flags to half-staff in recognition of the 122 documented lynchings across the state.

Over the past three weeks, The Charlotte Post has published a series on Willie McDaniel, a Black man who was lynched in Charlotte in 1929. He is one of two Black people known to have been lynched in the city — the other is Joseph McNeely, who was lynched by a mob in 1913. Both stories are featured on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project’s website. Helen Schwab, a freelance journalist who works with the project, wrote the five-part series on McDaniel. She says his story remains relevant and is told in a new way. She spoke with WFAE’s Gwendolyn Glenn about the series.

Helen Schwab: The five-part series I reformulated so that it would be more like an old-school series, where you get to the end and you think, 'But wait, what happened next?' We wanted people to read this story with that kind of intensity and that kind of interest.

Gwendolyn Glenn: Will the series uncover new details that were not in the online accounts?

Schwab: No, the series adds some context and is told differently and a little more pointedly.

Glenn: How so?

Schwab: It gets into more detail. We try to focus either on the plot a little more pointedly on the suspense, because this is more of an unraveling kind of story, a mystery, and this allowed us to tell it in a little more in that way.

Glenn: And that's what I was going to say, after reading the five parts, it read more like a novel. Remind people who Willie McDaniel was.

Schwab: Willie McDaniel was a young Black tenant farmer, the son of people who had farmed in Chester County for years. We believe his ancestors, his grandparents, were in Fairfield County, South Carolina. He comes from a history of enslavement, farming and the evolution of that — people becoming hired farm laborers to people renting land — and he was renting his own land in Mecklenburg from a landowner named Mell Grier. An argument arose when Willie McDaniel asked his landlord to be paid for work he had done.

Glenn: From what I've read in the past and from your articles, the landowner attacked him.

Schwab: Mell Grier himself says he picked up a rock the size of a baseball and threw it at Willie McDaniel. The two men grappled. They broke free. Mell Grier ran into his home and grabbed a shotgun. Willie McDaniel began to flee toward his own home on Mell Grier’s land. It was between a third of a mile and a half-mile away, the cabin that Will McDaniel rented with his wife, Sallie. Mell Grier took aim at the fleeing McDaniel. He would later testify he was too far away, so he didn't shoot.

Glenn: And then Willie McDaniel's body was found the next day. You talk about how some of his neighbors looked for him because they knew his life was in danger, but they didn't find him until the next day.

Schwab: That's right. He was not seen again until the next morning, when a young Black girl found his body near where he lived with Sallie and farmed.

Glenn: After his body had been found, there was controversy, right, about whether or not he had been shot?

Schwab: Yes, the tenant farmer who lived with him, Jim Edmonds, would say later that he told the police that he had seen shallow wounds on Willie McDaniel's face and neck and that he believed those wounds to be from what a shotgun would have caused. He was afraid to speak up, and when it was discovered that Willie McDaniel's neck was broken, they dismissed the idea that he had been shot.

The Charlotte Meckenburg Remembrance Project

Glenn: And he had been buried in a pauper's grave, correct, without his wife knowing?

Schwab: He had been buried by the undertaker, who believed he said that he would not be paid, so he buried him in a pauper’s grave in a cheap casket in what is now Pinewood Cemetery.

Glenn: And that cemetery still exists?

Schwab: In uptown Charlotte on Sixth Street.

Glenn: And when he was exhumed, you give details that I haven't heard before — say, for instance, that a relative said she brought a suit for him to be buried in, and when they exhumed his body, he was unclothed.

Schwab: Yes, the scene is vividly reported and heartbreaking. He was wrapped in packing material in this coffin, and there were scores of people, Black and white, standing around watching this examination of his body.

Glenn: And there were two editorials at the time. One said he was lynched. One said he was not. The newspapers played a role in this. Tell us about that.

Schwab: They did. There is not a quote outside of testimony of a Black person in these stories. They didn't interview Black people. So, what you get is the words of the police, lawyers. Willie McDaniel’s family and friends hired a white lawyer named Jake Newell, and it was courageous to do so at this time, but you don't get the story from anyone but people in power.

Glenn: And even after his body was exhumed, there was still doubt in terms of whether he was shot, and no one was arrested or convicted.

Schwab: No one was ever arrested for killing Willie McDaniel. They arrested some people. William McDaniel's widow and his fellow tenant farmers because the police insisted they knew something that they're not saying. They never seemed to connect the dots of what might have made them afraid to talk. We know that nothing came of their subsequent testimony to the grand jury. There were rumors that a mob had pulled him out for daring to argue with his white landlord, but that is reported as a rumor alone, and a newspaper does note this. There was no indication that the landowner’s house and farm were ever searched. That's stupefying.

Glenn: So why is it important to continue to talk about Willie McDaniel and what happened to him?

Schwab: The things that we're seeing disappear are alarming. So, the goal of the Remembrance Project is to lift these names up.

Glenn: And what do you want people to take away from the series?

Schwab: We want people to say their names and to understand what happened to these two men (Willie McDaniel and Joe McNeely), and we want people to tell the story themselves. Anyone who reads it, I would hope they tell one other person, ‘Hey, did you realize this happened right here in Charlotte?’ Charlotte believes itself to be different. Charlotte is not different. We need to understand that.

On July 24, The Charlotte Post will hold a panel discussion on local lynchings titled “Knowing, and Healing, Through History” from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Allegra Westbrooks Regional Library, 2412 Beatties Ford Road.