For the past five years, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project has worked to document lynchings that occurred in the county. It’s part of a national and statewide movement to identify and memorialize lynching victims.
According to A Red Record lynching project at UNC-Chapel Hill, between 1865 and 1946, nearly 200 lynchings occurred in North Carolina. Two happened in Mecklenburg County. The Charlotte group has a new website that includes a film and poems written about the victims by Charlotte poet Hannah Hasan, as well as information and resource material people can use to continue discussions in their communities on lynching.
The Remembrance Project and most other racial and justice advocates define lynching as the killing of people — mainly African Americans — by torture, mutilation, burning, dragging and hanging — racial tools used for many years to intimidate Black people and keep them subservient.
In 1913, 22-year-old Joseph McNeely was shot multiple times and Willie McDaniel, also 22, was found on the ground with a broken neck in 1929. Their deaths qualify as lynching, says Elisa Chinn-Gary, cofounder of Race Matters for Juvenile Justice, a local Remembrance Project partner. She reflects on the killings of both lynching victims. She says McNeely’s murder occurred after he was injured in a fight with a police officer in 1913.
Elisa Chinn-Gary: Mr. McNeely was wounded as was the police officer. Mr. McNeely was taken to the Great Samaritan Hospital, which was a hospital for Black people. A very large white mob gathered, pulled Mr. McNeely from the hospital riddled his body with bullets, took his wounded body to the jail where he passed away and died. Luckily, the officer recovered.
Gwendolyn Glenn: Now tell me about the other lynching that has been verified in Charlotte.
Chinn-Gary: Mr. Willie McDaniel was a sharecropper on the Grier Plantation, and there was a disagreement about compensation that led to a confrontation and Mr. McDaniel's body was found thereafter. It was a common story in the time, when lynchings were at a height in this country, that you were not to confront a white person and demand a fair wage.
Glenn: Do you know where the two are buried?
Chinn-Gary: I don't. What the lynching project does is we really want to pinpoint the location in which the incident occurred. So, it involves two very important aspects, a collection of soil that is approximate to the place in which the lynching occurred and it also involves erecting a historical marker that briefly tells the story of what happened here.
We have been able to collect soil on behalf of Joseph McNeely. That is the location of the Great Samaritan Hospital, which is now the Bank of America Stadium, where the Carolina Panthers and Charlotte FC have games. The second collection of soil at the location of Mr. McDaniel’s lynching is going to happen in the Reedy Park area where it happened.
Glenn: Were these stories well known here?
Chinn-Gary: I do not believe that they are well known and part of what this project wishes to do is to lift them up and ensure that we are telling the history that exists here locally. There is an underlying theme that the Charlotte community seemed to escape racism of that time, but what we want to put front and center is that it happened here and the Charlotte Mecklenburg community has its own stories to uncover.
Glenn: Now these are two cases that have been verified. Are there others that you're looking into at this point that could also qualify as lynchings that happened in Charlotte?
Chinn-Gary: Yes, I do believe that there are many other cases. Around kitchen tables, around front porches, around family reunions, many African American people have stories to tell when lynching in America was unrefuted, and no one held accountable.
Glenn: Krista Terrell, the Remembrance Project’s content and communications chair and steering committee member, says she had two family members who were targeted to be lynched. She says she only learned of these relative stories by chance a few years ago, while on a bus trip with her mother.
Krista Terrell: She just out of the blue, said, “Well, you know, we had two family members that were going to be lynched.” I was like, “What!” The first family member was my great uncle named James Frails, they called him Bubba, and he was in Harlem, Georgia. In 1922, he had to leave because he was targeted to be lynched. We don't know what he was accused of, but he left and was gone for 20 years. He actually came back in 1942 and he came back with a camera. He took a picture of his sister and I grew up looking at that picture in my other great aunt's house and never knew the story behind it.
Glenn: Now you said you had another relative who was targeted. Who was the other relative?
Terrell: My maternal grandmother's brother. His name was Joe Bailey Luke. When he was either 12 or 13, he had to hide for fear of being lynched. And this was in the 1930s in Columbia County, Georgia. Per my mother, the accusation was that a white woman said that he looked at her while he was shopping for groceries for the family. That evening, they hid him in the outhouse until the coast was clear.
Glenn: Terrell says Luke was killed at the age of 19 while riding his bike when a car driven by a white man hit him. Some suspect, but Terrell says they do not know if the incident was racially motivated. Many families have such stories, but they are often told in hush-hush conversations or not at all. Chinn-Gary and Terrell hope through the work of the Remembrance Project, that will change.
Chinn-Gary: There has to be a confrontation of this history in order to learn from it, to reconcile many of the inequities we see today in order to heal from the trauma of the past and to regain the hope and the courage for a better tomorrow. Brian Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (in Montgomery, Alabama), often says that as a nation we honor and acknowledge the Holocaust and what it took from humanity. After 9/11, a memorial was erected in a short period of time, yet with thousands of Black bodies that were horrifically killed, we have yet to have that same memorialization. So we will memorialize those locations (where they were lynched) and work hard to tell their stories.
Terrell: We want people to know about this history of racial terror, lynchings, know and understand that it happened here in Charlotte, Mecklenburg, correct misinformation and also tell the truth about these men's story. We want for people to also share with their neighbors and to really say to themselves, ‘never again’ because if we don't address it, it continues to happen even today.
Glenn: Project officials say some of the soil collected from Bank of America Stadium has been sent to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, where memorials are in place for the nearly 6,500 lynching victims identified nationwide. The same will be done once soil is collected in Reedy Creek Park where McDaniel was found. A historical marker will be erected at Bank of America Stadium for McNeely and one in Reedy Creek Park for McDaniel soon.
