James Shannon: How a 1947 Greenville nightmare changed South Carolina
It’s been sixty years now since a young man named Willie Earle was killed by a lynch mob comprised mostly of Greenville cab drivers on a lonely stretch of road near the Pickens County line. That event, and the mass trial that ensued a couple of months later, left scars on this community. Time has salved the wounds to a large degree, though the question of whether there was actual healing to be found remains largely subjective. The key participants are long dead. Of course, Willie Earle and Thomas W. Brown, the cab driver he was accused of killing, died hours apart on Feb. 17, 1947. Most members of the lynch mob would later die in their beds, but the injustice they inflicted lives on in our collective memory. Though there is nothing in this story that will make white people feel good about themselves, it is a story that must be told.
Greenville, South Carolina was no longer a sleepy little textile town in 1947. Hordes of her native sons had returned from the war restless for a better life, while the old order continued to assert itself. The textile mills that were still the city’s principal employer took their time assimilating these military veterans back into the workforce.
One thing the war didn’t change was the fact that Greenville was a segregated city in the South where Jim Crow still ruled with an iron fist. Since the time of slavery, an undercurrent of violence prevailed as a means of control over a black population whose ambitions were tempered by hard reality.
It was against this background that the story unfolded on a Saturday night in Greenville. A taxi driver named Thomas W. Brown picked up a fare on Markley Street, a young black man headed for Pickens County. Brown was older than most Greenville cab drivers, a 48-year-old disabled veteran of World War I. The father of three, Brown was described by those who knew him as a mild-mannered and sober man. Exactly what happened next would be the subject of some controversy, but around 10 pm a passer-by found a badly wounded Brown on the side of the Liberty-Pickens Road, beaten and stabbed three times. He was transported to St. Francis Hospital in critical condition, but not before telling police, “He took my cab and my money.” Reports would differ on whether Brown said he was attacked by one or two men, or indeed whether he had transported one or two fares in the hour before he was attacked.
Police then followed a heel print to the home of Tessie Earle in Liberty, where they found a bloody pocket knife and her 24-year-old son, Willie. He was arrested and taken to the Pickens County Jail, a medieval-looking structure in Pickens. It was early on the morning of Sunday, Feb. 16.
Back in Greenville, news of the robbery of Thomas Brown and the arrest of Willie Earle became a source of major agitation for the men who drove taxis for a living. The fear of robbery was a constant presence in their chosen profession, and the added ingredient of an alleged black-on-white crime exacerbated feelings that were already running high. The Blue Bird Taxi Company was located in a building in back of the courthouse in Greenville, across the street from a small café, but word spread to every cab company in town.
As night wore on, one of the cabbies went to the nearby Poinsett Hotel and brought back a bottle of liquor, fueling the outrage as reports of Brown mortally wounded in the hospital continued to pour in. At some point in the early morning hours of Monday Feb. 17, enough liquid courage had flowed and the group of men assembled between the cab company and the café began to take on the distinct qualities of a mob. For some reason, the Sheriff’s office housed in the adjacent courthouse remained blithely unconcerned about this gathering storm clearly visible through their windows.
By 3:30 am, the crowd numbered in the dozens. The exact number remains unknown, but at least 35 and perhaps more than 50 men soon piled into a line of taxicabs to form a procession that headed west out of Greenville to Pickens. Their intent was clear – to get Willie Earle from the jail and take revenge for the attack on Brown.
Around 5 am, jailer J.E. Gilstrap was awakened by pounding on the door of the ground floor apartment where he lived in the Pickens County Jail. Answering the door in his nightclothes, he was confronted by a gang of men displaying at least two shotguns and a street filled with taxis. It would be a dozen years before Harper Lee would write To Kill a Mockingbird, in which the fictional Atticus Finch would face down a lynch mob to save Tom Robinson. But J.E. Gilstrap was no Atticus Finch; he handed Willie Earle over without protest. Gilstrap would later testify that he was offended when some of the members of the mob used harsh language in front of Mrs. Gilstrap, but seemed to accept mob justice as par for the course. What really offended Gilstrap was a subsequent press account that erroneously identified him as a black man. A famous news photo from the incident shows Gilstrap pointing to the empty cell from which the mob removed his prisoner. For all his understandable cowardice, the onus for this lynching is not really on Pickens. This was a Greenville crime carried out by a Greenville mob to avenge a Greenville cabbie.
Once they got Willie Earle from the jail, he was not long for this world. Shoved into a taxi, he was transported via caravan down what is today known as Hwy. 124. Subsequent statements described a stop near the Saluda River where Earle was beaten in an attempted to force a confession. Finally, they took him down to Bramlett Road. Today, that forlorn patch of asphalt survives as Old Bramlett Road. Past the intersection with the aptly named street Gesthamane is where Willie Earle died near a slaughterhouse of the Southern Provision Company. He was beaten, stabbed and shot at point-blank range by a shotgun at least twice. A grisly photo of Earle’s body shows the extent of his suffering.
An hour after he was taken from the jail, an anonymous phone call to a black funeral home alerted the owner to the location of a new customer. The mortician called Coroner J.O. Turner, who went to the scene and found the body of Willie Earle, still warm....
The lynching of Willie Earle and the subsequent trial of his accused killers was a watershed event by any measure. Although they were acquitted, Gov. Thurmond’s determination that they must stand trial had a pronounced effect. This was the last recorded lynching in South Carolina history. It’s hard to reconcile Thurmond’s actions in this case with what happened a year later. When President Truman integrated the Army in 1948, it spawned the Dixiecrat rebellion that saw Strom running for president on a tough segregation platform that would forever cast him in the national spotlight as a snarling racist even as he remained in public life for more than 50 years after leaving the governor’s mansion....
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Greenville, South Carolina was no longer a sleepy little textile town in 1947. Hordes of her native sons had returned from the war restless for a better life, while the old order continued to assert itself. The textile mills that were still the city’s principal employer took their time assimilating these military veterans back into the workforce.
One thing the war didn’t change was the fact that Greenville was a segregated city in the South where Jim Crow still ruled with an iron fist. Since the time of slavery, an undercurrent of violence prevailed as a means of control over a black population whose ambitions were tempered by hard reality.
It was against this background that the story unfolded on a Saturday night in Greenville. A taxi driver named Thomas W. Brown picked up a fare on Markley Street, a young black man headed for Pickens County. Brown was older than most Greenville cab drivers, a 48-year-old disabled veteran of World War I. The father of three, Brown was described by those who knew him as a mild-mannered and sober man. Exactly what happened next would be the subject of some controversy, but around 10 pm a passer-by found a badly wounded Brown on the side of the Liberty-Pickens Road, beaten and stabbed three times. He was transported to St. Francis Hospital in critical condition, but not before telling police, “He took my cab and my money.” Reports would differ on whether Brown said he was attacked by one or two men, or indeed whether he had transported one or two fares in the hour before he was attacked.
Police then followed a heel print to the home of Tessie Earle in Liberty, where they found a bloody pocket knife and her 24-year-old son, Willie. He was arrested and taken to the Pickens County Jail, a medieval-looking structure in Pickens. It was early on the morning of Sunday, Feb. 16.
Back in Greenville, news of the robbery of Thomas Brown and the arrest of Willie Earle became a source of major agitation for the men who drove taxis for a living. The fear of robbery was a constant presence in their chosen profession, and the added ingredient of an alleged black-on-white crime exacerbated feelings that were already running high. The Blue Bird Taxi Company was located in a building in back of the courthouse in Greenville, across the street from a small café, but word spread to every cab company in town.
As night wore on, one of the cabbies went to the nearby Poinsett Hotel and brought back a bottle of liquor, fueling the outrage as reports of Brown mortally wounded in the hospital continued to pour in. At some point in the early morning hours of Monday Feb. 17, enough liquid courage had flowed and the group of men assembled between the cab company and the café began to take on the distinct qualities of a mob. For some reason, the Sheriff’s office housed in the adjacent courthouse remained blithely unconcerned about this gathering storm clearly visible through their windows.
By 3:30 am, the crowd numbered in the dozens. The exact number remains unknown, but at least 35 and perhaps more than 50 men soon piled into a line of taxicabs to form a procession that headed west out of Greenville to Pickens. Their intent was clear – to get Willie Earle from the jail and take revenge for the attack on Brown.
Around 5 am, jailer J.E. Gilstrap was awakened by pounding on the door of the ground floor apartment where he lived in the Pickens County Jail. Answering the door in his nightclothes, he was confronted by a gang of men displaying at least two shotguns and a street filled with taxis. It would be a dozen years before Harper Lee would write To Kill a Mockingbird, in which the fictional Atticus Finch would face down a lynch mob to save Tom Robinson. But J.E. Gilstrap was no Atticus Finch; he handed Willie Earle over without protest. Gilstrap would later testify that he was offended when some of the members of the mob used harsh language in front of Mrs. Gilstrap, but seemed to accept mob justice as par for the course. What really offended Gilstrap was a subsequent press account that erroneously identified him as a black man. A famous news photo from the incident shows Gilstrap pointing to the empty cell from which the mob removed his prisoner. For all his understandable cowardice, the onus for this lynching is not really on Pickens. This was a Greenville crime carried out by a Greenville mob to avenge a Greenville cabbie.
Once they got Willie Earle from the jail, he was not long for this world. Shoved into a taxi, he was transported via caravan down what is today known as Hwy. 124. Subsequent statements described a stop near the Saluda River where Earle was beaten in an attempted to force a confession. Finally, they took him down to Bramlett Road. Today, that forlorn patch of asphalt survives as Old Bramlett Road. Past the intersection with the aptly named street Gesthamane is where Willie Earle died near a slaughterhouse of the Southern Provision Company. He was beaten, stabbed and shot at point-blank range by a shotgun at least twice. A grisly photo of Earle’s body shows the extent of his suffering.
An hour after he was taken from the jail, an anonymous phone call to a black funeral home alerted the owner to the location of a new customer. The mortician called Coroner J.O. Turner, who went to the scene and found the body of Willie Earle, still warm....
The lynching of Willie Earle and the subsequent trial of his accused killers was a watershed event by any measure. Although they were acquitted, Gov. Thurmond’s determination that they must stand trial had a pronounced effect. This was the last recorded lynching in South Carolina history. It’s hard to reconcile Thurmond’s actions in this case with what happened a year later. When President Truman integrated the Army in 1948, it spawned the Dixiecrat rebellion that saw Strom running for president on a tough segregation platform that would forever cast him in the national spotlight as a snarling racist even as he remained in public life for more than 50 years after leaving the governor’s mansion....