Lynching of Lacy Mitchell and Willie Kirkland in Thomas County Part One
Part One of this Documentary series is on the lynching's in Thomas County, GA between 1877 - 1950. In this short we give a brief overview of what to expect in the upcoming documentaries and showing the monuments of the counties represented in Ga.
On August 29, 1930, in the small community of Five Forks, near Thomasville, Georgia, Henry Price and C. V. Moore arrived at the house of Alec and Minnie Lee Thomas. Alec Thomas was away driving his cotton to market in nearby Pavo, but his wife was home. The two men kicked in the doors and chased Minnie Lee Thomas into a field. They knocked her to the ground and, while her children stood on the porch calling for their mother, put a gun to her head and raped her, choking her each time she called for help. Price and Moore were both white. The Thomas's were black. Less than a month later, on September 24, a man attacked a nine-year-old white girl on her way home from school. Unhurt, but badly bruised and terrified, the girl identified her assailant as black and the white community of Thomas County moved into action. By nightfall a twenty-year-old convicted horse thief named Willie Kirkland had been arrested, and approximately one thou sand people soon converged on the stockade where he was in custody. Assurances from the local sheriff to the mob that no action would be taken until morning secured Kirkland's safety that night, but the next day nearly one hundred people again gathered out side of the county courthouse and overpowered the sheriff when he attempted to move Kirkland. A crowd of angry men hurried Kirkland away to nearby Magnolia Park where he was shot. His corpse was dragged through town behind a car and put on display in front of the courthouse. Three days later Minnie Lee Thomas's cousin Lacy Mitchell, who had been scheduled to testify at the trial of her rapists, was at home with his family when a small group of men arrived at his door and shot him in the stomach. Mitchell lingered for two agonizing days and in that time described his attackers to authorities. Suspicion immediately fell on Jack Bradley and Ed Allen. Thomas County began its second manhunt in a week, but this time the fugitives were white. These events, which were possibly the worst episodes of racial violence in the history of Thomas County, came at a time when such turbulence in the South was on the decline. There was nothing particularly unusual about any of the three episodes. The rape of black women by white men occurred with uncomfortable frequency in the Deep South. Allegations of rape or sexual assault by black men on white women frequently led to lynching: an execution without trial similar to the shooting of Willie Kirkland. As for Lacy Mitchell's murder, the death of a black man scheduled to testify against white defendants would not have surprised many people living in early twentieth-century Georgia.
The Georgia Historical. Quarterly Vol. LXXXVII, No. 1, Spring 2003
1 State o/Georgia'. Henry Price and C. V. Moore, Thomas County Superior Court (1930) , 156-65.
According to EJI - The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror documents EJI’s multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. EJI researchers documented 4075 racial terror lynching's of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 800 more lynching's of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.
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