The long history of lynching in North Carolina

Content Warning: This article contains descriptions of racial violence and some mentions of sexual assault.

Javion Magee, a 21-year-old truck driver from the Chicago area, was found dead in Henderson, N.C. on Sept. 11. His back lay flat against a tree, and a rope tied around his neck was connected to a branch.

The Magee family spokesperson, Candice Matthews, said the entire family is completely mortified and hurt. 

"They have a lot of questions and they just want to know what happened to their loved one," she said. 

Vance County Sheriff Curtis R. Brame said there were no initial signs of foul play.

In his statement to the press, he said since the rope was wrapped around Magee's neck without a knot in it, it was not a noose. Therefore, Brame said Magee's death was not a lynching. 

The history of lynching in North Carolina, and across the United States, is both long and difficult to define due to a lack of reporting on Black history for much of the 20th century. Many contemporary activists and scholars draw connections between the history of the violent act and modern systems, like the death penalty and its disproportionate use on Black people. 

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People defines lynching as the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. 

Erik Gellman, a history professor at UNC, said after the Civil War and through the early 20th century, lynching and other forms of racialized violence became a form of intimidation amongst white Southerners, particularly to enforce and justify Jim Crow laws.

The history of lynching

From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in America, but historians believe the true number is underreported due to a lack of formal tracking.

The documented history of lynching in North Carolina dates back to 1805, when a Black woman was burned alive in Wayne County. State law enforcement also partook in mob lynchings, such as when Chatham County officers lynched 16-year-old Eugene Daniel in 1921, who was memorialized a century after his death. 

In 1906, Nease Gillespie, John Gillespie, and Jack Dillingham were lynched in Salisbury, N.C. One of the perpetrators was arrested and prosecuted for his role in the mob executions. The case went to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which sentenced him to 15 years, one of the first convictions in N.C. and in American history. 

The public killings of Black people does not remain an act of the 19th-20th centuries. In Texas in 1998, James Byrd Jr. was beaten and chained to a truck by three white men, who dragged him to his death. In 2020 in Georgia, Ahmaud Arbery was chased down and fatally shot while jogging through a neighborhood. 

That same year, George Floyd was killed by a police officer who knelt on his neck for over nine minutes. 

Lynching was not federally outlawed until 2022, when the Senate passed the  Emmet Till Antilynching Act. The bill passed over a hundred years after Rep. George Henry White of North Carolina, the only Black member of Congress at the time, introduced the first bill to outlaw lynchings. 

Lynching in the justice system 

From 1910, when North Carolina created a centralized capital punishment system, to 1961, the state executed 361 people. Of the people executed, 80 percent were Black. 

Gellman said throughout the 1930s and 40s, Black-led organizations saw the connection between lynching and what they called “legalized lynching": racial terror through police violence and the death penalty. 

“That clearly wasn't justice, so there was that link that people made then, and now, about the connection between extralegal racialized violence and racialized violence that came through the actual channels of the legal system,” Gellman said. 

Nick Courmon, the community engagement coordinator for the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said there is an inextricable link between today's death penalty and the history of racial terror.

“It's all rooted in this dehumanization of, quite frankly, Black bodies and people of color,” Courmon said.

Courmon also said that many executions happen in the same places with lengthy histories of lynching. 

Noel Nickle, the director of the NCCADP, said that bias in the N.C. justice system is not unique to the state. 

“It's consistent that the death penalty is built on systemic racism and is a direct descendant of historic racial terror lynching,” she said.

Legal opposition

In 1925, 17-year-old Alvin Mansell went on trial for the alleged rape of a white woman in Asheville. He was sentenced to death even though there was considerable evidence of his innocence. Four thousand people, including the victim of the alleged attack signed a petition to save his life. Gov. Angus McLean then granted Mansell a reduced sentence, and after five years in a prison labor camp, he was pardoned and released.

This September, Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri after serving for nearly 24 years, despite mounting legal and public opposition. DNA evidence did not tie Williams to the murder he was accused of, and the execution was opposed by both the prosecution and the victim’s family. 

Nickle said that the Racial Justice Act is also at risk of losing its legislative power. The RJA was adopted in North Carolina in 2009, and allowed people on death row to use statistics and broad patterns of discrimination to prove that race contributed to their death sentences. 

“That's one of the reasons we haven't had executions in 18 years, is because of that litigation, but we anticipate that it will fall away, given the makeup of our state Supreme Court,” she said.

Nickle said that signing the NCCADP petition calling Gov. Roy Cooper to commute all death sentences to prison terms is one way students can make their voices heard.

“We read about these situations and they seem so big. Well, how can we make a difference? Adding your name to this petition makes a difference," Nickle said.

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