by: J.B. Smith
On the afternoon of May 15, 1916, renowned Waco photographer Fred Gildersleeve set up his box camera on the second floor of City Hall, aiming it at a small tree below.
Under the tree, men were stacking wooden boxes for a fire. A crowd of hundreds, then thousands began to swarm.
A roaring mob rushed to the scene from the courthouse, carrying a black teenager and mutilating him with knives. The men slipped a chain over the tree and began dangling the boy over a fire, to the cheers of a crowd estimated at 15,000. The orgy of torture would continue for more than an hour, ending with the decapitated body dragged through town.
Gildersleeve had gotten advance word of the lynching of 17-year-old Jesse Washington, who was on trial that day for murdering and raping a white woman.
The 35-year-old photographer joined the mayor and police chief in the mayor's office to watch the afternoon's spectacle. A faithful chronicler and booster of Waco, Gildersleeve was planning to sell postcards of the event.
As the grinning mob closed in on its prey, he clicked away. He burned onto film a scene that would outrage a nation and bring shame to a community known as the home of churches, colleges and cotton.
Though the atrocity on the Waco square was hardly unique for its era, the rare photos of a lynching in progress caused an international scandal. The Houston Chronicle , the New York Times and Le Monde of Paris denounced the "Waco Horror." The newly formed NAACP used it as a cause celebre for a nationwide anti-lynching campaign.
"Any talk of the triumph of Christianity, or the spread of human culture, is idle twaddle so long as the Waco lynching is possible in the United States of America," wrote W.E.B. DuBois, editor of the NAACP's newspaper.
The explosive power of the photos is such that 89 years later they have created a resurgence of interest in the case. Americans far from Waco have seen the images at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and in the 2000 book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," and a related traveling exhibit.
Now two well-researched books have appeared that investigate the case and raise disturbing questions about an event Waco would rather forget.
"The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP," by Houston author and publicist Patricia Bernstein, was released by the Texas A&M Press this month.
The other book is "The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas 1836-1916," by William Carrigan, a McLennan County native and professor of history at Rowan University in New Jersey. The book was released in the fall by the University of Illinois Press.
Meanwhile, a reporter from the Washington Post is working on yet a third book on the incident.
Carrigan, a 1989 graduate of Vanguard Preparatory School in Waco, never heard of the incident until he saw the Jesse Washington photos in a history class at the University of Texas in fall 1990. In the nearly 15 years since then, he has devoted his academic career to researching lynching in Central Texas.
"They're powerful," he said of the photos. "They stay with you in a way that the story by itself doesn't. When I saw them, I felt a range of emotions: Anger, shame, guilt and frustration. But the strongest was bewilderment.
"I grew up in rural Texas and knew people who were not ashamed of their racism. But here was something else: Thousands of people, including people like doctors and ministers, gathering to watch somebody burned alive, then having it defended in the local newspapers. That left the central question: What motivated them to do this? ... How could ordinary people lynch?"
For Waco, revived interest in the case raises still more questions: How does a community deal with atrocities committed in the distant past? What relevance does this event have to modern-day Waco, which elected a black mayor six years ago?
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