1776 Constitution of the State of North Carolina
Section 12. That no freeman ought to be taken, imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties, or privileges, or outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, or deprived of his life, liberty or property, but by the law of the land.
Constitution of 1868 of the State of North Carolina
Sec. 19. Law of the land; equal protection of the laws.
No person shall be taken, imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties, or privileges, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any manner deprived of his life, liberty, or property, but by the law of the land. No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws; nor shall any person be subjected to discrimination by the State because of race, color, religion, or national origin.
1971 Constitution of the State of North Carolina
Sec. 19. Law of the land; equal protection of the laws.
No person shall be taken, imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties, or privileges, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any manner deprived of his life, liberty, or property, but by the law of the land. No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws; nor shall any person be subjected to discrimination by the State because of race, color, religion, or national origin.
The Story of Estes Hairston
Estes Hairston was born in Stokes County in the State of North Carolina in 1858. He lived through the Civil War. He lived through Reconstruction. The United States Census listed Estes Hairston as a “Black.”
On, or about, the 21st Day of April 1881 – Estes Hairston was walking from Winston back to Walnut Cove; along the way, he encountered a young white girl named Martha Jenkins with who he was already familiar. They walked along the road until they got to Walnut Cove. According to a later marriage record, Martha was almost 12 at the time. Four days later, and at the urging of Alfred Jenkins [who would a year later sell his wife for five dollars], Estes Hairston was arrested and charged with the crime that he “violently and against her will feloniously did ravage and carnally know” Martha Jenkins. He was placed in jail until his trial date which was May 11, 1881.
Alfred Jenkins stated that Estes had encountered Martha Jenkins along the way to Walnut Cove and enticed her to come to a liquor store run by a man named Hall. Jenkins testified that Estes Hairston had purchased two glasses of liquor and gave them to Martha and encouraged her to drink them. He further testified that Hall witnessed Hairston giving his daughter the two drinks and encouraging her to imbibe. Mr. Jenkins stated that having gotten his daughter drunk that Mr. Hairston proceeded to take advantage of her.
Estes plead not guilty to the charges. He asked that Mr. Hall be subpoenaed and that his testimony would revel that Hairston had certainly neither bought liquor from him nor had he served any of such to Miss Jenkins. He said that he could also produce numerous witnesses from along the path that they had traveled together who would provide witness that she was and always had been entirely sober. Lastly, he stated that he could bring forward a witness that would testify the Mr. Jenkins was pursuing the allegations against Mr. Hairston for “malicious purposes.” The subpoenas were issued and all of the witnesses were in the process of being transferred to the court with the exception of Mr Hall who reported that he cold not come because of a “sickness.”
From the court records, it states:
“And upon consideration thereof, it is ordered by the Court that the case be continued until the next times of this court for the defendants. The prisoner Estes Hairston is remanded to jail.”
The Story of Edward Lindsay
Edward Lindsay – we have little confirmed information about Mr. Lindsay. We know that he had lived and worked in Iredell County before coming to Stokes County. According to the 1870 Census, there was a 19 year old Edward Lindsay working as a farm laborer in Wilson, N.C. He was listed as “Mulatto”
Ed Lindsay was arrested for an assault upon Rachel Jane Garringer on the 10th Day of March 1881; the court records state that he did “feloniously make an assault upon one Rachel Jane Garringer there and then against her will and feloniously did ravage and carnally know her.” Ed Lindsay pleaded not guilty and stated that the woman who had filed charges against him held a grievance against him. His attorney had subpoenaed would be presenting witnesses two witnesses from Forsyth County who would affirm that “the prosecutrix has been in the habit of making charges against him similar to this one, and several other friends, and has done so repeatedly when she has her spells.” His lawyer had also subpoenaed several men from Iredell County who had employed Ed Lindsay “for the purposes of proving his good character, that he was hired by these gentleman and lived with them until lately, the he has been informed by counsel that it is absolutely necessary for him to prove his former good character and that h he is utterly unable to do so unless he brings his former bosses.” He did not know if the subphoenas had been served, but a friend’s letter “that these witnesses can be got here by the next term of the court.”
The court records stated that “upon consideration thereof, it is ordered by the court that the case be continued until the next term of this court for the defendant Ed Lindsay is remanded to jail.”
John Whitten Confronts The Kidnappers
Estes Hairston and Edwards Lindsay were remanded to the Stokes County Jail. Several weeks later, Jailer John B. Whitten was asleep at the Stokes County Jail when he was awakened by a knock at the door. He told the visitor to go away, but they persisted. Thinking it might be a prisoner being delivered, he picked up his pistol and went to the door; suddenly, he was surrounded by a horde of armed men. He dropped his weapon. One of the masked and hooded men demanded that he give them the keys to the cell. Whitten refused. If their intent was to seize the men he was bound by oath and by law to protect, he would not assist them in any manner. He stood his ground. The men ransacked the room and found a set of keys and demanded of Whitten that he tell them which key it was that opened the cells; he, again, refused to accede to their wishes. They tried different keys until they found a key that opened the door to the cell area. They pushed Whitten into an open cell and demanded to know where Hairston and Lindsay were; Whitten refused to tell the men what they needed to know.
The Klansmen continued to search and finally found the cell which contained Estes and Edward, but it was made of solid wood and they had no key to open it nor axe to break it down. In a few moments, however, the mob were able to pry the door loose from its bearings with a crowbar. The mob rushed into the room and took Estes Hairston and Edward Lindsay. They mounted them on horses and fled south from Danbury to Walnut Cove.
The Encounter with Henry Martin
Henry D. Martin was asleep in his bed when he heard the sounds of hooves hitting the wood on the bridge near the gristmill that stood just adjacent to his house. He sprang from the bed to see what was the matter. When he ran to his gate he saw a large group of men – the same group of men he had seen earlier riding up from Walnut Cove. His house was located about midway between Walnut Cove and Danbury Even though they were in masks and hoods, they sensed the threat that Martin might provide and the leader bade them to leave the house as soon as possible. Before the men rode away, Martin said – in his statement to the Coroner the following day – that he heard the two men making a noise: “I heard two men making a noise as though they were praying.” One of the hooded riders spoke to the others, “Shoot that Negro if he attempts to follow us.” The men had planned to take Hairston and Lindsay to Walnut Cove and hang them on a sympathizer’s porch, but the darkness and impatience stopped them from pursuing this plan. They stopped and made their plans to hang them from a pine tree on the property of one William Neal near the intersection of what is now Highway 8 and Highway 89.
The Mourning After
The following morning, Henry Martin awoke early and pursued the path that the riders had taken the previous night; about two miles from his home, he found two bodies hanging from a pine tree on the property of William Neal. He left the bodies where they hanging and walked the distance back to Danbury to solicit the assistance of the Sheriff; John F. Estes, the Deputy Sheriff, returned with Martin and was accompanied the S. B. Taylor, the Coroner, and a jury of a half a dozen men. They found Hairston and Lindsay hanging from the tree and the Deputy Sheriff sat down and made the following note:
“I saw them hanging to a Pine tree about four miles south of Danbury near Mr. William Neal’s & recognized them as being the prisoners and they were dead.”
The coroner asked them jury to stand with him in the presence of the bodies. As he did, he asked the jailer if he knew who they men were who took the prisoners from the jail; he said “No!” He asked Henry Martin if he recognized any of the men in the mob and martin, too, said “No!” as it was too dark to do so. The coroner sat down and recorded his notes:
“We, for our verdict, do say that Estes Hairston and Ed Lindsay came to their death by violent means to wit hanging by parties to the jurors unknown.”
He passed his statement around and the men there signed the document. As they were signing the document, the friends and family of Estes Hairston came and asked for his body that he might be given a decent funeral. They cut him down from the tree and returned to Walnut Cove to lay him to rest. William Neal paid for the coffin and the burial of Ed Lindsay in the pauper’s field.
The Aftermath
It was not long before the lynching of Estes Hairston and Edward Lindsay became an issue not just of state interest, but of national interest. It is one thing for a person to be killed extrajudicially – but, it is an altogether different kind of thing for prisoners to be removed from jail while in the middle of the trial and to be “taken, imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties, or privileges, or outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, or deprived of his life, liberty or property, but by the law of the land.” This goes against the very Declaration of Rights as established by the very first Constitution of the State of North Carolina in 1776 and every following reiteration.
The killing of these two men became a news item across the state, but not just what happened to them but those who perpetuated such a crime. Only ten years earlier, President Ulysses S. Grant had signed the KU Klux Klan Act to “enforce the Provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other Purposes.” Around that time then Governor William Holden used state troops against the Ku Klux Klan; Democrats impeached Holden and removed him from office (the first governor in American history to suffer such a fate). Some five years before the Hairston/Lindsay killing, the federal government under Rutherford B. Hayes abandoned federal responsibility for enforcing blacks' civil rights in the South. The Goldsboro Standard headline for the article on the Hairston/Lindsay killing read quite simply “K.K.K.”; the article simply stated that two Black men who had raped two White women “were taken from jail and hung in the night.”
Throughout North Carolina, the incident received notice and most certainly notoriety. The Winston Leader ran an article headlined “The Lynching in Danbury”; the article erroneously reported the death of Jenkins and the disappearance of “an idiotic woman” (neither happened). The Leader reported that one hundred fifty men were engaged in the transaction and stated that “All perpetrators of such heinous crimes should suffer the full measure of the law, still we regret that this mode has to be resorted to in order to avenge a wrong.” The Raleigh News and Observer reported under the headline “Judge Lynch” and that “Two Negro Rapists Lynched on Monday” being that “A Pair of Black Fiends Sent to Eternity Together – A Stokes County Sensation – Taken from Jail by 150 Men.” From the News and Observer, the article was spread throughout the State of North Carolina.
The Charlotte Daily Observer put things quite simply: “A Despatch to the Daily Observer announces that two Negroes, Estes Hairston, who outraged a twelve year old white girl and Lindsay who committed the same crime against Miss Garner were taken from jail on Monday night, in Stokes County, and hanged. They had lain seven months in jail.”
Days later, the event became national news. The New York Times reported “Two Brutal Negroes Lynched: A North Carolina Mob Takes the Law into Its Own Hands.” The New York Times article seemed to contain details about a wagon and halters which none of the other stories mentioned. It ended with the conclusion that “The punishment meted out to Lindsay and Hairstone is generally approved by both the white and colored people of the community.” The Chicago Tribune reported the story as “Lynching – How its Done In North Carolina: Two Ravishers Taken from Jail and Left Dangling from A Tree.” It ended with the same refrain as the New York Times and noted that “The names of those who participated in the lynching are not known.” The Cincinnati Enquirer, in a “Special Dispatch to the Enquirer” on June 23rd, reprinted the article from the New York Times in its entirety with the Chicago Tribune headline. The lynchings of Estes Hairston and Edward Lindsay were an event of national and statewide significance.
Why now?
On Dec. 19, 2018 the United States Senate unanimously passed legislation that made lynching a federal crime. The Justice for Lynching Act classifies lynching, “the ultimate expression of racism in the United States,” as a hate crime. In its findings, the bill states that at least 4,742 people, mostly African Americans, were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, and that Congress had considered nearly 200 anti-lynching bills in the first half of the 20th century without passing any of them. On April 28, 2018, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, opened in downtown Montgomery Alabama as a national memorial to commemorate the victims of lynching in the United States. The memorial is intended to acknowledge past racial terrorism and advocate for social justice in America.
On April 7th, 2019 the first historic marker commemorating a lynching victim in the Commonwealth of Virginia was unveiled in Charles City County one hundred and twenty seven years after the death of Isaac Brandon. Isaac Brandon, a 43-year-old father of eight, was seized by a mob of masked men from the Charles City County courthouse jail and hanged from a nearby tree in 1892. Brandon, who was accused of attacking a white woman and, never received a trial before he was killed; no charges were ever filed against anyone who participated in his torture and killing, the marker states. The marker sits along the Virginia Capital Trail, a 52-mile cycling and pedestrian trail that stretches from Richmond to Williamsburg. The sign is part of the state Department of Historic Resources’ attempt in recent years to feature a more balanced representation of Virginia’s history through its historical marker program.
In 2014, the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., published a report that counted 123 lynchings of African Americans in North Carolina between the years 1877 and 1950. The probability is that the numbers are much higher, but we have undocumented reports and inaccurate numbers. At some point, the statistics become not something we should be bound to. North Carolina does not have a marker to honor the victims of extrajudicial executions. At a time when others are tearing down memorials and racial, ethnic, and political divides are tearing our country apart, we are hoping to build something up. We want to honor not just those who lost their lives, but those who fought to protect them from death and who fought to bring their deaths to the light. As such, it will be a first. Please help us to do so.