"Lynching in Montevallo": A Historical Account

Across the street from this marker, two African American men were lynched by a white mob on August 31, 1889. Their names are unknown. During this era, deep racial hostility in the South permitted suspicion and presumptions of guilt against black people to flourish without serious scrutiny. After a white man was killed while interrupting a burglary, a group of armed white men searched the area and apprehended the two unidentified black men as suspects. When the two men were brought to town, hundreds of angry white citizens gathered demanding revenge. Before the two men could be transferred to the Columbiana jail, local officers turned them over to the mob, claiming they feared a “bloody riot” if they did not allow the mob to abduct the two men. Under the threat of lynching, one of the men reportedly confessed to the crime. Often, African Americans accused of crimes were beaten and tortured to obtain confessions that would be used to justify lynchings. The other man, known only as “Big Six,” insisted upon his innocence. Despite this, the mob hanged both men from a tree. These two unidentified black men were denied their constitutional right to stand trial, and were killed by a lawless mob that never faced prosecution. They were two of at least nine African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Shelby County between 1889 and 1923. (Text version of the description on one side of the Main Street lynching marker).

Contributed by Kathy King, Montevallo Citizen and Community Remembrance Project Coalition Co-Leader

The "Lynching in Montevallo" marker crafted by the EJI is an essential act of historical reimagination. It demands that we think differently about the persistence of racist violence, the trauma inflicted by terror lynchings, and the humanity of the two persons lynched in our city in 1889.

It is no easy thing to convey the complexities of the Montevallo lynching on one side of a marker. Many people will want to know more, and since there is a good deal more to be known, we have created this memorial website. It goes into more detail regarding the lynching, its time and place, the people involved, the crime that was its immediate cause, and the emotional and psychological damage that municipal amnesia has failed to repair. This fleshed out account relies chiefly upon newspaper reports from the time interwoven with details drawn from personal writings and local and family traditions.

Those who want to pursue the story further will find sources and additional information at the end. Be aware that every account of the lynching that we have been able to locate is told from the point of view of white observers and the white press. We would be thrilled to learn of additional sources that supply some of the missing black perspectives.

The Story

On a muggy Saturday night, August 31, 1889, two black men were hoisted onto the limb of a tree at the corner of Main and Shelby streets, lynched by a white mob on suspicion of burglary and murder. They were accused of killing a young white man in the course of a burglary that went bad. Sometime after midnight the previous night John T. Lawrence had received word of a break-in at his father-in-law's store. Armed with a pistol, he confronted the burglars. In the "general shooting" that ensued (Mont. Adv., 1 Sept) he was fatally shot in the chest, by all accounts dying instantly. His assailants escaped.

White Montevallo was outraged and demanded revenge. Suspicion fell upon two negroes, as they were invariably called, identified only by their skin color and firearms. One was "a large yellow negro who carried a Winchester rifle," the other "a small black negro . . . also armed" (Mont. Adv, 3 Sept). Retribution was swift and brutal. Before the day was over "the forms of two negroes" dangled "not fifty yards from where Lawrence lost his life" (Mont. Adv., 3 Sept). For the next several days the double lynching received surprisingly extensive coverage in the local and national press. The names of the two negroes were not reported.

We know a fair amount about the young white man who died defending the family store. John Lawrence was privately and publicly mourned, and the story of his tragic death entered the historical record. The Shelby Chronicle, 5 Sept, describes him as a "universally liked" young man who left "a young wife to mourn his untimely death." In nearby Brierfield in Bibb County Thomas Fancher recorded in his diary that Lawrence was a "high tone gentleman beloved by all who knew him." He had recently married into the family of one of Montevallo's leading citizens, Samuel Latham, owner of the general store at Shelby and Main where Lawrence confronted the would-be burglars. (Some Montevallo residents will recall the site as Rogan's store. It is presently a storefront church and for some years was a martial arts studio.) He was buried with a tombstone which can be visited today in the Latham section of the Montevallo Cemetery. His widowed wife, Alma Viola née Latham, remarried. She is buried in the Clanton cemetery alongside her second husband, John Ellis. The men who were lynched left no such traces, apart from the fact that one was called "Big Six." In the place where their names belong on the Shelby County monument at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery is the word "Unknown."

The Mob

The murder that brought on the lynching, the action of the mob, and the hanging itself were covered in unusual detail in newspaper accounts that originated in Montevallo and were widely published across the state for the next few weeks. From this reportage it is possible to piece together a picture of what happened that day. Notices describing the two "negroes [who] were suspicioned" circulated early in the morning (Prattville Progress, 6 Sept). Groups of armed men fanned out into the surrounding countryside to hunt down the "suspicioned" men. They were separately apprehended and brought back to town where crowds of angry white men had gathered. Town officials at first wanted to send them by train to the jail in Columbiana for safekeeping, but "hundreds" of heavily armed men "who swore that Lawrence's death should be avenged" swarmed the railroad depot. They demanded a lynching. Badly outnumbered and outgunned, fearing a "bloody riot," the officials turned the accused men over to the mob. (Mont. Adv., 3 Sept). Newspaper sources pass over in silence details of the procession from the depot to the lynching site, a distance of about a mile, but those open to imagining what it was like to be pulled, or dragged, or pushed by a mob, might start with this evocation: "A lynching involved a man, but sometimes a woman or a child, who was dragged from home, heels in the dirt, body contorting, convulsing with fear" (Norris).

One of the town leaders who sought to avert violence was H. C. Reynolds, soon to be the first president of what is now the University of Montevallo. It was not the first or last time during the lynching era that, whatever misgivings they may have harbored about lynchings, town leaders ended up complicit in mob violence. No one in the mob itself ever faced prosecution. A Coroner's inquest brought back the expected and unironically delivered verdict: the men died "at the hands of unknown parties" (Mont. Adv., 3 Sept).

Caution is needed when decoding coverage of lynchings in the white press, and the Montevallo sources require special care. The very nature of a lynching "made it practically impossible to get at the exact facts of the alleged crimes," writes an important early scholar of lynching. In nearly every case "a tradition of absolute guilt of the person lynched sprang up immediately and cut off all further legal investigation" (Raper, 5). Manfred Berg, author of a respected history of lynching in America, writes: "blacks accused of violent crimes against white people had little chance of receiving a fair trial" -- or, one might add, fair coverage in the press. "[P]ublic rage against the black murderer obscured the evidence of what had actually happened. Numerous blacks who were lynched for murdering a white person may have been perfectly innocent of any crime" (99). Add to this the fact, little known, that the murdered man's father, Dr. J. T. "Jimmy Tee" Lawrence, was himself a newspaper man, the East Perry correspondent (Marion Times-Standard, 4 Sept). If Dr. Lawrence was not on hand to supply the specials from Montevallo himself, he could have depended upon a colleague to share a father's horror, dismay, distress, and outrage, and indifference to justice for the "suspicioned negroes."

It is against this background that we must read the contradictory accounts of the supposed "confession" of the two men who were lynched. One tradition of thought, traceable to an account datelined Montevallo, 2 Sept, depicts Big Six as defiant to the end, insisting upon his innocence even after the other suspect "confessed." The quotation marks are necessary. Threats, intimidation, beatings, and other forms of torture were used at this time to coerce confessions that could then be used to justify a lynching. The very language of this article gives reason to doubt the confession. The smaller and younger of the men, "finally," after prolonged questioning, "gave way, confessed everything" (Mont. Adv., Sept 3). There is a world of implication in that word "finally." But the account in the Eufaula Daily Times, also datelined Montevallo, Sept 2, tells a different story. In this source Big Six admits to having killed Lawrence with his Winchester and implicates a third "negro." (This information comes from "the parties who lynched the two negroes last night," a cheeky flaunting of the impunity enjoyed by lynch mobs.) There is no resolving the contradiction. Big Six may or may not have confessed to killing John Lawrence, he may or may not have been telling the truth. Such are the inevitable ambiguities and uncertainties of the stories that transmit the past, made messier still in this case by historical disregard for black lives.

Big Six

Big Six is a good example of the way a "tradition of absolute guilt" springs up in the immediate aftermath of a lynching. Within hours he had been furnished with a nefarious criminal identity. His "record has been traced up," reports the Eufaula Daily Times, and he turns out to have been be a murderer several times over, an unusually vicious one. The previous year, he chopped up a negro with an axe. A year after the lynching, his reputation is more villainous still. An error-ridden account in the Eufaula Times and News paints him as a "desperado negro" who had savagely beaten the brains out of a man and provides him as well with an unsavory outlaw past: he had been the member of a "regular band of murderers and robbers" (11 Sept 1890).

Tall tales about the recently lynched man began to circulate almost immediately. The figure of Big Six took on folkloristic, larger-than-life elements in the Eufaula Daily Times (2 Sept), which likened him to Hercules, hero of Greek and Roman legends renowned for his extraordinary strength and courage. "He was about 6 feet high, weighing about 200 pounds, well muscled -- in fact, a perfect Hercules and a walking arsenal. Besides his Winchester rifle, he carried a sack of cartridges, bullet moulds, lead and powder." He is all well-muscled body, a superb specimen of physical prowess, the menace enhanced by the Winchester that is an extension of his body and the supply of ammunition that he carries upon his body. He is an epic threat, a "walking arsenal," no ordinary human being. This is not reportage but myth-making and multilayered fantasy: the negro with no name is at once nobody, all-body, and the embodiment of white fears.

However, there may be more than an element of truth to the Eufaula Times claim that Big Six had belonged to a "regular band of murderers and robbers." Fancher's reference in a diary entry dated 3 Sept 1889 to Big Six as the "noted yellow Negro," suggests he enjoyed some degree of local notoriety as an outlaw. Fancher places him in a gang of "3 Negros and 2 white men" known for "selling whiskey & rob[b]ing & thieving generally." (There is no mention of murder.) Newspaper sources from the pre-lynching period give teasing glimpses of this interracial moonshining gang. Membership varied according to who had just been shot and who was then in the hands of the authorities, but there seemed to have been, at any given time, two or three unnamed black men and two or three named white men. (One of those named was James Hickey, who would later be lynched in connection with the Lawrence murder.)* The gang sold whiskey to black laborers in the mines and railroad camps. Their infamy was such that a Kansas newspaper described them as "among the most desperate and daring" of the moonshine gangs in the state. They were reported to have run off a US deputy, and ordered him never to return (Topeka State Journal, 1 Aug 1888). Doubtless they engaged in other criminal mischief as well, including perhaps murder. It was reported that they had killed a Mr Levi Lawley. It is not inconceivable that they broke into Latham's store on August 31.

*Hickey was lynched just six weeks later after reportedly admitting to "being with the [lynched] negroes." He claimed that Big Six did the shooting. He was hanged from a tree on Mulberry Creek near Maplesville for complicity in the Lawrence murder, and his body "riddled with bullets" (Mont. Adv., Oct 16).

It was uncommon but by no means unheard of for white men to be lynched. During the last decades of the nineteenth century whites represented around 10% of the lynchings in the South. The vast majority of lynchings targeted black males and were intended to terrorize African American communities.

That Big Six was a "noted" member of an outlaw gang may explain why he so quickly became an object of suspicion. A tall, muscled man, standing at six feet or thereabouts, would have been a conspicuous presence on the Montevallo streets, and reportedly he was sighted in the vicinity of Latham's store not long before the break-in. He was carrying a Winchester rifle, and black men bearing powerful firearms made white folks take note. At a moment when an inflamed white community needed a black body to punish, he was perilously exposed. Adding to his vulnerability, he was said to have lived outside town in a railroad camp. He was a transient, an outsider; he lacked even the limited protection of a black lodge or church or the support of a reputable white person to vouch for him. Big Six may have been one in the ever-lengthening line of black men in the wrong place at the wrong time.

On the other hand there is nothing in the surviving sources to exclude the possibility that he did kill John Lawrence. Since he was lynched without an investigation or trial we will never know.

The Lynching

Events moved rapidly in Montevallo. Lawrence was killed in the early morning hours, the suspects were handed over to the mob the next evening, and they were hanged that night. Their bodies may have been left dangling in the tree. An eyewitness account from the next morning begins: "Excitement over the murder of Mr. John Lawrence is this morning at an end. The forms of two negroes hang stiff and stark from a limb not fifty yards from where Lawrence lost his life"(Mont. Adv., 3 Sept). The Eufaula Daily Times tells the story differently, as usual. It downplays the excitement: "Large crowds from the country for miles around thronged the town Saturday," it reported, "but no excitement existed. I suppose no more quiet and orderly hanging ever took place." Occupants of a private house "not forty feet from the tree" slept through the whole thing (4 Sept).

It is tempting to dismiss this picture of a quiet and orderly hanging as fanciful and self-serving; an attempt to sanitize an ugly event. Surely it strains credulity to think that throngs of enraged men, said to be on the verge of rioting at the depot, would now regulate themselves in so peaceable a manner. Against this improbably silent lynching one might consider a recent description from Michele Norris, former host of NPR's All Things Considered and founding director of The Race Card Project:

A lynching was loud, for a mob is never silent. The act itself was audible: The rope chafed against the bark. It tore open the skin. It suffocated and gagged, crushed the esophagus and snapped the neck. It made water, involuntary and foul, tricking past the knee, past the calf and the foot. A lynching was a fight against gravity. Desperate. Futile. Listless. And gravity always won.

But perhaps there is something to be said for the subdued version of events. A family tradition related to me by Montevallo citizen Marshel Roy Cunningham has it that his ancestors, Henry Wilson and Augusta Allen Wilson, who lived in the house where the lynching tree stood, "slept through the whole thing." He recalls being told "the lynching story over and over" in his youth. Had "Cousin Henry Wilson" known that his yard was the site of a lynching, he "would have run the group on down the street."

Memories have been known to stand guardian over cherished versions of an idealized past, and family memories are notoriously difficult to verify. Regrettably, no memories from the black community have survived. Stories about the double lynching doubtless circulated in 1889 but have left few traces today, at least none that the Remembrance Project has been able to recover.

It is at once an example of the erasure of the African American past and of the intertwining of black and white histories that memories preserved by Cunningham may offer our best bridge to this troubled moment in our town's history. "One of my great grandfathers was present at the lynching," he writes. "He said the men were hanged by ropes put around their necks. The ropes were thrown over the limbs of the tree and the men were hoisted up as one would elevate a flag. In this way, their necks would not break by falling and it would take longer to suffocate."

And now, for a moment, the human reality of the men who were lynched slips into view. The glimpse of their final agony, the futile struggle against gravity, is heart-breaking:

He said one of the men next to the trunk of the tree had no shoes on and would use his feet to climb up the trunk of the tree long enough to catch a breath and then fall back down. He did this several times until his strength left him and he was not able to repeat the process and finally ran out of breath and died.

The hats of the lynched men were left on the gate posts of the fence that ran around the house and the ropes were left in the tree "to warn any of the locals what would happen to them if anything similar were to occur in the future."

The Lynching Site

The site was probably chosen for its proximity to the scene of the crime and its potential for public display. The hanging tree was a stone's throw from the store where Lawrence was shot to death -- lynching parties liked to revisit crime scenes -- and it had additional symbolic significance. The tree stood in full view of the town's main thoroughfare, inclining gently downward toward the commercial center of the town in one direction, toward the houses "across the creek" in the other. In 1889 many of Montevallo's black citizens lived across Shoal Creek in the area that extends today from City Hall toward Lucky's Foodland. They would have had to pass the hanging tree on their way into town. The effect of the spectacle of two black bodies hanging "stiff and stark" from the tree is hardly to be contemplated. Oral tradition had it that the ropes were left hanging in the tree. They were still there some eighteen years later if the information recorded by Eloise Meroney is reliable (46). The bodies, the hats and ropes, sent a casually brutal message about the "unlimited rights of white men and the absence of any rights on the part of any accused Negro" (Raper 9), about the terrible vulnerabilities of black bodies.

The tree meant differently for white and black Montevallo. Its highly visible location, at the point of greatest elevation downtown (and today, ironically, across from City Hall), underlines the way the ritualized elements of a public lynching served to strengthen the ties that bind within the white community. A lynching, as one scholar observes, was "meted out by a group of people claiming to represent the will of the larger community and acting with an expectation of impunity" (Berg ix). For citizens of the town with white skins the lynching re-affirmed the culture white supremacy and enacted for all to see the shared privileges of white superiority. For citizens of color the meaning could not have been more different. The tree that marked the unofficial boundary between black and white Montevallo stood as an inescapable warning, a testimony to the uncertainty of black lives and the ever-present danger to their bodies. It was a reminder of the violence that could be summoned at virtually any time to terrorize people who lived on the other side of the creek.

Thinking About Lynching Today

There are some in our town even today who would prefer that the site of the lynching remain unmarked. Best not dwell on this unquestionably ugly episode from our past. Besides, no town should be in the business of erecting memorials to criminals, to men who deserved hanging. Apart from the fact that the guilt or innocence of one or both men cannot be established, the exercise of just mercy, to use EJI's Bryan Stevenson's wonderful phrase, requires that we think beyond guilt and innocence. People, all of us, are "more than the worst thing they've ever done," as Stevenson likes to say, and that goes for Big Six and his unnamed companion. Death by lynching is lawless, brutal, an obscene cruelty, an affront to human decency, and an assault on the soul of all participants. No person deserves to be lynched. Equally, no person deserves to be a person who lynches.

Reckoning with a hateful past is a hard thing, a painful thing. Who has not felt the desire to let the past be past? But Sherrilyn Ifill is surely right to say that "the history of racial terrorism continues to shape the relationship between and among blacks and whites in communities all over the country." It is this history "that lurks in the dim, gray area of distrust, fear, and resentment between and among blacks and whites" (On the Courthouse Lawn, xix). Forgetting is not healing, silence is not reconciliation. Healing and reconciliation demand truth. The truth-telling on the EJI marker is a crucial step toward a reckoning that Montevallo is proud to undertake.

"Lynching in Montevallo': A Historical Account" is a work in progress intended to move forward with contributions from members of the Montevallo community, and beyond. If you have new information to contribute, or corrections to suggest, please contact us at montevallocrp@gmail.com. Let your voice and your story be heard!

Acknowledgements and Sources

Thanks are due to Marshel Roy Cunningham for sharing family memories in emails dated 15 August 2018 and 19 June 2020. Henry Wilson, who lived with his wife, Augusta Wilson, née Allen, in the house where the lynching took place, was an attorney who practiced law with Rufus Cobb, later governor of Alabama. The lynching tree is long gone but the house still exists; it has been moved around the corner onto Shelby Street.

Thanks are also due to Marty Everse, who shared information from the unpublished diaries of Thomas Fancher, a devout Baptist, farmer, and part-time contractor for the Bibb or Brierfield Furnace. The original diaries are in the possession of the present Thomas Fancher, for most of his life known as Tim to avoid confusion with his father, Thomas, the son of Paul Fancher, who was the son of the original Thomas Fancher.

Secondary Sources

Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America, American Ways, 2011.

Sherrilyn A. Ifill, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century, Beacon Press, 2007. Chapter 5 on local newspapers provides an invaluable account of patterns of factual distortion in press coverage of lynchings.

Eloise Meroney, Montevallo: The First One Hundred Years, Times Printing Co, 1977. Includes a brief account of the 1889 lynching: see pages 45-6. A photo of the house built by Henry Wilson in 1880 is on page 52.

Michele Norris, "So you want to talk about lynching? Understand this first," Washington Post, 23 Oct 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/so-you-want-to-talk-about-lynching-understand-this-first/2019/10/23/c5a5fd2a-f5ae-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching, Dover Publications, 2003.

Primary Sources

These are newspaper articles cited above. Additional articles can be accessed via the subscription service Newspapers.com.

Eufaula Daily Times, 4 Sept 1889.

Marion Times-Standard, 4 Sept 1889.

Montgomery Advertiser, 1 Sept 1889.

Montgomery Advertiser, 3 Sept 1889.

Montgomery Advertiser, 17 Oct 1889.

Prattville Progress, 6 Sept 1889.

Shelby Chronicle, 5 Sept 1889.

Times and News (Eufaula), 11 Sept 1890.

Topeka State Journal, 2 Aug 1888.