"The Waco Horror": The Lynching of Jesse Washington

Jesse Washington was a seventeen-year-old Black farmhand when a White mob lynched him on May 15, 1916. The Handbook of Texas says Sheriff Samuel Fleming moved him to Dallas before trial, a White jury convicted him in four minutes, and spectators seized him, dragged him to City Hall with a chain around his neck, hanged him from a tree and burned him. No one in the mob was prosecuted. A. T. Smith, a Black editor, was convicted of criminal libel for printing claims against Lucy Fryer's husband. Baylor faculty condemned the mob.

What the plaque says

"The Waco Horror": The Lynching of Jesse Washington The history of McLennan County, like that of Texas and the nation, is marred by institutional racism sometimes manifested in violence. From 1860 through 1922, 43 lynchings were documented here. Following reconstruction, most victims were black. Jim Crow Laws and acts of violence were used to disenfranchise, segregate and impede the advancement of African Americans. The most notorious local act of racial violence occurred in 1916. On May 8th, in the farming community of Robinson, Mrs. Lucy Fryer was killed near her house. Jesse Washington, a teenaged African American farmhand, was arrested for her murder. Known to be illiterate and possibly having an intellectual disability, Washington changed his story from denial to admission of guilt after being questioned for days. One week later, as large crowds gathered, he was brought to Waco for trial. Following brief proceedings with novice lawyers, Washington was convicted of murder and sentenced to death after four minutes of jury deliberation. Immediately, he was seized by a horde of onlookers and dragged several blocks to city hall where he was beaten, stabbed, hanged, mutilated and burned to death as thousands cheered. Jesse Washington's horrific death received unparalleled nationwide public attention. Several reports, particularly from outside Texas, denounced the act as a breakdown of law and morality. The newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)–now the nation's oldest Civil Rights organization–hired Elisabeth Freeman to investigate. Famed editor W.E.B. Du Bois used her findings and commemorative photographs taken at the scene as the basis for the NAACP's July 1916 issue of The Crisis, a widely distributed publication, referring to the event as "The Waco Horror." Du Bois and the NAACP made the atrocity a turning point in the National Anti-Lynching Movement and a step in the long march toward the promise of Civil Rights for all. (2016)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Suspension Bridge — 0.2 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 0.3 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 0.7 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 1.2 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.

More markers nearby

• McLennan County Medical Society — steps away
• Waco — steps away
• Gerald-Harris Shooting — steps away
• Brann-Davis Shootings — steps away