The Lula Sherman and Manse Waldrop Story. Pt II

Part II

As many of you know, the Hill1News site has been down for the last week or so because yours truly was trying to find a way to host my site for free. I found several ways to do it, but in the end, I chose to go back to being chained to paid hosting because if I hosted it myself I would be giving people from all over the world access to a server on my “home network”. Hosting companies have better security measures in place so that hackers have a harder time accessing their servers. I don’t have the expertise to properly secure it from my detractors and they would like nothing better than to see me exposed… Racist hacker: “Hey fellows, it’s Christmas time! Hill1news has just bent over and opened several ports right into his… uh… network. How many of y’all want to help me go in there and cut his blog off.” So yeah, after thinking about how uncomfortable that could be, I’ll just fork over the money. Anywho, I’m back and like they say, no harm, no foul. Please enjoy Part II of the Lula Sherman and Manse Waldrop Story.

Me Tarzan… You Toby…

So in the previous article, we discussed the crime leading up to the trial for the murder of Manse Waldrop. Waldrop was shot and then hung by his neck for the rape and murder of Lula Sherman by a black mob in South Carolina in 1887. Now black folks hanging a white man in South Carolina in 1887 was like Donald Trump dating Al Sharpton’s daughter… that shat ain’t supposed to happen… but it did.
Let’s pick up where we left off. So a grand jury convened in Pickens County, South Carolina, on January 16, 1888, with Judge Joseph J. Norton presiding over the Court of General Sessions. Previously the sheriff and the coroner’s jury had arrested five black men for murder and one Gaylord Eaton, a white man as an accomplice to murder. However, after the true nature of the “real” crime had been revealed, and I’m not talking about the murder of Lula Sherman, but that a bunch of nigras had shot a white man and then hung him by his neck from the tallest tree they could find and was then aided by another white man to boot… well, that was the real crime… The grand jury went straight Klux this time and charged Gaylord Eaton with murder too! Not only did they up the charge on Eaton, but they also charged another black man who wasn’t even there with murder… and if you think they were finished, well hold my beer… the rascals also charged Folger and his boys with being an accomplice to murder!! Racist jury: By gawd boy… you let dem niggas take a white man from you and hang him from the tallest tree they could find and you did nothing??!!” If you remember Folger and his boys tried to stop the black mob from hanging Waldrop. Back in those days, a white man was supposed to be like Tarzan, able to control thousands of nigras by just swinging out a tree and hollering… the jury thought at the very least, they could have said ” My name is TARZAN!!.. If y’all hang that gawd fearing white man from the tallest tree you can find, then me and Boy gonna swing half naked out those trees over there and start hollering!!” In addition to indicting Folger and his boys, they also indicted two men for retail whiskey sales. Yep… they indicted those two for selling liquor to the black men, many of whom were inebriated and singing “Ain’t no mountain high enough to keep me from hanging you babe…🎶” Anywho, they weren’t playing! If you had any connection to a white man being hung by a black mob, then when it came time for the ropes to be passed out, you were gonna get yours. After the indictments were handed down, the jury begged the Solicitor to “exert himself- use all his means- and exhaust every effort to make sure they were swinging by sundown…” Whoops! I mean exhaust every effort to secure proof against the parties named, and bring them to trial, but as you can see, the scope of their indictments goes to show how seriously they viewed a white man being hung by a black mob. To them, any white man present who saw black people stringing up a white man and didn’t do anything about it might as well get up in the tree with him.

Did I Say Schools Too?

So they were indicted in January 1888 and because the defense asked for a continuance they didn’t go to trial until July 1888. In the meantime, they were being held in the Pickens jail. I mentioned the time between indictment and trial because as you know January is a winter month. So besides them being in the town jail where they had hung a white man just a few hundred yards away… because the jail was made from wood, they had no means of keeping warm. A fire wasn’t allowed in the jail. They kept warm by pacing back and forth. To keep their spirits high they sang songs and hymns. ” I’m Not Afraid Now, Because I’ll Be Dead Tomorrow…🎵” and “They Left My Heart In San Francisco And The Rest Of Me In Lake Thurmond…🎶” Alright, I don’t know if they sang those songs… but they did sing to get their mind off the cold as reported by the local newspaper. As an aside, there is actually a lake in Georgia called Lake Strom Thurmond. It is the largest lake in Georgia. For those that don’t know who Strom Thurmond was, he was a decorated first-degree hard scrabble racist wearing a burning cross and golden rope insignia on a cotton field plantation medallion:

“I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” – Senator Strom Thurmond 1948

Maybe not enough troops to stop us from getting into your swimming pools, homes, and churches, but it certainly wasn’t enough to stop “you” from getting into a bed with a black woman. For all that BS he was talking about black people, ole Strom had a “BLACK DAUGHTER!” After they found out about that shat, we didn’t hear another peep out of him until just before they buried his ass. He tried to say we got it all wrong, and he wasn’t a racist. He was just an advocate for state’s rights… Yeah okay.. the state’s right to keep them nigras away from me. Thurmond was the longest-living seated senator in US history, having retired at the age of 100. He died in 2003 and his eulogy was given by none other than guess who? The author of mass incarceration, Joe Biden. Yep folks, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Anywho, so yeah the trial began in July. By that time the charges against Folger and his boys were dismissed. I guess they just wanted to warn them and anybody else who saw a white man swinging from a tree with black folks standing under it… if you come before this court, you better tell us you had a Tarzan suit on. The trial proceeded forward with the other five black defendants and one white defendant. So the state witnesses were primarily white citizens of Central, the town where it happened, that testified how they tried to prevent the lynching. The defense strategy was to put family members on the stand to give the defendants alibis. Curiously after closing arguments in the first trial, the jury could not decide on a verdict and the judge called a mistrial. A mistrial? It’s surprising they had a trial at all. The normal procedure was to whip azz, hang high, and repeat… The defendants were returned to the jail in Pickens. They would stay there until the next trial which didn’t happen until almost a year later in March 1889. At this trial, verdicts were reached. Eaton, the white defendant, Sherman, the father of Lula, and Reese, a former member of Lula’s coroner’s jury were found not guilty. Williams, Heyward, and Bolton were convicted. Williams and Bolton were not members of Lula’s coroner’s jury and Heyward was the one with the mouth… Heyward: We “ought” to hang the faque outta him!!” I knew that was going to come back to haunt him. Bolton was granted a new trial because according to the records, there was some prejudicial evidence against him that amounted to hearsay. Prosecutor: Mr. Bolton.. isn’t it true that after you hung gawd fearing Manse Waldrop from the highest tree you could find, you went to the bar and had drinks with a white woman…? Defense: “YOUR HONOR!!!” so yeah… okay I don’t really know if that’s what happened, but anyway he was granted a new trial. The judge sentenced Williams and Heyward to hang on April 5, 1889. As soon as the verdicts were announced, black folks from all over the state went into high gear. Petitions were signed, and prominent black citizens and politicians wrote to the governor. A group of African American ministers met with the governor to ask for clemency for Willams and Heyward. In the end, it paid off. The execution was delayed and eventually, all three men were given a full pardon. The governor, John Richardson, was what historians called a Bourbon politician. The name was given to them by their critics who thought them to be too liberal and behind the times. While Jim Crow was steadily encroaching on the rights of black citizens in the decade after the civil war, politicians like Richardson were somewhat responsive to our needs and opinions. However, two years later Ben Tillman’s more virulent brand of racism would gain political supremacy in South Carolina and the suffering of blacks would increase ten-fold under his leadership.

How Do You Spell Pitchfork Governor?

PSA: Don’t try this at home. This image is part of an art exhibit. The artist has not been identified and they’re saying he better not be identified if he knows what’s good for him…

Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, was a racist of the highest caliber. He would become governor of South Carolina on December 4, 1890. He is one of the reasons that they don’t want Critical Race Theory taught in South Carolina schools. In 1876 he led a group of paramilitary Red Shirts in an episode that came to be known as the Hamburg Massacre. The Redshirts was a domestic terrorist group of white supremacists bent on using intimidation and force to drive out Republicans from southern politics and replace them with Dixie Democrats by any means necessary. Had Tillman been governor when Manse Waldrop was hanged by blacks, then he would have hung everybody in that town, including the white population for letting their nigras get out of control. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, he defended lynching, and frequently ridiculed black Americans in his speeches, boasting of having helped kill them in the Hamburg Massacre. So we are not going to talk about “Pitchfork” right now as we got some more to cover with our current article, but we will be getting back to him and his role in the Hamburg Massacre in a later edition of Hill1news. So just one more thing before we leave this topic, I did not give him the moniker “Pitchfork”. It was given to him by the participants of the 1896 Democratic Convention when he threatened to use a pitchfork on Grover Cleveland… but like they say if the shoe fits… Anywho, the release of the black people who were arrested and indicted for the hanging of a white man in the former confederate state of South Carolina had far-reaching implications with respect to lynching. On one hand, they couldn’t have black folks running around hanging white men from the tallest tree they could find… and on the other hand, they didn’t want to establish a precedent that mobs who lynched to avenge sexual assaults would be hunted down and punished. The question was did blacks have a right to protect their families just as whites had a right to protect theirs? Blacks argued that If a white man had raped and killed a white child and the father of that child found the rapist and hung him, then it wouldn’t have ended in a trial. That would be just one dead rapist, lets’s go home and have a beer. They were punishing black people for the same thing a white person would have not had to face justice for. In an increasingly hostile environment against blacks after the civil war, they felt it was their right to protect themselves. However, it was brought up that sanctioning lynchings against whites, would also strengthen the hand of white lynchers who would inevitably turn the practice against black victims. All those black victims who were just getting a beat down before would now face legalized lynching. However, most white citizens agreed that under these particular circumstances, in the rape and murder of a child, lynching was an appropriate remedy whether the perpetrator was black or white. In a letter to the local newspaper, Folger wrote:
“To all thinking men, it seems to me, that this will show the ‘bloody shirt’ men of New England that the negro can lynch the white perpetrator of crime with as much impunity as can his Caucasian
brother lynch the negro.” (Bloody shirts are the Redshirts domestic terrorist organization we spoke about earlier.)
Several dozen citizens in Central signed a petition stating:
“We are opposed to lynch law but it is a recognized fact that no white man has ever been convicted in South Carolina for this offense,( raping and killing a black child) and it would seem to us to be unfair and unjust to hang these poor negroes, even if guilty, for simply following the advice & example of their white fellow citizens.”
Those were some bold statements to make down there in those times, especially Folger’s statement, which basically said white folks did not have a monopoly on hanging people, just “uck” around and find out. The second petition statement wasn’t quite as strong and to tell the truth was a bit condescending. It was saying we shouldn’t punish black people for hanging a white man for rape and murder because they were given permission and were following their massa’s lead. Well taking into account the era and this was down south, the thought of southerners giving permission for blacks to hang a white person for the rape and murder of a black child was just… how should I say this… white privilege at its finest, gawd bless dey hearts. Anywho, back then, you take what you can get.

Have A Little Mercy

Now the judge who presided over the case, Judge Joseph Norton aka (Confederate Colonel Norton) not to be confused with Confederate defense attorney Colonel R.W Pendleton, wrote some really greasy shat to the governor after the trial. Yes, Judge Norton had also been a Colonel in the Confederate Army too… anyway he wrote the governor saying that he believed the jury freed the nigras because they didn’t want them to hang for “killing” a murderer and a rapist. The jury didn’t know they could ask the judge for mercy and if they had known that he didn’t have to sentence them to hang, he probably wouldn’t have had to set them free. Yeah right, mercy would have meant being imprisoned on a South Carolina chain gang for the rest of your probably short painful life, supervised by former confederate soldiers, that had their mama’s house burned down by Union soldiers trying to set them darkies free. Racist prison guard: “Boy don’t you know dat dem blue bellies burned my mama’s house down and took all our livestock and all the meat we could afford to buy was the pads off the bottom of a raccoon’s feet!! Don’t You Hear Me Talking To You Boy!!” Well, don’t do me any favors Colonel… Now as hard as it may seem by this example, the judge was actually on our side when it came to rape and lynching. He also suggested to the governor that a law be introduced in the General Assembly that makes “lynching for rape an additional ground for declaring a homicide excusable.” That meant that it didn’t matter what race you were, if you were lynching somebody for rape, it would be excused. Of course, the General Assembly of South Carolina threw that bill right out the window and then they went out there and stomped on it. Ain’t no way in twenty-five hells, were they gonna have black folks hanging white folks in the confederate state that first told Lincoln to kiss it. Remember, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. Another peculiar argument of this case was saying that letting blacks lynch whites was not really justice because blacks were just imitating their white counterparts. The supporters said that we really didn’t understand the consequences of justice because justice is a product of a civilized society. Since we came from Africa and there was no civilized society there, our progress had been determined by imitating white folks. In essence, they were saying, we wanted to lynch white folks for raping and killing little children because we had seen them do it. Now… they gonna make me go back and turn on my Samuel L. Jackson again… One of the oldest legal systems in the world began in Africa.. the Ma’at which dates back thousands of years to over 2500 BCE!! Since there was no recorded history in Europe before 800 BCE, I’m gonna say back then it was every man for himself… smoke em’ if you got em’. Codified law in Europe didn’t happen until around the 5th century AD, under Emperor Justinian, almost 15 centuries later… excuse me…

Legitimate Lynchings…

Anywho.. the idea that we were only imitating our white brothers when it came to lynching lasted all the way into the 20th century. Lynching they said was a white man’s tool. To underscore this fact, an argument was even put forth that the Waldrop lynching did not even meet the basic requirements for a legitimate lynching. Yeah, that shat had me laughing too.. a legitimate lynching… Not only didn’t blacks have a right to lynch, but they also didn’t lynch Manse Waldrop under the “proper” rules for lynching. Although ya’ll can’t see it, I’m laughing my ass off right now!! Anywho, the Keowee Courier, a small insignificant rag in the nearby town of Walhalla, population 400 hard rock racist, published an editorial that took the position that Lula Sherman did not qualify as a victim worthy of being avenged by lynching. ( Is that a legitimate lynching or just a plain lynching?) To save us time I’m not going to show the entire editorial here. I’m just going to condense it into something we already knew that they were going to say. “You have to be pure of heart with the innocence of the white flower in the garden of virtue and righteousness, with wings riding above the shamed and wretched of the earth to be worthy of the vengeance that is prescribed by lynching.” In other words, only the white woman is worthy of retribution. Now those are my words. Here is an excerpt from the actual editorial:
“Lynch law is wrong in itself. However, some crimes are so revolting that vengeance cannot be stayed. Of these crimes, the fiendish and brutal violence against respectable women is the highest. Protection of such women is a hallmark of Anglo-Saxon, Christian civilization, and summary punishment of a brute, black or white, who assaults a pure woman, we cannot condemn.”
The key word here is “Anglo-Saxon.” So while it seems that they supported the hanging of Manse Waldrop, they also inferred that black men do not value black women as white men value white women. By saying that Sherman did not qualify for being a victim in which lynching was prescribed, they are siding with the court which ruled that Lula Sherman did not die from the rape, but from “diseases particular to females.” They are saying that the word “disease” precludes her from being pure. So the disease they are talking about is when Waldrop stuffed dirty rags inside her to stop the bleeding. This cause an infection that lead to sepsis from which she later died. See how I wrote it compared to how they wrote it?

Ain’t Nobody Getting None

So the hanging of a white man in 1887 by black men from the tallest tree they could find did set another precedence besides the fact of former slaves hanging former masters which didn’t result in the immediate lowering of black folk’s life spans in South Carolina. The focus shifted from race to women’s rights, and how women would be protected, who would protect them, and which women were or were not worth protecting. Before the Civil War, white men had directed that outcome. With Reconstruction and the new political climate, black women and poor white women took advantage of the situation to demand their protection from white men against rape. Powerful organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), launched major campaigns directed against white men to change the rape laws and said not nobody was getting not now a piece from now on until something changed. Okay… they didn’t threaten them with that… but the shat was getting real. In addition, the campaign also worked to raise the legal age of consent so that it would be easier to prosecute rape. It was part of a sweeping nationwide referendum on sex reform started by the WCTU in 1885, two years before the rape of Lula Sherman. Now everything was looking up in most of the country with respect to attitudes concerning rape and its criminality. That was until white racists down south started peeing in the greens. Instead of having women focus on rape as a universal crime against women, they flip the script and started having white women focus on black men raping white women. Yep.. down south it was no longer about white men raping… it was about black men raping. By flipping the script it focused the debate on keeping control of punishment for rape in the hands of white men while simultaneously allowing their access to rape black women without punishment untouched. White women were forced into a trade-off for the right of southern womanhood to be protected and avenged for rape by black men. In other words, if you want to be protected against black men raping you, then leave the rape laws right where they are at. However, it was also a tradeoff for white men in that now they didn’t oppose black men lynching other black men. Remember that lynching was always thought of as a white man’s tool. Now black folks could lynch as many other black folks as they wanted… just as long as they didn’t lynch any white folks. Through the latter part of the 19th century… ie the 1800s, many African Americans supported the idea of lynching as retributive justice in their own communities the same as their white counterparts, even though the laws down south operated differently for them. It would be in the 20th century before those attitudes would change. I guess because by then African Americans were being lynched for all kinds of crazy.. like looking someone in the eyeball or forgetting to put a “yass suh” at the end of that sentence. Anywho, adopting anti-lynching laws in the 20th century became a central plank in the fight for civil rights.

Almost But Not Quite…

So the rape and murder of Lula Sherman and the subsequent hanging of Manse Waldrop by black men from the highest tree they could find was a “kind” of turning point for blacks in general and women in particular. In the late 1800s, temperance and suffrage activists successfully advocated raising the legal age of consent from 10 to between 14 and 18, depending on the state. It was no longer illegal for blacks to protect their communities from predators through the use of retributive justice as their white counterparts had been doing all along for rape… so long as you weren’t stringing up a white man…. and for the first time lynching as a form of retributed justice for any crime was now being questioned altogether. Although I mentioned that these sea changes were turning points for blacks and women, turning points and turning corners are entirely two different things. It would be almost 100 years after the rape and murder of Lula Sherman that the second feminist wave led by the “National Organization Of Women,” would initiate legislative reform against rape, and another ten years before it would be adopted by all fifty states. It would be “over 100” years before lynching would be addressed. More than 200 anti-lynching bills were put before Congress between 1865 and the Civil Rights movement… all failed. The last “classical” lynching as reported by Tuskegee Institute was in 1955 and involved a young black boy named Emmett Till. Classical in this sense means that they did it because of his color and for no other reason. A white kid doing the same thing would have just been ignored. Anyway, it would be “another” 67 years after Till’s death that Congress would pass the “Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act.” Even then after more than 150 years had passed, three congressmen still opposed any lynching laws. All of these repercussions came about or were advanced when one day in 1886 a group of black men in South Carolina, grabbed Manse Waldrop by his scrawny little neck and hung him from the highest tree they could find for the rape and murder of a 14 year old black child named Lula Sherman. The rest is history.

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