Claude Neal

Claude Neal was an African-American farmhand who was lynched on October 26, 1934 in Jackson County, Florida for allegedly raping and killing Lola Cannady, a nineteen-year-old white female. He was taken from the county jail in Marianna, and tortured and hanged near the town of Greenwood. It was a spectacle lynching, committed before a large white crowd drawn from the region.[1] In the next days, whites rioted in an attempt to drive blacks from the county, injuring an estimated 200 persons, including police. The governor called in the National Guard to suppress the white rioting.

Events

Neal was arrested, accused of raping and killing Lola Cannady (sometimes spelled Cannidy). When the news got out, lynch mobs began to form to find and kill him.[2] In order to keep Neal safe from the lynch mobs, law enforcement moved him to multiple jails, including to Brewton, Alabama. But a lynch mob found him and brought him back to the county seat of Marianna, Florida.[3]

Neal was tortured and mutilated, and finally killed by a group of lynchers. They returned the body to the Cannady farm, where it was further mutilated by members of the mob who had come to witness the lynching.[2] The body was later hanged in front of the Marianna courthouse, before being cut down and buried by the sheriff in the morning.[3] A large group of people came to the courthouse and demanded that the body be hanged again. They began attacking blacks in the area and rioting.[3] The lynching of Claude Neal and the riots that followed played a large part in bringing about the end of the practice of lynching in the United States.[2]

Murder of Lola Cannady

Lola Cannady, who lived near Claude Neal, never came back home on Thursday, October 18, 1934, after leaving home to walk to a water pump to water the family's hogs.[2] Friends and neighbors helped the Cannady family in their search for Lola in the fields behind the family's land. At 6:30 A.M. the next day, they found her body poorly hidden in the woods, under the cover of two logs and a pine tree branch.[2] Cannady had been bludgeoned to death with a hammer that had been taken from the Cannady field.[2] It was later determined that Cannady had been raped.[2]

Sheriff Flake Chambliss became focused on two suspects: Claude Neal, a black farmworker, and Calvin Cross, who was white.[2] Sheriff Chambliss had received reports that Neal had been in the field near the same water pump that Lola had gone to and that he was gone for about two hours before going home.[2] Neal was arrested about two hours after the discovery of Cannady's body.[3]

Although the evidence gathered against Neal made him a prime suspect in the case, it was not enough to prove that he was guilty of the crime.[2] The evidence included bloody clothes that were found at the home he shared with his mother, as well as a bloody piece of fabric which Sheriff Chambliss claimed fit a tear in Neal's shirt.[2] Neal reportedly had cuts on his hands and was inconsistent in his descriptions as to where they had come from; he gave three different explanations for the cuts, with one being that he had gotten them while fixing a fence, one being that he had cut his hands in a fight, and one being that he had cut them jumping a fence.[2] In addition, Neal was missing a ring on his pocket watch. A common, standard watch ring had been found near the spot where Cannady had been murdered.[2] No tests were done on the murder weapon to determine if Neal's fingerprints were on it.[2] The sheriff moved Neal's mother and aunt out of town to prevent them from being harmed by a lynch mob. But they did not get to testify in front of the coroner's jury about allegedly washing Claude Neal's bloody clothing, as was claimed by the prosecution.[2]

Howard Kester, who was investigating the case and reporting to the NAACP, heard rumors among blacks in the area about the murder of Cannady.[1][2] One such rumor was that she had been murdered by a white man who later asked Neal's mother and aunt to wash his clothes and possibly offered them payment.[2] Another rumor was that a white man who lived in Malone, Florida had already confessed to killing Cannady, and that he had given Neal money in exchange for trading clothes with him after he committed the murder.[2] Neither of these rumors were ever proven .[2] Kester said that perhaps Neal and Cannady had had a secret love affair, and that he murdered her out of anger if their relationship ended. He had no evidence for this, and such an affair was denied by the Cannady family.[2]

Jailing of Claude Neal

Before the coroner's jury had charged Neal and before much evidence had been found, lynch mobs began forming and searching for Neal.[2] Belief that Neal had killed Cannady spread further when newspapers began running stories about him a day after the crime had occurred.[2][4] Due to the lynch mobs trying to find and capture Neal, the sheriff moved him multiple times to different jails:[2] from the Bay County Jail in Panama City, to Camp Walton, then to Pensacola on the morning of October 20.[2] In Pensacola, Sheriff Herbert E. Gandy did not want to keep him in the Escambia County jail because it was not believed to be sturdy enough to withstand an attack, and a group had already recently attempted to raid the jail for Neal.[2] Neal was moved briefly to Fort Barrancas at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, before finally being moved to the poorly secured jail in Brewton, Alabama[2] In order to keep Neal's location a secret, he was booked on charges of vagrancy under the alias of John Smith.[2]

On Monday October 22, after being interrogated by Sheriff Gandy on October 20 and 21, Neal confessed that he and another black man named Herbert Smith had raped and murdered Lola Cannady. He had no defense counsel. He later made another confession and said that he had acted alone.[2]

On October 26 a small mob of people arrived in Brewton and while one group distracted the sheriff, others came to the jail where they searched the cells and captured Neal.[2] This capture of Neal was well planned and carried out, with the abductors using strategy rather than the common lynch mob approach of intimidating the police force.[2] The group traveled back to Jackson County with Neal. They reassured each other about their actions, saying that Neal did not deserve a trial because of the heinous nature of his crimes.[2] The group told the newspapers that they intended to lynch Neal; they believed their decision was justified. [2] The abductors announced that he would be lynched that night between the hours of 8 o'clock P.M. and 9 o'clock P.M.. The media openly reported in newspapers and on radios that Neal was going to be lynched.[3]

Lynching of Claude Neal

A large group formed to witness the Claude Neal lynching on the Cannady family's land; estimates of the crowds size ranged from hundreds to several thousand.[2] The leaders in the group of spectators attempted to calm the group so that they could bring Claude Neal to the property for the lynching but became apprehensive as the group became further impatient and unruly.[2] The leaders who had promised the Cannady family that they could be the first to attack Neal attempted to sneak the family away from the crowd of spectators to the place where Lola Cannady had been murdered, so that George Cannady could be the one to kill Neal.[2] The crowd was informed of the Cannady family moving and quickly caught up but when Neal was still not brought out, the group grew further frustrated.[2] It was determined by the committee of six in charge of Neal's lynching that a riot could break out if Neal was brought in front of the crowd and that he would have to be killed in private by those holding him.[2][5] The men holding Neal brought him to a spot in the woods near Peri Landing along the Chattahoochee River to lynch him.[5]

Claude Neal was tortured and subjected to castration, forced autocannibalism of his genitalia,[6][7] stabbing, burning with hot irons, the removal of his toes and fingers, and hanging before the group killed him. They tied his corpse to an automobile and drove to the Cannady property at 1 o'clock A.M.[2][3] After the body was delivered, George Cannady was upset that he had not been the one to kill Neal, and shot the body three times in the forehead.[2] The crowd further mutilated the body by kicking it, stabbing it and running over it with cars. Some children in the crowd participated by stabbing the body with sharpened sticks.[2] Out of anger towards Neal and black people in general, the crowd burned shacks in the area that were owned by blacks.[2]

Marianna Riots

The body of Claude Neal was hanged outside of the town courthouse at 3 o'clock A.M. but was discovered by Sheriff Chambliss at 6 o'clock A.M. He cut it down and buried it.[2] A mob formed outside of the courthouse with over two thousand people having arrived by noon, but they were too late to see Neal's body. Some purchased picture postcards of the corpse from photographers for fifty cents each.[2] The mob demanded that the sheriff hang Neal's body again outside the courthouse but he refused.

The whites started to riot.[3] They attacked blacks that day, October 27, 1934, injuring about 200 blacks; the mob also attacked some police trying to suppress the disorder.[2] Some white people took great risks by protecting black people during the riots, often aiding people who they worked with. The governor of Florida called out the National Guard, which managed to suppress the riots.[3]

Effects

The brutal lynching of Claude Neal generated outrage in the rest of the country. Even in Florida, there was reaction and lynching lost its previous social acceptance.[2] Neal's lynching provoked strong opposition to the practice across the nation.[2] The media gave extensive national coverage to the events.[2] By this time, Southern women had organized to oppose lynchings and were regularly speaking out about it.[2] The lynching also showed people how ineffective the policies and measures were on both the local and federal levels for preventing lynchings in the United States.[1] Many Americans became determined to bring an end to such practices throughout the country.[1]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Youngblood, Joshua (Summer 2007). ""Haven't Quite Shaken the Horror": Howard Kester, the Lynching of Claude Neal, and Social Activism in the South During the 1930s". The Florida Historical Quarterly. 86 (1): 1, 3–4. JSTOR 30150098.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 McGovern, James R. (1992). Anatomy of a Lynching /The Killing of Claude Neal (Louisiana paperback ed., 1992. ed.). Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 1–2, 16, 21, 22, 43–49, 52, 54–56, 59–60, 62, 64–66, 73–74, 78–82, 84–91, 141, 143–144. ISBN 0807117668.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Lynchings". PBS. The Documentary Institute. Retrieved 25 April 2013.
  4. ↑ "Claude Neal". Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. Retrieved 29 April 2013.
  5. 1 2 "Spectacle: The lynching of Claude Neal". Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved 27 April 2013.
  6. ↑ http://people.howstuffworks.com/cannibalism3.htm
  7. ↑ http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/spectacle-the-lynching-of-claude-neal/1197360
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