Lynching of Ephraim Grizzard

Lynching of Ephraim Grizzard
Location Woodland Street Bridge, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.
Date April 30, 1892
Attack type
 Lynching

Ephraim Grizzard was an African-American man who was lynched on April 30, 1892, in front of a white crowd of 10,000 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was hanged from the Woodland Street Bridge and shot hundreds of times by the mob. His memory was honored in June 2017 with a church service at Fisk University and a plaque dedicated at St. Anselm's Episcopal Church in Nashville.

Lynching

Mollie and Rosina Bruce, two daughters of the white Bruce family in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, were reported as having been assaulted by African-American men on April 27, 1892.[1][2][3] They were the daughters of the late Lee Bruce, a veteran of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.[4] The Bruce daughters lived in Goodlettsville with their mother.[4]

Henry Grizzard was caught first and reportedly confessed, implicating another man named Mack Harper. Grizzard was quickly hanged by a mob at 10 AM on April 28, 1892 near Goodlettsville.[3][5][6] His brothers John and Ephraim Grizzard were arrested and jailed as suspects in Nashville, the county seat of Davidson County. Mack Harper and Manuel Jones were also arrested, but John Grizzard and Jones were soon released for lack of evidence. The two Bruce girls did not make a positive identification of Grizzard and Harper as their assailants.[1]

At 10 p.m. on April 29, 1892, a mob of 300 white men from Goodlettsville went to the Nashville jail to try to take Ephraim Grizzard from jail for lynching.[1][2] Governor John P. Buchanan and Adjutant General Norman went to the jail a little before 2 a.m.[2] A shooting occurred at 2:25 a.m.; the mob fired gunshots from outside and the police shot back from inside the building.[2] Two white men, Charles Rear and N.D. Guthrie, were mortally wounded and died.[1][2][7] At 2:45 a.m., Governor Buchanan asked the mob to let Grizzard be tried in a court of law.[2] The mob dispersed shortly before 5 a.m.[1][2]

At 2 p.m. on April 30, 1892, a mob of 6,000 men from 20 towns gathered in Nashville.[7] A "wealthy merchant" from Goodlettsville gave a speech in front of the crowd, which had grown to 10,000.[7] The mob returned to the Nashville jail, where they took Grizzard out of his cell.[1][2] He was "dragged through the streets in broad daylight",[8] and taken to the east side of the Woodland Street Bridge over the Cumberland River (near the modern-day Nissan Stadium). Grizzard was hanged and shot to death, riddled with bullets.[1] He was shot 200 times.[7] His corpse was taken back to Goodlettsville, shown to the Bruce family, and burned.[7]

A fund was set up for the Bruce family by The Daily American on May 1, 1892.[4] One of the donors was Edmund William Cole, the president of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway.[4]

Civil rights activist Ida B. Wells investigated the lynching. She found that Grizzard had allegedly visited one of the Bruce women; she said he was punished for this suggestion of an interracial relationship. At the same time, a white man was in jail for the rape of an eight-year-old black girl, but the mob left him alone.[9] She described Grizzard's murder as "A naked, bloody example of the blood-thirstiness of the nineteenth century civilization of the Athens of the South."[8] She added, "No cannon nor military were called out in his defence."[8]

On May 2, 1892, blacks in Triune were reported as killing at least three whites in retaliation for the Grizzard lynching.[7]

Legacy

In June 2017, the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee Task Force on Anti-Racism and Lipscomb University's Christian Scholars' Conference organized a service, held in honor of the 1892 lynching victim Ephraim Grizzard, at the Fisk University Memorial Chapel.[10]

It was followed by the dedication of a plaque in his memory in the St. Anselm's Episcopal Church in Nashville. This historic plaque also honors the memory of two other lynching victims: his brother Henry Grizzard and Samuel Smith of Nolensville, Tennessee.[10] The Grizzard brothers and Smith were three of the six blacks documented as lynched in Davidson County in the post-Reconstruction period.[11]

(According to Natasha Deane, who researched the article for St. Anselm's website on the history of the lynchings and memorial marker, issues of the Nashville Banner from the days immediately following the report of Grizzard's lynching are missing from the archive at the Nashville Public Library.[12])

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Grizzard Lynched At Last. After Being Twice Repulsed the Mob Returns to the Nashville Jail, Drags Out the Negro, Takes Him to the Bridge in the Middle of the City, Hangs Him and Riddles the Body with Bullets". The Indianapolis Journal. May 1, 1892. p. 4. Retrieved April 26, 2018 – via Newspapers.com. (Registration required (help)).
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Finally Successful. An Attempt to Lynch Negroes At Nashville, Tenn., Successfully Resisted. The Government Takes Charge of the Jail Forces--One of the Lynchers Killed. Another Attempt Proves Successful, and the Negro Is Hanged. Crimes". The Courier. Waterloo, Iowa. May 2, 1892. p. 2. Retrieved April 27, 2018 – via Newspapers.com. (Registration required (help)).
  3. 1 2 "Hanged Only One. Avenging Tennesseans Growing Charitable Towards Their Colored Fellow-Citizens". The Indianapolis Journal. April 29, 1892. p. 1. Retrieved June 4, 2018 – via Newspapers.com. (Registration required (help)).
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Vengeance. Eph Grizzard Has Followed His Brother Henry. Taken from the Jail and Hanged Off the Bridge. The Mob Reopens Operations in Broad Daylight. And They Meet Practically No Resistance. Excitement Rules for Awhile and a Calm Follows. Details of the Awful Doings Yesterday. Further Notes from Friday Night--Chas. Rear and Guthrie Are Not Dead--No Further Trouble Expected". The Daily American. Nashville, Tennessee. May 1, 1892. Retrieved June 5, 2018 – via Newspapers.com. (Registration required (help)).
  5. ↑ "Two of the Rioters Shot. Details of the First Attempt to Lynch the Prisoner". The Indianapolis Journal. May 1, 1892. p. 4. Retrieved April 26, 2018 – via Newspapers.com. (Registration required (help)).
  6. ↑ "By a Rope. A Negro Ex-Convict Hanged by Judge Lynch. Henry Grizzard Committed the Unpardonable Crime. His Outrageous Assault Upon Defenseless Women. Another Negro Guilty But Not Fully Identified. Four Arrested on Suspicion and Now in the Jail. A Posse of Citizen Take the Law in Their Own Hands and Mete Out Justice". The Daily American. Nashville, Tennessee. April 29, 1892. p. 1. Retrieved June 5, 2018 – via Newspapers.com. (Registration required (help)).
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "The Mob Had Its Way. Ephraim Grizzard Taken from Jail at Nashville and Lynched". The Richmond Item. Richmond, Virginia. May 2, 1892. p. 2. Retrieved April 27, 2018 – via Newspapers.com. (Registration required (help)).
  8. 1 2 3 Wells, Ida Bell (1892). "United States atrocities: lynch law". LSE Selected Pamphlets: 7. JSTOR 60222131.
  9. ↑ Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape & Race in the Nineteenth-century South, Univ of North Carolina Press, 2004, p. 253
  10. 1 2 Scheu, Katherine (June 7, 2017). "Nashville's Episcopal Church remembers 1892 lynchings in city". The Tennessean. Retrieved April 26, 2018.
  11. ↑ Lynching in America/Summary by County (3rd edition), p. 9, Equal Justice Initiative, 2017, Montgomery, Alabama
  12. ↑ Deane, Natasha (June 5, 2017). "Memorial Marker for Lynching Victims". St Anselm Episcopal Church. Retrieved April 27, 2018.
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