Lynching legacy still affects SC. Greenville honors victims by telling their stories

Robert Williams, 1881. Ira Johnson, 1895. Tom Keith, 1899. George Green, 1933.

They are the four men whose deaths were confirmed to have been caused by lynching in Greenville County. The Community Remembrance Project of Greenville County wants people to remember them, to look straight into the violence because by acknowledging the past, healing can begin.

The group held a virtual meeting Tuesday night to remember Keith and to hold a community-wide discussion on justice and the justice system.

Greenville actor Jeremiah Dew portrayed Keith in a video shown Tuesday night. Keith was a hand on the Travelers Rest farm of J.B. Hawkins Jr. The Roe Ford Road farm is across from present-day Furman University.

“I was the old and trusted farmhand,” Dew, portraying Keith, said in the video.

Keith had too much to drink one summer night, and the next thing he knew, the farmer was hitting him with a gun to wake him up.

The farmer had found Keith in a bedroom with the farmer’s son and daughter.

“It was an accident,” Dew said.

The farmer told him to get off his land, and he did. He knew what sort of harm could come to him, but he couldn’t outrun trouble. A mob of white men tracked him, tied him to a tree and shot him, over and over. They dumped his body in the Saluda River.

Keith was the second of the four men to be highlighted in community meetings. The first was Green, a tenant farmer who after the harvest was told by C.F. James, the landowner, to get off his Taylors property, which is now the site of the First Baptist Church in Taylors.

By rights, Green had until the end of the year to leave. James called on the Ku Klux Klan to handle matters. A group of at least 12 broke into Green’s house while he and his wife were in bed. The result was a bloodbath, his great-granddaughter Maxine Moragne said in a recent interview with The State.

She was told the story as a young child. Her grandfather said there was so much blood, his shoes stuck to the floor. Green’s wife fainted; the assailants thought she was dead. But she survived to testify in court. Each defendant was acquitted.

Green’s commemoration and community education event was in November 2019, a few months after the Community Remembrance Project was started. The soil collection ceremony was last November on the grounds of the First Baptist Church in Taylors.

Traci Barr, the co-chair for Community Remembrance Project events, said Keith’s soil collection is tentatively set for June.

Williams and Johnson will have commemorations of their own. Johnson, accused of killing a white man, was dragged from a cell and hanged in San Souci. Williams, accused of assaulting a white woman, was taken from jail and hanged near Pelzer.

Moragne said there were probably many more lynchings in Greenville County, but they cannot be confirmed with public records.

The soil from each of the lynching sites will be included in a memorial at the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Community Remembrance Project has raised $16,265 of its $66,500 goal needed to also have an exhibit in Greenville. Once the four men are honored, the group will bring Greenville County’s memorial stone at the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice to Greenville.

Historian D.J. Polite told the group Tuesday that justice cannot be built on top of the injustice of the past, especially a past that includes lynching.

Lynching was built on the idea that white men had to protect white women from Black men who they considered beasts, he said. It also served to show who had the power.

Polite said such injustice flowed through generations. In areas where lynching was prevalent, voter registration today is lower. Without fundamental changes, it will continue for years to come.

“The nation will falter when you have a shackled leg behind your back,” Polite said. “Everyone fails. Too many people would rather fail than see everyone succeed.”

He asked what a jury of one’s peers looks like for a Black man. Is it an all-Black jury, he said, and added he doubted that would happen.

Another concern he has is for the mental health of Black children. Not only do parents have to have “the talk” about how to respond to police. They also have to talk to their sons about the fact that they are feared by whites, Polite said.

“Society is resegregating, regressing,” he said. The civil rights gains of the 1960s were like whites saying “you can be in my presence,” not true equity.

“It’s disrespectful,” he said.

This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 11:50 AM.