By David Kurlander
Twenty-eight voting rights protestors were arrested last week outside of the U.S. Capitol Building on the same day that Senate Republicans blocked action on the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. On this week’s Now & Then episode, “When Americans Can’t Turn Away,” Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman discussed past moments of political mobilization, including the widespread outcry that followed the 1946 blinding of Black World War II veteran Isaac Woodard by South Carolina police officers. Six years before the attack on Woodard, the Tennessee lynching of a Black NAACP voting rights worker became an early catalyzing force in the modern civil rights movement.
Brownsville, Tennessee in Summer 1940 was a 19,000-person small city with a two-thirds Black majority. The iconic singer Tina Turner was born there the previous year.
A local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), formed in 1939, was beginning to meet with city and county officials about the possibility of mounting Black voter registration drives for the upcoming November 1940 presidential election.
Elbert Williams was a 31-year-old Black man who worked in a Brownsville laundromat with his wife Annie. He also served as the Secretary of the Brownsville NAACP. He was close with the chapter’s president, Reverend Buster Walker, and its executive committee member, Elisha Davis, who owned a filling station.
The NAACP push for the vote in Brownsville led to immediate backlash by the white community. Black residents found to be involved with the group were fired from their jobs, refused credit in banks, and had their mail opened.
On June 16th, a white vigilante mob led by Brownsville Night Marshal and Sheriff-elected Tip Hunter abducted Davis from his home and took him to the banks of nearby Forked Deer River. Hunter and his co-conspirators forced Davis to give up the names of the NAACP chapter’s most influential members. Members of the mob then demanded that Davis leave Brownsville and warned him that he would be killed if he returned.
Four days after Davis’s kidnapping, on the night of June 20th, 1940, Elbert and Annie listened on the radio to Black heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis retain his crown in a title fight against Italian American Arturo Godoy. After the fight, Tip Hunter and Coca-Cola plant manager Ed Lee knocked on the door. They took Elbert to the local jail, where a 60-person mob had assembled. Annie went to the jail to investigate. The officer in charge of the jail assured Annie that Elbert was safe.
Three days later, on June 23rd, fishermen discovered Williams’s body floating in the Hatchie River. He was the first NAACP official to die in the fight for civil rights.
The national leader of the NAACP, Executive Secretary Walter White, quickly arrived in Brownsville with an investigations team and identified 13 men they believed had been in the mob, including two bank officials, several police officers, a state highway commissioner, and a few merchants. They sent their discoveries to the Department of Justice on July 1st.
On July 12th, Assistant Attorney General O. John Rogge wrote to the NAACP: “You will be glad to know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been requested to make a thorough investigation of violations of civil liberties in Brownsville, Tennessee.”
The same day, White appeared before the resolutions committee at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and recounted in detail the details of Williams’s lynching. He demanded a strong anti-lynching plank in the party platform.
Back in Brownsville, however, the white population continued to stonewall all attempts to find justice for Elbert Williams.
The Memphis Press Scimitar offered the most detailed coverage of the investigation into Williams’s death. At least one store in Brownsville stopped selling the paper to Black residents to try to limit their knowledge of the case.
Prompted by the federal investigation, Haywood County—of which Brownsville was the county seat—agreed to call a grand jury to investigate Williams’s death. But on August 12th, they released a report that—in sharp contrast to the NAACP findings—suggested there was no clear party to blame for Williams’s killing: “We the grand jury of Haywood county cannot find anyone responsible for the death of Elbert Williams, who was apparently lynched the hands of unknown parties.”
On August 29th, White appeared at an NAACP-sponsored fundraising mass at St John’s A.M.E. Church in Nashville. White singled out Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar for reproach. Beginning in January 1938, McKellar had helped lead a month-long Southern filibuster of the Wagner-Van Nuys federal anti-lynching bill, which would have provided $250 million in protective funds for Black Southerners. On January 17th, 1938, McKellar entered into the congressional record telegrams from 15 Southern governors promising that they would fight lynching on the state level and that federal legislation was unnecessary.
“The Brownsville lynching clearly shows how much faith can be placed in those pledges,” White summated. White ended his sermon with a reference to America’s impending entrance into World War II: “Dark and perilous days lie ahead of America. The tides of totalitarianism sweep ominously down upon the shores of what some orators call the last remaining democracy. We ask America if she wants the twelve million Negroes of this country to believe in their country’s honesty when it says it opposes race hatred and bigotry and dictatorship. If so, then America must wipe out the kind of Hitlerite bigotry for which the Brownsville tragedy stands.”
Shortly before White’s Nashville speech, the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier offered a similar warning to an American nation on the brink of fighting for democracy in Europe. “There is something definitely wrong about a so-called democratic government that froths at the mouth about frightfulness and terrorism abroad, yet has not a mumble of condemnation for the same sort of thing at home…There are a thousand Brownsvilles in this country where Negrophobia enslaves democracy as effectively as the Nazi enslave liberty in Europe.”
The Department of Justice stumbled ahead in its investigation with minimal local cooperation. Assistant Attorney General Rogge ultimately ordered Tennessee United States Attorney William McClanahan to protect Black voters during a registration drive in early September, but even those who had the courage to register were terrified of reprisals if they ultimately voted. The NAACP quoted one white Brownsville resident as saying, “Before this is through, the river will be full of n____s.”
By early September, at least thirty Black Brownsville families fled due to continued threats to their lives.
Local NAACP chapter president Rev. Walker left his pregnant wife and seven children in Brownsville to seek refuge from the mob. He reflected on his perilous flight to The Chicago Defender: “I went to Jackson (Tenn.) and there was a crew looking for me here. I had to leave,” Walker said. “I went to Memphis and two car loads had been there looking for me, so I had to hide until they could get me out of town.”
Annie Williams fled to relatives in Farmingdale, New York. “I’ll never set foot in Brownsville again if I can help it,” she told the New York Amsterdam News. “Elbert was good. He never did anybody any harm in his life and he’d never been in trouble. Why should they have wanted to kill him?”
Most of America’s biggest papers—alongside President Roosevelt and his Republican challenger Wendell Wilkie—ignored calls to acknowledge the lynching. A Letter to the Editor did make it into the Boston Globe in March 1941. The missive, sent by Socialist politician Alfred Baker Lewis, argued that those who supported the nascent Lend-Lease proposal to assist England’s war effort must also vocally support civil rights: “Those who vote for the Lend-Lease bill, yet support the denial of voting rights to Negroes, are as truly false friends of democracy as those who would deny aid to Britain.”
Eighteen months after Williams’s lynching, another incident underscored the depth of mob racial hatred in Brownsville. On December 12th, 1941, five days after Pearl Harbor, Black Memphis attorney A. A. Latting headed to Brownsville to try an uncontested divorce case. A mob of 300 whites gathered in front of the Haywood County Courthouse.
“Ain’t no n____ lawyer going to try a case in Haywood County, Tennessee. We ain’t goin’ to stand for it. We ran one n____ lawyer out of here and if you know what is good for you—you better git.”
According to the Chicago Defender, Latting retorted that “he had registered and might be called for military service in the United States Army to fight for the principles of ‘Liberty, Justice and Equality’ which were being denied him.” Latting ultimately agreed to leave Brownsville.
Shortly after the Latting incident, in February 1942, the Department of Justice closed the book on Elbert Williams’s lynching. No federal, state, or local charges were filed.
In 1960, Black Americans registered to vote in Brownsville in large numbers for the first time since 1884. The Cleveland Call and Post, a Black paper, poignantly reminded readers that the progress “came 20 years too late for lynched NAACP leader Elbert Williams.”
Although the blinding of Isaac Woodard six years later would bring more of white America into the struggle for Black equality, the response to Elbert Williams’s lynching—in its cruel parallelism to the fight against Fascism overseas—showed the rumblings of the mass mobilization for justice that was to come.
For more on Elbert Williams and Brownsville, read Heather Catherwood’s excellent 2012 Northeastern School of Law paper “In the Absence of Governmental Protection: The Struggle of the Brownsville NAACP to Secure the Right to Vote.” And check out lawyer Jim Emison’s online portal on the Williams lynching.
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