On the morning of May 15, 1916, approximately 15,000 people gathered near Waco, Texas to witness the trial and lynching of Jesse Washington, an eighteen-year-old black man charged with the bludgeoning death of Lucy Fryer. The brutal murder of Washington provided the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with an opportunity to place lynching at the forefront of public consciousness, and thereby solicit support for its national anti-lynching campaign.

The body of Fryer, a fifty-three-year-old white woman, was found by her children on the family’s property in Robinson, seven miles southeast of Waco. Jesse Washington, a laborer on Fryer’s farm, was arrested and charged with Fryer’s death. Tensions ran high in the town. When A. T. Smith, the black managing editor of Paul Quinn Weekly, reprinted a Chicago Defender article that proclaimed Fryer’s husband George murdered his wife, Smith was arrested, convicted of libel, and sentenced to one year of hard labor on the local road gang.

#Lynch
#I CANT BREATHE
#RacialGgaps

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/washington-jessie-1897-1916/