Phoenix Election riot

The Phoenix Election riot beginning on November 8, 1898 was a riot and mass lynching by white South Carolinians in the name of Redemption in Greenwood County, South Carolina. Over a dozen prominent black leaders were murdered and hundreds were injured by a white mob.

This election cycle was the first since the 1895 Constitution of South Carolina disenfranchised black voters. The small town of Phoenix was the home of the land-owning white Tolbert family. Its patriarch John R. Tolbert had risen to Colonel in the Confederate Army, but held to liberal principles, voted Republican, and encouraged the local black population to assert their rights.[1] The state legislature had closed all Phoenix polls in 1868 to block the Tolbert's influence.

On election night 1898 an altercation at a Tolbert-owned store, a white Democratic partisan named J.I. Etheridge was shot and killed. This triggered four days of violence directed mainly at the black population. Three hundred heavily armed men gathered.[2] An estimated twelve African-Americans were fatally shot or hung, through the 13th, when an elderly woman named Eliza Cooke was shot and killed. Whites who refused to join were also threatened.[3] On the 9th the white mob on horseback encountered a four-year-old Benjamin Mays and his father, a moment that Mays "never forgot".[4]

U.S. Senator Benjamin Tillman spoke in the area a year later, and was quoted as saying, "If you want to uproot the snake [of black voting] and kill it, go and kill the Tolberts." [5]

References

  1. Voices of Black South Carolina: Legend & Legacy, by Damon L. Fordham, The History Press, 2009, page 124
  2. New York Times, November 11, 1898
  3. "A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881-1940, by Terence Finnegan", collected in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, edited by William Fitzhugh Brundage, UNC Press Books, 1997, pages 210-213
  4. Voices of Black South Carolina: Legend & Legacy, by Damon L. Fordham, The History Press, 2009, page 125-26
  5. Voices of Black South Carolina: Legend & Legacy, by Damon L. Fordham, The History Press, 2009, page 125


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, March 16, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.