HARRY THEMAL

Harry Themal: New Castle County’s gruesome 1903 lynching by fire

Harry Themal

Sunday is the birthday anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., observed the next day as a federal holiday that honors the minister who spoke for nonviolent activism in the civil rights movement.

It is appropriate to the need for his message of peace by recalling the most violent and stomach-turning murder of an African-American, which occurred not in the Deep South, but in northern New Castle County.

That lynching, along with 4,000 others, will be remembered in a Memorial to Peace and Justice, planned for Montgomery, Alabama, and recently detailed in a Washington Post article printed in the News Journal.

As Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said on a PBS interview, “We don’t have an interest in punishing America for this history, but we don’t believe we can be free until we acknowledge this history.”

With that in mind, here’s a warning, if you don’t want to be reminded of an ugly day in Delaware life, do not read any further.

The multiple headlines in the June 23, 1903, Every Evening, summed up the gruesome New Castle County lynching:
“THE NEGRO BURNED AT THE STAKE/George White, colored, Taken from the Workhouse and Killed/AT 1:30 THIS MORNING/After He Had Confessed to Assaulting Miss Bishop/5,000 PEOPLE AT THE WORKHOUSE/Heavy Doors Battered Down With Railroad Ties/BOY SHOT AND SERIOUSLY HURT.”

George White had been arrested after the June 15, fatal stabbing of Helen Bishop, the daughter of the minister who was superintendent of Ferris School on Center Road.

Helping to agitate a lynch mob was a minister, the Rev. Robert Elwood, who showed his Wilmington congregation bloodstains from the site of the girls’ fatal assault and asked for swift justice.

As night fell, thousands stormed the prison where White was being protected, while the warden, prison guards and Wilmington police tried to stop the frenzied mob, firing shots and turning on high-pressured water hoses. In the melee a 15-year-old boy was fatally shot. The would-be lynchers forced their way through steel doors into White’s prison cell, took him to a field near the scene of the crime, lit a pyre of straw and fence posts smashed into kindling, coiled ropes around the man and threw him into the fire.

White twice freed himself only to be thrown back into the flames as thousands of all ages watched and some cheered. The New York Sun wrote, “By dawn a few pale bones were all that remained of the black man. Vendors hawked them in the streets of Wilmington as souvenirs.” The Every Evening reported on people taking pieces of wood, clothing and even the body from the pyre.

The gruesome murder made worldwide news. A minister’s letter to the New York Times called Delaware “a community corrupted in civic ideals and void in civic and moral virility.” Whatever that means.

In response, E. F. Bross, who identified himself as editor of the New Castle News, wrote the Times that a majority of Delawareans were good folk but that “womanhood will be protected in future as long as good red blood flows in the veins of men, and law will be respected in Delaware as elsewhere, except in those rare emergencies when the mad flood-tide of human passion submerged reason for the moment.”

When Pres. Teddy Roosevelt learned of the Delaware lynching, he said, “Whoever in any part of our country has taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by fire must forever have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.” Hundreds of congressional bills over the years to outlaw lynching never passed.

A cartoon in the Literary Digest, noting that deadly pogroms against Jews in Russia had occurred less than two months earlier, showed a tearful Czar Nicholas II rejecting a petition from B’nai B’rith saying, “Excuse me. I’m busy weeping over this Delaware affair.”

Harry Themal has written a News Journal column since 1989.