On 6/24/07, Juretta Heckscher wrote:
>  Lynchings were a primitive form of community "justice" that took the law into its
own hands.  They did indeed have the support of a large segment of the
white community wherever they took place.  As Anita has suggested,
those who found them horrific were nevertheless cowed into silence
(after all, might they have been next?).   Why would a local sheriff,
for example, risk his job and perhaps his own life to stop a lynching,
even if he opposed it? <

Some white people opposed lynching. My grandmother and her cousins
told the story of their grandfather, Methodist minister Francis Asbury
Hewitt (1828-1907) of Jefferson County, Alabama: "Grandpa Hewitt was a
clerk in a hardware store (in Warrior, I think) when a lynch mob
formed and was ready to hang a man. They did not have a rope, so they
roared into the hardware store to get one. Grandpa Hewitt announced
that there were to be no rope sales that day. They said they were
going to take the rope anyway. Grandpa Hewitt straddled the rope and
with good words and a little help from a sawed-off shotgun,
discouraged them to the point that they left without the rope and the
man was not hanged."

Another story went: "Grandpa Hewitt was of a strong and independent
character. He was asked to preach the funeral of a man of whom very
little good could be said. Grandpa Hewitt rose to speak. 'I was not
well acquainted with the deceased, but I understand he was a good
husband and kind father at such times as he was sober.' This being the
total sermon. Some did not think too well of his brevity. He said that
was about all he could say and stay within the bounds of truth."

In the 1920s this same grandmother discovered a trunk full of Ku Klux
Klan robes in the garage of a house she owned and rented out (this was
way before the days of tenants' privacy rights). She dragged the trunk
into the middle of the unpaved street and made a very public bonfire
in front of the renters' house, saying that no tenant of hers was
going to support the Klan. That was about the last known Klan
appearance in Alvin, Texas.

Kathleen
The Book Doctor