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