I've written quite a bit about lynchings in Missouri, including a book called Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri https://amzn.to/3X9dZrd. There are still quite a few lynchings that occurred in the state, however, that I have never previously written about. One is the lynching of a black man named Will Sherrod in 1927 at the small community of Braggadocio in Pemiscot County (in the bootheel). As was common when African-Americans were lynched in the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the cause of the mob action was an alleged attack on a white woman.
On Saturday night, May 21, 1927, a black man entered the home of 31-year-old widow Mary Ella Hendershot in Braggadocio and, according to the Caruthersville Democrat-Argus, "subdued her by threats of death and by clubbing her with a revolver he carried." He "forced her to submit to his evil desires," allegedly raping her repeatedly over the next three or four hours in the presence of her two young children. The assailant reportedly threatened the oldest child, a 7-year-old boy, with death if he tried to notify neighbors or otherwise go for help. At one point he supposedly knocked the boy across the room when the lad tried to come to his mother's aid. At some point during the man's attack on the woman, she bit him on the arm, leaving an imprint of her teeth, a clue that was later used to help identify the assailant.
After her ordeal was over, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Mrs. Hendershot notified local constable Aubrey Dye of the attack and described her assailant. Based on her description, Dye suspected that the rapist was Will Sherrod, a black man in his early thirties who was already in custody, having been arrested just a short time earlier for breaking into the home of another Braggadocio resident, R. D. Kersey, and firing shots at the man early Saturday night, before the attack on Ella Hendershot. The teeth mark on Sherrod's arm seemed to confirm the constable's suspicion, and, when the suspect was taken before a local justice of the peace for the Kersey crime, he supposedly admitted the criminal assault on the woman as well.
While still at the justice of the peace's house, Sherrod tried to escape. Dye gave chase and shot the fleeing man twice, inflicting a dangerous wound that entered his shoulder and penetrated into the chest. The wounded prisoner was then forwarded to the Pemiscot County Jail at Caruthersville early Sunday morning.
In response to rumors of mob action, Sheriff J. Ham Smith considered moving Sherrod to jail in a neighboring county, but a doctor who examined the prisoner said his condition was too serious for him to be moved. Late Sunday night, May 22, the rumored mob from Braggadocio showed up at the Caruthersville jail, and some of its leaders went to the door and called for the sheriff. The men were so orderly and quiet that the sheriff didn't suspect anything amiss, but when he opened the door, the men promptly got the drop on him and forced him to surrender the keys. I
After gaining possession of the prisoner, the vigilantes, numbering about 100, loaded him into a car, and drove in a procession back to Braggadocio, the scene of the crime, where Mrs. Hendershot readily identified him as her attacker. Sherrod was then hanged from a crude scaffold that had already been erected for that purpose. While he was hanging, several shots were fired into his body, and it was left hanging all night and into the next day.
As was the case in most lynchings during the late 1800s and early 1900s, little effort was made to bring the mob to justice. The sheriff, for instance, said that most of the vigilantes wore masks and that he didn't recognize any of the ones who didn't. And no one else came forward to identify any of the mob.
2 comments:
This hanging is part of our ugly history. I'm ashamed of it and horrified by it, as everyone should be. I recall small incidents of racism in Bloomfield, where I was raised, but nothing violent. If such occurred, my mother kept it from us, or the majority of town did. We had that sundown law which itself was so hideous, another shame. It's difficult now even to express grief over these acts, because the grief seems a kind of appropriation of the black experience. Feel it but don't talk about it.
I agree, Rose Marie. We had no racial violence in the small Missouri town where I grew up either, because we had no blacks who lived there or even stopped while passing through on the highway, as far as I ever knew, but there was a lot of racism just in the way people talked and so forth.
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