18/52 - Sliding Doors - 4 - The Aftermath
As I mentioned in the original Sliding Doors post, I became interested in the intersecting lives of Eugene Daniel and Gertrude Stone after discovering they were each buried in separate church cemeteries about 10 miles from here. Other posts in the series:
Sliding Doors - 1 - A Walk Through Two Cemeteries
Sliding Doors - 2 - Prologue
Sliding Doors – 3 – When Worlds Collide
[Note: In researching this story, I was lucky to come upon Morgan Vickers' compelling honors thesis for the UNC Department of American Studies, The Legacy of a Lynching: Community and Familial Adaptation in the Wake of Racial Trauma (https://doi.org/10.17615/py92-5d12). Read their paper—it will be worth your time. ANY QUOTES IN THE TEXT THAT FOLLOWS ARE FROM THAT PAPER.]
So, as Paul Harvey might ask, “What’s the rest of the story?”
In the immediate aftermath of the lynching, local papers covered the immediate story, often getting Eugene’s name wrong and usually couching the story in the context of community “frustrations” about rising crime. Per the Hickory Daily Record, "Several violent crimes committed recently in this county are thought to be responsible for the lynching, much indignation having been expressed by the residents." Morgan's thesis contains a particularly rich set of links to primary sources reporting on the lynching.
“Chatham Mob Lynches Negro with Tire Chain.”
“Negro is Lynched by Mob At Pittsboro Early on Sunday – Colored Youth Discovered in Home of New Hope Farmer While Husband is Away”
“Negro Lynched by Mob Near Pittsboro Yesterday”
After the immediate first round of stories, everyone stopped talking about the events of late September 1921. Within a month, there were no further articles about the lynching. The County Coroner and a jury found no one responsible, even though a mob of 50 had committed the crime and a thousand people had convened on a Sunday morning to witness the result, most likely many of them on the way to church. Like many lynchings, everyone knew who did it, and no one was ever held accountable. And the community officially pretended that nothing unusual had happened.
So, what am I -- what are we -- to make of this a century later?
As I realized when writing Immigrant Secrets, trauma leaves a long tail. And it is not just personal, but collective. I'll leave it to others to debate whether it is genetically carried or not. But I do think trauma is inherited and passed from generation to generation.
The trauma of the history of lynching upon the African-American community is one that I cannot even begin to understand. It was one of the reasons for the massive migration north of African Americans in the mid-1900s. “The Talk” that is given to young boys has many roots, and the collective trauma of more than 4,000 lynchings is a very significant one.
Our failure to reckon with our past makes us blind to the long tail of racial trauma. Many Confederate statues were purposefully created in parallel at the same time as the Eugene Daniel lynching as yet another reminder (in case the victims missed the point) of who was really in power. This hubris in willfully denying this leads us to make past sins worse by imagining that the descendants of those who perpetuated the trauma are better equipped to define it – and determine when it should be “over” -- than are the victims.
At the micro level of the two families involved, their futures evolved in a way one couldn’t have imagined in 1921. Reading between the lines, it seems, as is often the case, that the victims exhibited far more grace and courage than the perpetrators.
First, the Stone family:
Despite the fact that Gertrude received no injury when Daniel reportedly entered her room, she was “considerably upset” and dealt with “extreme fright and nervousness” following the lynching….Such nerves and anxiety may have contributed to the fact that Gertrude left school early, lived at home with her parents nearly a decade following the accusation and lynching, and was not married at an age where most of her peers were already wed…. In 1933, she married Andrew Jackson Mills, a farmer from William Township, the township directly north of New Hope Township. Despite being married for over thirty years, Gertrude and Andrew never had any children… Like Gertrude, Ernest Stone [Gertrude’s brother] lived the majority of his life in and around New Hope Township as a farmer until he passed away in 1968 due to heart failure. Also like Gertrude, he married but did not have any children. [Vickers]
The story of the Daniel family is very different. Their history in the wake of the lynching is a long and prolific one; the nine surviving Daniel children leave an incredible legacy, one that says something about overcoming trauma. It doesn’t make it go away, but it demonstrates how victims survive:
Eugene’s descendants lived lives not only dissimilar from that which he was deprived of, but far from what he might have experienced had he lived: educated, white-collar, urban dwelling, long, and durable…. In 1920, most of the children in the Daniel family knew how to read and write but did not attend school at that point in time, as education was not an accessible reality for young African Americans in New Hope Township prior to the lynching. But, education quickly came to take over the lives of the Daniel descendants in the years that followed. [Vickers]
The life of Eugene’s older brother John T. – who was 19 years old at the time of the lynching and must have been particularly impacted by it – is a good example:
John T. was more than committed to the educational system. He attended local public schools for his primary education, graduated from the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, and then went on to receive his Bachelor of Science and his Doctor of Medicine degree from Howard University. He was also the first African American to serve as the President of the Board of Medical Examiners.181 Likewise, his son, John T. Jr. served more than 30 years as the principal for the Pender County Training School in Rocky Point, North Carolina, founded the Southeastern School Masters Club, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Teachers Association. [Vickers]
Lastly, one of the central conclusions in Morgan’s thesis rings so true to my records, archives, and family history friends and underscores the challenges we all currently face in preserving "born digital" information for the future:
It is only through the pairing of historic records and modern digital tools that historians can fully excavate lost communities as they were geographically, demographically, and socially. Traditional research methods allow historians to perform primary source, archival and oral history research that serves as the backbone of any historic project; but modern tools, including digital mapping software, global positioning devices, and digital archives allow modern researchers to gain a fuller, more interactive picture that would otherwise be missed by searching only in two dimensions. [Vickers]
I grew up loving To Kill a Mockingbird. There are many parallels to the story of Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson and that of Gertrude Stone and Eugene Daniel.
But one person is missing in the real-life version of this story. There was no Atticus to hold up a mirror to the sins of the guilty. This kind of silence was far more prevalent in most communities than the Harper Lee version.
On the cusp of the centennial of Eugene's lynching, Chatham County finally got around to recognizing the sin that had been perpetrated upon the Daniel family and on five other lynching victims in Chatham County.
It's just the beginning of the reckoning that needs to be made.
