The mob was eventually able to gain entrance into the jail, where they abducted Neal Gillespie, his son John Gillespie, and Jack Dillingham following them roughing up and “interrogating” the six suspects (Wood). Following the abduction, the three men “were marched toward Spencer, but a halt was made at Henderson’s ball grounds in the edge of the town. There the negroes were given time to confess the crime. They refused either to deny or confess, and were so thoroughly frightened as almost to have lost the power of speech. John Gillespie wept piteously and begged for his life” (The Chicago Daily Tribune).
Particularly horrific is the manner in which Neal Gillespie, John Gillespie, and Jack Dillingham were murdered that night. The process is …show more content…
However, because Hall was only prosecuted, mixed signals were sent about the stance on lynchings. Claude A. Clegg III writes, “It simultaneously signaled that lynchings were becoming unacceptable expressions of extralegal retribution and confirmed that local and state authorities were limited in their willingness to pursue lynch mobs.” Hall’s prosecution brought to light a union of political and cultural trends that had distinguished southern history since the slave emancipation in 1865. As a social phenomenon, lynching had gradually developed to become white-on-black crime, a way of “dramatizing the racial boundaries that protected white privilege and domination from black encroachment” (Clegg). Mob murders of African-Americans served two main purposes: one, to strike fear into black communities and subject them to white supremacy, and two, to punish them for supposed violations against the communal norms determined by the white people. The mob violence culture, in both North Carolina and throughout the southern United States, aided politicians, yellow journalists (writers of journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration) and overbearing executives in keeping federal officials from discovering that African Americans were “being removed en masse from voter rolls” (Clegg). Clegg goes on to explain that lynching was so appealing to white voters and workers because of their anxieties about “their own place in a social order facing the vagaries of modernity.” This means that lynching was simply a vehicle used to help old-fashioned, backwards-minded white people preserve the past in the only way they knew
Particularly horrific is the manner in which Neal Gillespie, John Gillespie, and Jack Dillingham were murdered that night. The process is …show more content…
However, because Hall was only prosecuted, mixed signals were sent about the stance on lynchings. Claude A. Clegg III writes, “It simultaneously signaled that lynchings were becoming unacceptable expressions of extralegal retribution and confirmed that local and state authorities were limited in their willingness to pursue lynch mobs.” Hall’s prosecution brought to light a union of political and cultural trends that had distinguished southern history since the slave emancipation in 1865. As a social phenomenon, lynching had gradually developed to become white-on-black crime, a way of “dramatizing the racial boundaries that protected white privilege and domination from black encroachment” (Clegg). Mob murders of African-Americans served two main purposes: one, to strike fear into black communities and subject them to white supremacy, and two, to punish them for supposed violations against the communal norms determined by the white people. The mob violence culture, in both North Carolina and throughout the southern United States, aided politicians, yellow journalists (writers of journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration) and overbearing executives in keeping federal officials from discovering that African Americans were “being removed en masse from voter rolls” (Clegg). Clegg goes on to explain that lynching was so appealing to white voters and workers because of their anxieties about “their own place in a social order facing the vagaries of modernity.” This means that lynching was simply a vehicle used to help old-fashioned, backwards-minded white people preserve the past in the only way they knew