TAMPA — One hundred years ago, 10 cents worth of apples led to a family’s tragedy that was covered in newspapers throughout the nation and the world.
A Black man in Norlina, North Carolina, demanded better apples than the rotten batch he was sold. The white store clerk refused. An argument ensued. Days later, the customer, Plummer Bullock, was lynched.
His brother, Matthew Bullock, escaped the mob to Canada, setting up an internationally covered extradition battle.
In present-day Hillsborough County, photographer Octavio Jones, whose maternal grandfather was a cousin to the Bullock brothers, wants the story to be known.
Jones, 44, is looking forward to North Carolina’s Warren County NAACP fulfilling a promise, possibly within a year or two, to erect a lynching memorial dedicated to his murdered cousin and another victim. He will attend the unveiling.
“I don’t want them to be forgotten,” said Jones, a former Tampa Bay Times photographer who freelances for other publications. “They were persecuted, it was prejudice, it was wrong.”
![Octavio Jones is related to lynching victim Plummer Bullock through his maternal grandfather.](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"%20viewBox="0%200%205760%203732"/%3E "Octavio Jones is related to lynching victim Plummer Bullock through his maternal grandfather.")
Jones was unaware of the family story until he was a teenager. He moved from his “crime-riddled" native Washington, D.C., to live with his grandmother, Emma Boyd, in “safer Norlina,” he said.
“I also wanted to get to know her better,” Jones said. “I’d ask my grandmother questions about our family."
One day, Jones recalled, his grandmother mentioned she was once a cook in the White House.
On another occasion, his grandmother was watching a 60 Minutes episode about lynchings, he said, "when she looked at me and said, ‘That happened to your grandfather Marcellus’ cousin, too.' I was listening to music, so I took off my headphones and asked for the whole story. I couldn’t believe it. It was because of apples.”
The anger Norlina’s white community felt for the Bullock family 100 years ago stemmed from something deeper than apples, said Glenn Hinson, an associate professor of folklore and anthropology at University of North Carolina. He includes the lynching in his curriculum.
“They were jealous,” he said.
Back then, Warren was among the “poorest counties in a poor state,” wrote John C. Weaver in 1996 in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal story “Black Man, White Justice” about the lynching.
But the Bullock family, Hinson said, was well off in comparison. “The father was a respected reverend. He owned land. He hired workers. I suspect a lot of poor whites found that problematic.”
![This hardware store in Norlina, North Carolina, was previously a grocery where, in 1921, an argument over 10 cents worth of apples led to two Black men being lynched.](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"%20viewBox="0%200%204895%203268"/%3E "This hardware store in Norlina, North Carolina, was previously a grocery where, in 1921, an argument over 10 cents worth of apples led to two Black men being lynched.")
In January 1921, 19-year-old Plummer Bullock purchased the apples. The clerk, 16-year-old Rabey Traylor, tried to sell him rotten fruit rather than what was picked out, Hinson said.
“Traylor sought to humiliate young Bullock, to show him which race ordained the minutiae of life in a bitter, petty world,” Weaver wrote.
As the argument between Plummer Bullock and the clerk escalated, other white townspeople gathered around, Hinson said. Plummer Bullock’s friend, Alfred Williams, “realized this was not going to end well, so convinced him to leave. But it did not end there.”
A few days later, groups of white and Black men engaged in a gun battle near the train depot. Five white men and three Black men were wounded. Newspaper reports give varying accounts of the incident.
Some wrote that Plummer Bullock and Williams gathered more than a dozen Black men — including 21-year-old Matthew Bullock — with the intent to kill the Traylor family, but were intercepted by the armed white mob.
Others reported that neither of the brothers was at the gunfight — Plummer had already been placed in a cell for protection from a lynching mob and Matthew was miles away.
None of those versions are “what we think actually happened,” Hinson said. His research, which includes oral histories passed down from those residing in the town at the time, concludes that the white mob was traveling to Norlina’s Black neighborhood “to shoot it up."
The Bullock brothers gathered men to protect their community and intercepted the mob.
The police and press put full blame for the gunfight on Black residents and arrested them.
“They sacrificed their freedom,” said Jones, who has shopped at the hardware store that used to be the Traylor family’s grocery.
He wonders, had his cousins and the others not armed themselves and stopped the white mob, how many residents of the Black neighborhood would have died that day.
“My friends who are descendants of the residents of that Black area might not be here today if not for those men," Jones said.
Hinson also learned the details of the lynching: A masked, armed mob of 150 men later took Plummer Bullock and Williams from the jail and brought them to the woods.
“They gave them two choices: run or pray,” he said. Plummer Bullock ran. Williams prayed. They were both shot to death.
Matthew Bullock escaped town to Hamilton in Ontario, Canada.
“A melodramatic tale has him boarding a ferry with gospel singers who crossed the Niagara River at Fort Erie,” Weaver wrote.
By January 1922, word of his whereabouts reached Norlina. The police chief there successfully lobbied his Hamilton counterpart to arrest Matthew Bullock, who was wanted in Norlina on charges of inciting a riot and intent to murder.
The Canadian government refused to extradite him without a trial on their soil because Matthew Bullock said he would be lynched in North Carolina without the opportunity to stand before a judge.
Canada requested that Norlina send witnesses to testify on the authenticity of the charges. The North Carolina governor refused.
“I am not going to try North Carolina’s honor and integrity before any judge in any foreign country,” Gov. Cameron Morrison said. “North Carolina is not on trial.”
But, in a way, it was, Hinson said. Canada portrayed it as a legal issue, but it was about race “if you look closely at the coverage.”
One of the most circulated quotes in Canadian and U.S. newspapers, he said, was the North Carolina governor defending lynchings.
“People in some sections of the country do not seem to understand that so-called lynchings in the South are nothing more than the killing of a criminal by friends and frequently outraged relatives of the victim of the prisoner’s crime,” the governor told reporters.
Matthew Bullock was released from jail in February 1922 and allowed to remain in Canada.
A month later, the Ku Klux Klan threatened to kidnap and forcefully return him to North Carolina. He was rumored to have fled to England. Hinson thinks that was a ruse and that he stayed in Canada, evidenced by the ease with which he continued to visit family in the United States.
“For years thereafter at Christmas,” Hinson said, “Matthew Bullock would show up incognito at his parents' home in Washington, D.C.”
In an era when lynchings were far too common, the Bullock family stood out and garnered international headlines throughout the year-long saga.
“Why?” Hinson asked. “The hook for this particular one was the fact that African Americans fought back.”
Still, in the century since the story ended, the town of Norlina has sought to ignore the past, Warren County NAACP president Cosmos George said, but “I won’t let them.”
Two years ago, he successfully lobbied to have the death certificates of Plummer Bullock and Williams changed to declare that their cause of death was “lynched by mob.” The certificates previously reported they had died of gunshot wounds.
Some family members have been aware of the tragic story since early childhood, Jones said, while others learned it later in life than he did. “I don’t know why we don’t talk more about it,” he said. “I guess it is hard.”
Jones said the Bullock brothers have been on his mind more recently as he traveled the nation as a photojournalist, covering rallies against what protesters say is systemic racism.
How can the nation heal modern-day racism, Jones asked, when we have yet to heal past racism? A memorial in Norlina, he said, is a good step.
“Not talking about it will not resolve anything,” George said of racially motivated lynchings. “It is like covering a dirty floor with a clean carpet. Sooner or later the floor will rot."
Added Jones, “I want everyone to know about my cousin. They were all treated like second-class citizens and didn’t deserve to be.”
Hillsborough County wants its own lynching memorial
Hillsborough County had six known racially motivated lynchings of Black men from the 1850s through the early 1900s.
A committee made up of local elected officials, historians, pastors and civil rights leaders wants to add each of their names to a lynching memorial.
Tampa City Councilman Luis Viera, who is among those leading the charge, hopes it can be dedicated by April at a yet-to-be-determined location.
Two of the victims are known only as Adam and Galloway.
The others are John Crooms, Lewis Jackson, Samuel Arline and Robert Johnson.
The marker will primarily revolve around the story of Johnson, Viera said.
In 1934, Johnson was arrested for assaulting a white woman but not charged. But he was guilty of stealing chickens. As he was being transferred to a city jail, he was kidnapped by three white men and shot dead.
“We should never hide from our more painful history as Americans,” Viera said. “Good Americans use painful history to find out how we got to where we are today, to build bridges of understanding and to make historical wrongs right in our own time.”
"story" - Google News
November 17, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/3lGoSvt
Tampa photographer wants nation to know the story of ancestor who was lynched - Tampa Bay Times
"story" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YrOfIK
https://ift.tt/2xwebYA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Tampa photographer wants nation to know the story of ancestor who was lynched - Tampa Bay Times"
Post a Comment