The 1934 Lynching and Mutilation of Claude Neal, by a Jackson County, Florida Mob
November 11th 2019
Grove of trees in Florida
By Bill Berkowitz
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees-- Strange Fruit, written by Abel Meeropol and performed by many, including Billie Holiday
In 1934, Claude Neal was tortured and lynched. His mutilated body was hung for public display near the courthouse in Jackson County, Florida, a community in the Florida Panhandle. Local newspapers and radio stations had announced the impending lynching. Thousands gathered, creating a party-like atmosphere. Photographs of Neal’s body were taken and sold on the streets. No one has ever been held responsible for the torturing and lynching of Claude Neal.
In addition to Neal’s relatives, two people have been trying to keep the story of Neal’s lynching from being forgotten: Ben Montgomery and L. Lamar Wilson. In 2012, the Tampa Bay Times’ Montgomery wrote a story titled “Spectacle: the lynching of Claude Neal,” which detailed the lynching. Keeping Neal’s memory alive has been the quest of the poet L. Lamar Wilson, who was born and raised in Marianna, Florida, where Neal’s lynching took place.
In a late-October episode of NPR's Code Switch podcast, host Shereen Marisol pointed out, that Neal’s lynching “has been referred to as one of the most violent and well-attended lynching in U.S. history”.
Ben Montgomery, who was instrumental in reporting about the Dozier School for Boys -- the infamous now-closed juvenile reform school, where boys were brutally abused and some killed – came across Neal’s story while researching and reporting on the Dozier School. He started googling Neal, and an online message board led him to Orlando Williams, one of Neal’s descendants, who talked about needing a reporter to tell Neal’s story.
The Lynching of Claude Neal
The lynching of Claude Neal was in no way a historical aberration. According to a Tuskegee Institute study, 4,743 people were lynched in the United States between the years 1882 and 1968, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites. Mote then 80 percent of all lynching took place in the south.
In “Spectacle,” Montgomery sets the stage:
“Jackson County, Florida, 1934: Drip coffee, Purity Ice Cream, turnips, chuck roast, mustard for 15 cents a quart, 26 cents for a dozen eggs. Sun-bleached overalls, Baptists, Methodists, kerosene lamps, screen doors, mosquitoes, pine trees, knee stains, brick chimneys, K & K Grocery, and cotton, 12 cents a pound. Cotton on the roadside and cotton in the ditch and cotton in forever rows stretched across fields flat as tabletops.
Claude Neal was a 23-year-old illiterate farmhand, who had “probably a common law wife … [and] a daughter,” Montgomery told Meraji. It was possible that Neal was having a secret relationship with Lola Cannady, a white 20-something farm girl. On October 18, 1934, Cannady left her home to water the hogs. She never came back. She was later found dead on the edge of the hog pen.
The sheriff found Claude Neal “sleeping in a corncrib a few farms away later that day,” Montgomery told Meraji, and he became a suspect, and was taken into custody. Word about Lola Cannady’s death spread quickly throughout Jackson county. The sheriff, Flake Chambliss, knew there would be trouble so he tried to protect Neal from angry mobs. For six days, Chambliss moved Neal from county-to-county, and place-to-place so they might escape the mob.
“Meanwhile, because so much time has elapsed - six days at this point - word has spread that there's going to be a lynch party at the Cannady place,” Montgomery said. “And depending on whose estimates you believe - and I've seen anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 - a good number of people show up, and they stand around bonfires waiting for the committee of six, as they were called, to turn over Claude Neal. They wanted to torture him, to get him to say he was sorry and that he committed the crime.”
The mob found out that Neal was being held in the small town of Brewton, Alabama. With cars loaded with shotgun wielding men with dynamite, the mob kidnapped Neal and drove him the fifty miles or so back to Florida.
Neal had signed a confession with an X. A huge crowd gathered at the Cannady farm, waiting for the kidnappers to turn him over to them.
They “tortured him,” According to Montgomery, the mob poked him with hot irons …. they strung him up, and let him down. And they fired bullets into his body. And they cut off his genitals and make him eat them and make him say that they’re good, … [E]ventually they kill him.” They then tied Neal’s dead body to the running board of a car and drove him from Peri Landing, where they had tortured him, to the Cannady family home.
Thousands had brought picnic lunches and were gathered around bonfires. When Neal’s body was delivered, many took turns performing “all sorts of barbaric acts,” including, Montgomery said, “severing toes and fingers.” They then tied the body to a car and dragging it into Marianna. They “hung Claude Neal’s corpse from an oak tree in front of the courthouse … and took pictures with it.”
Montgomery reported that the pictures were “snapped before sunup on October 27, 1934. It shows a thin, short man hanging by his neck from [the] oak tree …. The man is naked and mutilated. Blood streaks his skin. A rope is tied crudely around his neck. It is not a noose, not meant for killing …. The hanging was for display. His missing fingers and toes was for display. His missing toes and fingers were community keepsakes. … The photograph sold for 50 cents on the street that day.”
A High School Student Discovers The Horror
More then a decade before Montgomery published his story in the Tampa Bay Times, a high school student, L. Lamar Wilson, was working on a book report at the Jackson County Public Library. He came across a book titled, The Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal, by James R. McGovern [click here for an updated Introduction to McGovern’s book]. Wilson told Code Switch’s Meraji: “I flipped the pages and started reading the opening pages, and when I saw 1934, I did the math. My grandmother, who was born in 1905, she would've been 29. She was alive. Other members of my family would've been alive.”
Wilson went out to the car where his grandmother and his great aunt, his grandmother’s sister, were waiting for him. He asked them if they knew Claude Neal. “I could see her sink in her seat,” Wilson told Meraji. “And they wouldn’t say anything. The whole ride home, they didn’t say anything.” Eventually, the only thing “my grandmother said was, I told that boy to leave that white gal alone. I told that boy to leave that white gal alone.”
“I could see “the fear in their eyes, [their] mortification was palpable,” Wilson, a poet and assistant professor of creative writing at Wake Forest University, told Meraji.
"Even before I would write the poem that would inhabit my first book 'Sacrilegion,' I was trying to process and make sense of my own personal history and make sense of this really deep and troubling silence that I grew up with around the racial violence that has really haunted Marianna, Florida since its inception, but particularly since the early 20th Century," Wilson told WFSU News’ Tom Flanigan.
Years later, Wilson wrote a book with the poem called “Resurrection Sunday,” which in part relates the story of his grandmother’s reaction to his questions about Neal’s lynching. An excerpt of the poem can be found here
I told that boy
to leave that white gal alone: the only words
breaking the silence of the rest of that ride,
the only words her brother says at home.
I told that boy to leave that white gal alone:
their script a shroud over faces suddenly
childlike, each crease around their eyes
a dog-eared page the boy can never read.
While the book was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Wilson told Code Switch that he was “feeling yucky, ashamed, that I am benefitting off of this tragedy. And I had to get it out of me. I went back to that little boy on the mourner's bench in church praying, and I thought, what could I do? And some still, small voice said, run. Take that land back. Do like Joshua on the Jericho wall. Walk around those streets and claim them.”
Wilson posted a message about his upcoming run on Facebook. Ben Montgomery, whose story about the Neal lynching had been published in the Tampa Bay Times, contacted Wilson with the message, “I’m coming to run with you.”
Montgomery and Wilson became Facebook friends, and on the day of the run, October 26, on the anniversary of the Claude Neal lynching, not only did Montgomery show up, but several of his friends – elderly survivors of the Dozier School for Boys scarred by their experience there -- “drove behind us and in front of us and just made sure nothing bad happened,” Montgomery said. “And then they came out to support Lamar and what he was doing, just really to make sure he was safe.”
There are no signs marking the tree on the courthouse lawn from which Claude Neal’s body was hung in 1934. The main perpetrators were never punished. No one in the jubilant crowd was held responsible. There has been no formal apology. Most everyone in that euphoric crowd is likely dead. Everyone in Claude Neal’s “family has inherited the trauma from that experience, whether they were alive or not,” Montomery told Meraji. “That made it real to me. It made it real to me today and to my readers. And it upped the importance of us acknowledging these things and discussing them and remembering them.”
Interestingly, as Manfred Berg writes in the updated Introduction to Anatomy of a Lynching, “Representatives of both the ASWPL and the NAACP had informed Florida governor David Sholtz of the impending lynching, including its approximate location, but he neglected to take vigorous action to stop the murder. The grand jury investigation ended with the stereotypical phrase that Neal ‘came to his death at the hands of persons unknown’ and, … commended the local sheriff for his splendid discharge of duty.’”
[A short documentary about Wilson’s run is called "The Changing Same,”.]