The lynching of African Americans was a widely supported campaign to enforce racial subordination and segregation during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. ”Lynching in America,” a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, documents more than 4400 racial terror lynchings in the United States during this period. These events did not occur solely “somewhere else.” The EJI has identified and documented five cases of lynching in Volusia County, Florida.
Additional research has been undertaken by The Volusia Remembers Coalition using original sources, including newspaper articles and public letters from the time of the event. As additional research yields more details, we will update this list.
Lee Bailey had recently been employed by J.R. Wetherell in DeLand. While Mr. Wetherell was out of town, attending to business, Mrs. Wetherell, alone in their house on south Amelia, reported to a neighbor that she had been raped. Mr. Bailey was soon arrested and identified by Mrs. Wetherell. As the local paper, The Florida Agriculturist Supplement, reported at the time, Mr. Bailey had the “same straight hair, the peculiar shaped head, the woolen shirt and his breath was impregnated with whiskey. The negro who committed the dastardly deed had all of these” (September 30, 1891). On this basis, an “indignant” white mob overwhelmed the sheriff at the jail that night and dragged Mr. Bailey to a nearby oak on Rich Avenue, not far from the jail, where he was hanged and his body riddled by bullets. The Agriculturist proclaimed in its headline that this was “A JUST FATE!” Charges of sexual assault by Black men against White women were often enough to justify White lynch mobs. Upholding the “purity” of White Southern womanhood and presenting Black men as over-sexualized and violent reinforced a key idea underpinning Jim Crow segregation and anti-Black racism.
A ceremony of soil-gathering and remembrance was held for Mr. Bailey in DeLand September 25, 2021.
Read the program of the event: PROGRAM
Anthony Johnson, an agricultural worker, was lynched with Charles Harris in or near DeLand. The exact location and other circumstances are currently unknown. We know only that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Harris were not given a chance to defend themselves in court against an allegation that they had assaulted an eight-year-old White girl, Eva Bruce. Racial terror lynchings, where the alleged victim was a White woman or girl, were commonplace during the Jim Crow era. The Equal Justice Initiative has now documented well over 6000 racial terror incidents; a good number of these cases fall into this pattern. White lynchers were almost never brought to justice for their racial terror murders. Victims never had an opportunity to defend themselves.
The life of Mr. Anthony Johnson
was honored by Volusia Remembers Coalition
on Saturday, September 17, 2022
at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church
in Osteen, Florida
View the program for the ceremony HERE
Charles Harris was also an agricultural worker. We don’t know much else about his life , other than that he was lynched alongside Anthony Johnson in or near DeLand. Both Mr. Harris and Mr. Johnson were accused of assaulting an eight-year-old White girl, Eva Bruce. That charge was never tested in court, because the two men were lynched by a White mob before they had a chance to defend themselves. In the Jim Crow era, a complaint about a criminal assault of a White woman or girl was commonly given as a justification for lynching. Protecting the “purity” of White women was part of the ideology to keep Blacks separate and lower than Whites. Whites, even though well-known in the community and sometimes even when they were pictured in local newspapers, were almost never prosecuted for lynching Black men.
The life of Mr. Charles Harris
was honored by Volusia Remembers Coalition
on Saturday, September 17, 2022
at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church
in Osteen, Florida
View the program for the ceremony HERE
Herbert Brooks, a twenty-four-year-old British subject from Nassau in the Bahamas, was living in Miami, when he was arrested in a door-to-door search of Black residences because, deputies alleged, his description fit “in a general way” the description given by a fifty-five-year-old White woman who reported being assaulted nearby. A White mob of some 1200 men surrounded the city jail. For safe keeping, Sheriff D.W. Moran decided to transport Mr. Brooks out of town by train, ultimately to a jail in Jacksonville. Returning to Miami for trial, Mr. Brooks was alleged to have jumped from the train, dying after his head struck the tracks just north of Daytona Beach. He was accompanied by deputies and shackled and handcuffed at the time. An autopsy was performed in Daytona Beach and another, at the request of the British Consulate in Miami. After reviewing the autopsy results and description of injuries, which did not indicate any head injuries, some Bahamians and Blacks in Miami concluded that Brooks was beaten to death before being brought onto the train and then dumped on the tracks. This story—a Black man murdered in police custody after an arrest for an alleged crime against a White woman—is often repeated during this period. Mr. Brooks never had an opportunity to defend himself in court.
Lee Snell, a resident of Daytona Beach, was a veteran of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, a branch of service open to African Americans in the strictly segregated military of that time. After his service, he returned home to a hero’s welcome; his military service is memorialized today on a plaque at Halifax Hospital. Mr. Snell became a respected member of the community and a successful entrepreneur, owning his own taxi service in Daytona Beach.
In 1939, in an early morning accident, a White child on a bicycle, Benny Blackwelder, collided with Mr. Snell’s taxi. It is unclear whether Mr. Snell’s taxi struck the boy, or the boy collided with the taxi. The boy was rushed to Halifax Hospital where, sadly, he died. Mr. Snell, shaken, submitted to arrest at the scene, and was taken to the Daytona jail on the charge of manslaughter. When a White mob was rumored to be forming, inflamed by the boy’s older brothers, Everett and Earl Blackwelder, the decision was made, and widely announced, that a single White constable, James Durden, would escort Mr. Snell by car to the County Jail in DeLand for safe-keeping. Before Mr. Snell could defend himself through the legal process, however, he was lynched by the older Blackwelders, by the side of the old brick highway between Daytona and DeLand.
Drawing on eyewitness testimony and newspaper accounts at the time, historian Walter T. Howard offers this chilling description of the lynching, allowing us to feel the moments of terror Mr. Snell must have experienced. The Blackwelders forced the constable’s car to the side of the brick road and dragged Mr. Snell from the car, beating him with the stock of their rifle and shotgun. As Mr. Snell was “clinging tightly for his life to the officer’s arm,” Earl shot him with his high-powered rifle. “The injured man fled in panic,” Howard writes. “Everett shot him in the left knee, and as he fell, Earl shot him twice in the upper body” (Lynchings: Extralegal Violence in Florida during the 1930s, 124-132). There was a trial, but Constable Durden and other witnesses refused to identify the Blackwelders in court as his murderers, and so they were released.
The lynching of Lee Snell attracted state and national attention. Volusia County educator and legendary civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, at the time, wrote a letter to the editors of Florida’s newspapers to ask for justice for Mr. Snell. “The eyes of America and the world,” she wrote, “are turned this way taking note of your standard of justice." Some small measure of justice was restored in 2020 when members of the Volusia Remembers Coalition gathered to honor Mr. Snell on Memorial Day and to lay a wreath on his marble military tombstone in Daytona Beach. Our first soil collection, tentatively scheduled for the end of February, will be at the site of Lee Snell’s lynching on the Old DeLand Highway.
Members of the Volusia Remembers Coalition gathered to remember Lee Snell at his gravesite as part of their Memorial Day remembrance in May of 2020. See pictures and read more on our blog HERE.