Victims of lynching were overwhelmingly Black men. Yet the terror extended to Black women as well, a fact obscured by history until recently. Scholar Haley Brown’s research uncovers eleven confirmed cases of Black women lynched in Texas, a chilling reminder of the injustice faced by countless others.
These women were lynched,” writes Brown, “for something a male acquaintance, spouse, partner, or family member was accused of. Each was lynched alongside others:
- Lizzie Jackson was lynched with her husband and three others in 1885.
- Sallie Molena was killed by a mob with her husband and young daughter in 1890.
- Fanny Phillips was murdered with her husband, four sons, a granddaughter, and two hired hands in 1895 when their home was firebombed and riddled with bullets.
Brown details the case of Mary Jackson, a Black woman lynched in Harrison County, Texas, in February 1912. Jackson, around forty years old, was hanged alongside her older neighbor, George Sanders.
Brown writes, ‘The lynching of Jackson and Sanders demonstrates how a lynch mob embraced an eye-for-an-eye mentality, disregarding the gender of their victims so long as they were Black. Although their primary target may have been [Tennie] Sneed, the mob appeared satisfied with lynching any Black person associated with the crime.
Tennie Sneed found himself in a situation where he had to defend himself against Paul Strange, resulting in Strange’s unfortunate death. However, this incident occurred in Harrison County, known for its troubling history of racial violence. This history includes multiple instances of Black individuals being lynched, such as the brutal killings of five men in 1901 and four men in 1909. Just prior to Sneed’s case, Will Ollie was also lynched by a mob, causing widespread fear among the Black community. Many Black residents decided to leave town out of concern for potential retaliation.
In the aftermath of Sneed’s actions, he too fled the area. However, instead of addressing the situation through legal channels, white vigilantes took matters into their own hands. They targeted Sneed’s family, attacking those they could find. Sneed’s brother-in-law, father-in-law, wife (who was four months pregnant at the time), and mother-in-law were all subjected to violence, demonstrating the gravity of racial tensions in the region.
After Sneed was arrested, a mob showed up at the Harrison County jail demanding his release. But he wasn’t there; he had been sent to another county for his own protection. The mob, however, felt compelled to kill someone Black. Substitution of Black surrogates was common when law enforcement shielded the intended victim. That night, the mob went after people only tangentially related to Sneed’s actions. Jackson, who lived on Paul Strange’s property and had worked as his cook and housekeeper, was among their victims.
As Brown stresses, the lynching of women undermined one of the primary justifications for lynch law: the defense of ‘womanhood.’ While this justification centered on white womanhood, mobs who lynched Black women typically did so away from the public eye. Jackson and Sanders were prime examples, lynched at night by a small group of men.
“The violent, communal rituals of public lynchings – which could include castration, burning, and other tortures – were considered legitimate spectacles for white women and children. However, when mobs lynched Black women, they generally did so away from such audiences. As Brown suggests, this reveals a disturbing contradiction: ‘mobs knew in some manner that lynching women was more dishonorable than lynching men, yet not wrong enough to prevent them from doing so.
Local public opinion shockingly sided with the lynch mob. The county newspaper, without any evidence, labeled Jackson and Sanders accessories to the Strange killing. None of the lynch mob members were ever punished for their lawless actions. However, in a rare instance of criticism aimed at a pillar of white supremacist terror, the Dallas Morning News scolded Harrison County whites. They asserted that the two victims were “probably innocent” and condemned the lynching of women and children as something that “lowered the standard of citizenship.” Brown believes it’s unlikely the News would have shown such criticism had Sanders been lynched alone.
After two trials ended in hung juries, Tennie Sneed was convicted of manslaughter in 1914. Shockingly, the jury openly admitted they feared “the defendant would be killed if acquitted.” He served three years in prison and lived until 1972.
Texas, of course, was not unique in its history of lynching Black women. Perhaps the most infamous case was that of Mary Turner in 1918. Eight months pregnant, Turner was savagely murdered by a white mob in Georgia, enraged by her condemnation of her husband’s lynching the previous day.
Edited by Brajabandhu Mahanta from “Black Women Were Also Lynched” by Matthew Wills
