Today’s Mutilated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Fifty years after the Jackson County War, one of the bloodiest race wars in the Reconstruction-era South, Marianna, Florida put itself at the center of another nefarious chapter of American history with the public lynching of Claude Neal.
A twenty-three-year-old black farmhand who grew up in Jackson County, Neal was tortured, mutilated, and hanged from an oak tree on the courthouse lawn in 1934 in this City of Southern Charm.
Neal had been accused of raping and murdering a young white woman, Lola Cannidy, when she tried to break off their affair. He was kidnapped from authorities by a swarm of angry men, castrated, burned with hot irons, and stabbed, over and over, even after he was dead. Witnesses to the horror claimed that even small children participated, poking him with whittled sticks.
After hours of torture, Neal’s savaged body was tied to the back of a car and dragged to the courthouse, where a large crowd of men, women, and children waited to observe the official lynching.
The event had been advanced in newspapers across the South, attracting people from near and far to the Panhandle city.
“Big Preparation Made for Lynching Tonight,” the Macon Telegraph wrote in its morning edition on October 26, 1934:
This morning a mob seized Claude Neal, 23, from a jail in Brewton, Ala., where he had been held in connection with the murder of a white girl which took place here several days ago.
At noon a “Committee of Six” representing the mob announced a timetable for the lynching, which was given in newspapers and over the radio as follows:
At sundown the Negro will be taken to the farm two miles from here where Miss Lola Cannidy, the murder victim, lived. There, he will be mutilated by the girl’s father.
Then he will be brought to a pigpen in the middle of a cotton field nearby, where the girl’s body was found, and killed.
Finally his body will be brought to Marianna, the county seat, nine miles from here, and hung in the court house square for all to see.
“All white folks are invited to the party,” said the announcement issued by the mob’s Committee of Six.
The next day’s papers reported the event in all of its gruesome detail.
“Lynching Carried Off Almost As Advertised,” read the headline in the Birmingham Postin Alabama.
Marianna, Fla. – The body of Claude Neal, 23, negro, confessed attacker and slayer of a white girl, swung from a tree on the courthouse lawn here today, victim of an enraged mob’s vengeance… Photographers say they will soon have pictures of the body for sale for fifty cents each. Fingers and toes from Neal’s body are freely exhibited on street corners here.
Walter White, the spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), would call the lynching “one of the most bestial crimes ever committed by a mob.”
But, for some, the ghastly public execution hadn’t been sufficient to avenge Lola Cannidy’s death. When the county sheriff cut down Neal’s body, people gathered together to protest and demanded the corpse be strung up again. The sheriff refused, and for the next two days mobs swarmed downtown Marianna, hunting the frightened blacks that remained there, driving them from their homes and their businesses.
By the time the National Guard was called in to restore order to the Jackson County seat, some two hundred African Americans, mothers and fathers, children and grandparents, had been injured in violent attacks.
Culled from: The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South
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