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Authors: Isabel Wilkerson
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from the rest of the world by its cypress woods and turpentine camps. It was another country, with its own laws and constitution. And all through the 1920s, when George was a toddler and then in grade school, the grown people hung their heads over the violence that descended over them and passed the stories among themselves and to the children when they got old enough to understand.
They talked about the white mob that burned down the colored section of Ocoee, over by Orlando, when a colored man tried to vote back in 1920, how the man was hanged from a tree and other colored people were burned to death and the remaining colored people packed up and never returned. They whispered about the time the white people burned and leveled Rosewood, a colored settlement by the Gulf of Mexico, halfway between St. Petersburg and Tallahassee, because a white woman said a colored man had attacked her. It was where, a survivor said, “anything that was black or looked black was killed.” 59 That was in 1923.
And then, in the fall of 1934, when George was a teenager and old enough to take note of such things, perhaps the single worst act of torture and execution in twentieth-century America occurred in the panhandletown of Marianna, Florida, a farm settlement halfway between Pensacola and Tallahassee. 60
That October, a twenty-three-year-old colored farmhand named Claude Neal was accused of the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy. Neal had grown up across the road from Lola Cannidy’s family. He was arrested and signed a written confession that historians have since called into question. But at the time, passions ran so high that a band of more than three hundred men armed with guns, knives, torches, and dynamite went searching for Neal in every jail within a seventy-five-mile radius of Marianna.
The manhunt forced the authorities to move Neal across the panhandle, from Marianna to Panama City by car, to Camp Walton by boat, to Pensacola by car again, with the mob on their trail at every turn. Finally, the Escambia County sheriff, fearing that his jail in Pensacola was too dilapidated to withstand attack, decided to take Neal out of state altogether, to the tiny town of Brewton, Alabama, fifty-five miles north of Pensacola. Someone leaked Neal’s whereabouts, and a lynching party of some one hundred men drove several hours on Highway 231 in a thirty-car caravan from Florida to Alabama. There the men managed to divert the local sheriff and overtake the deputy. They stormed the jail and took Neal, his limbs bound with a plow rope, back to Marianna.
It was the early morning hours of October 26, a Friday. 61 Neal’s chief abductors, a self-described “committee of six,” an oddly officious term commonly used by the leaders of southern lynch mobs, set the lynching for 8 P.M. , when most everyone would be off work. The advance notice allowed word to spread by radio, teletype, and afternoon papers to the western time zones.
Well before the appointed hour, several thousand people had gathered at the lynching site. The crowd grew so large and unruly—people having been given sufficient forewarning to come in from other states—that the committee of six, fearing a riot, took Neal to the woods by the Chipola River to wait out the crowds and torture him before the execution. 62
There his captors took knives and castrated him in the woods. Then they made him eat the severed body parts “and say he liked it,” a witness said.
“One man threw up at the sight,” wrote the historian James R. McGovern.
Around Neal’s neck, they tied a rope and pulled it over a limb to the point of his choking before lowering him to take up the torture again.“Every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or toe,” the witness said. Then the men used hot irons to burn him all over his body in a ritual that went on for several hours.
“It is almost impossible to believe that a human being could stand such unspeakable
They talked about the white mob that burned down the colored section of Ocoee, over by Orlando, when a colored man tried to vote back in 1920, how the man was hanged from a tree and other colored people were burned to death and the remaining colored people packed up and never returned. They whispered about the time the white people burned and leveled Rosewood, a colored settlement by the Gulf of Mexico, halfway between St. Petersburg and Tallahassee, because a white woman said a colored man had attacked her. It was where, a survivor said, “anything that was black or looked black was killed.” 59 That was in 1923.
And then, in the fall of 1934, when George was a teenager and old enough to take note of such things, perhaps the single worst act of torture and execution in twentieth-century America occurred in the panhandletown of Marianna, Florida, a farm settlement halfway between Pensacola and Tallahassee. 60
That October, a twenty-three-year-old colored farmhand named Claude Neal was accused of the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy. Neal had grown up across the road from Lola Cannidy’s family. He was arrested and signed a written confession that historians have since called into question. But at the time, passions ran so high that a band of more than three hundred men armed with guns, knives, torches, and dynamite went searching for Neal in every jail within a seventy-five-mile radius of Marianna.
The manhunt forced the authorities to move Neal across the panhandle, from Marianna to Panama City by car, to Camp Walton by boat, to Pensacola by car again, with the mob on their trail at every turn. Finally, the Escambia County sheriff, fearing that his jail in Pensacola was too dilapidated to withstand attack, decided to take Neal out of state altogether, to the tiny town of Brewton, Alabama, fifty-five miles north of Pensacola. Someone leaked Neal’s whereabouts, and a lynching party of some one hundred men drove several hours on Highway 231 in a thirty-car caravan from Florida to Alabama. There the men managed to divert the local sheriff and overtake the deputy. They stormed the jail and took Neal, his limbs bound with a plow rope, back to Marianna.
It was the early morning hours of October 26, a Friday. 61 Neal’s chief abductors, a self-described “committee of six,” an oddly officious term commonly used by the leaders of southern lynch mobs, set the lynching for 8 P.M. , when most everyone would be off work. The advance notice allowed word to spread by radio, teletype, and afternoon papers to the western time zones.
Well before the appointed hour, several thousand people had gathered at the lynching site. The crowd grew so large and unruly—people having been given sufficient forewarning to come in from other states—that the committee of six, fearing a riot, took Neal to the woods by the Chipola River to wait out the crowds and torture him before the execution. 62
There his captors took knives and castrated him in the woods. Then they made him eat the severed body parts “and say he liked it,” a witness said.
“One man threw up at the sight,” wrote the historian James R. McGovern.
Around Neal’s neck, they tied a rope and pulled it over a limb to the point of his choking before lowering him to take up the torture again.“Every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or toe,” the witness said. Then the men used hot irons to burn him all over his body in a ritual that went on for several hours.
“It is almost impossible to believe that a human being could stand such unspeakable
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