"They Done Me Wrong"

Life in Greenwood, Fla. was a little less dull one day last week when all the white folks in the neighborhood were invited out to George Cannidy's place for a lynching. Someone had dragged Farmer Cannidy's young daughter Lola out across his cotton patch, raped her near a pigsty, bashed in her head and left her under some pine boughs for dead. A Negro buck named Claude Neal had been arrested for the crime, lodged for safe keeping in a jail across the Alabama line at Brewton. One hundred Floridians had driven over to Brewton and without much fuss removed Claude Neal from the jail.

Upon invitation of a "lynching committee" of six, 5,000 men, women and children choked the front yard of the Cannidy place, overflowed into the cotton field where bonfires were lighted. The Cannidys had prepared some sharp sticks and whetted their knives in anticipation of the revenge they would take on Negro Neal. A man said to be a Florida legislator got up and amused the crowd with a funny speech as it waited for the spectacle. It was nearly midnight when one of the "lynching committee" appeared to announce that he feared violence with so many people around; there would be no show until most of the mob went home. Plain truth seemed to be that the lynching committee had so brutalized the Negro that he had died back in the woods on the banks of the Chipola River before the lynchers had a chance to kill him publicly. He was certainly quite dead when, toward morning, the lynchers dumped his mutilated corpse in front of the Cannidy's door. "Pa" Cannidy was hopping mad.

"They done me wrong about this here killing," he wailed. "They promised me they'd bring him up to my house before they killed him and let me have the first shot. That's what I wanted."

"Pa" and "Ma" and the eight Cannidy children had to be satisfied with the last shot. They got out the family rabbit gun and pumped a few slugs into the lifeless blackamoor. Then the corpse was taken into Marianna, the county seat, hung up in front of the courthouse. The dirty work of cutting it down went to the county sheriff. National Guardsmen arrived, as usual, too late to do Claude Neal any good.

Governor David Holtz, back at Tallahassee from the American Legion convention in Miami (see above), felt that an explanation was due with regard to his tardiness in calling out the militia. "It was not a case of calling out the militia to protect the jail or a prisoner in custody of an officer," said he. "The Negro was held in the hands of a mob out in the woods. . . . It would have been futile to have called out the militia."

But the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which had begged for troops as soon as Neal was taken from Brewton, found it hard to believe that soldiers were trained only to find their way around in city streets or jail corridors. Indignantly A. S. W. P. L. wired Attorney General Cummings to beg him to start some sort of Federal prosecution.

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