| Lynching of Henry Choate | |
|---|---|
| Location | Columbia, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Date | November 13, 1927 |
Attack type | Murder by bludgeoning, lynching, extrajudicial killing, hanging, dragging |
| Weapon | Rope, sledgehammer, motor vehicle |
| Victim | Henry Choate, aged 18 |
| Perpetrators | Mob of white residents in Columbia, Tennessee |
| Motive | Anti-black racism, retaliation against Choate for being accused of the assault of a white girl |
| Charges | None [1] |
Henry Choate was an 18-year-old African-American teenager who was lynched by a mob in Columbia, Tennessee, on November 13, 1927. [2] Choate was accused of having assaulted 16-year old Sarah Harlan, a white girl, and was taken to the Columbia jail, despite Harlan not being able to identify Choate as the attacker. A mob numbering hundreds of people sprang him from the jail, dragged him through the city behind a car, and then hanged him from the courthouse. During the lynching, Harlan's mother begged the mob to spare Choate's life. A grand jury declined to file any charges. [1]
Choate was working on a road construction project in Coffee County, Tennessee, and went to Columbia on Armistice Day to visit his grandfather, Henry Clay Harlan, who was 85 years old, born into slavery, and lived about seven miles west of Columbia. During that visit, a young white girl, 16-year old Sarah Harlan (no relation to Henry Clay Harlan) claimed she had been attacked by a young black man. The sheriff of Maury County, Sam Wiley, brought in a pack of bloodhounds. Choate was arrested and put in the county jail, despite Sarah Harlan saying she could not identify Choate as the perpetrator. [1] The sheriff's wife, Mrs. Wiley, alerted the "Negro cook of the jail", Ella Gant, that a group of men were going to come and kill Choate. Gant brought him cigarettes and told him the news, and that he should pray. When the mob came, Mrs. Wiley hid the keys and told the mob she wasn't going to see "an innocent boy hung". But when a man started pounding at the jail door with a hammer, and the use of dynamite was threatened, she procured the key. [3] The mob, some 250 men, [4] opened the jail, got Choate out, and someone hit him with a hammer on the head, murdering him. They then tied him to a truck and dragged him through the streets, and up into the courthouse. [3] There he was hanged, from the second story of the County Courthouse in Columbia, which was still decorated for Armistice Day. [5] During the lynching, Sarah Harlan's mother begged the mob to let Choate live and instead let the case go to trial. [1]
Two weeks after the lynching, a grand jury declined to file charges. While acknowledging that the lynching was a criminal offense, the grand jury stated in their ruling that witnesses were unable to positively identify any perpetrators. [1]
In 2023, Choate’s lynching became the subject of renewed media coverage due to the use of the Maury County Courthouse as the main filming site for Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” music video. The song’s lyrics, and the choice of filming location for the video, were characterized as racist by many critics, with the video being pulled by Country Music Television. The song subsequently topped the US Billboard Hot 100. [1]
Maury County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee, in the Middle Tennessee region. As of the 2020 census, the population was 100,974. Its county seat is Columbia. Maury County is part of the Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN metropolitan statistical area.
Columbia is a city in and the county seat of Maury County, Tennessee. The population was 41,690 as of the 2020 United States census. Columbia is included in the Nashville metropolitan area.
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On March 19, 1906, Ed Johnson, a young African American man, was murdered by a lynch mob in his home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He had been wrongfully sentenced to death for the rape of Nevada Taylor, but Justice John Marshall Harlan of the United States Supreme Court had issued a stay of execution. To prevent delay or avoidance of execution, a mob broke into the jail where Johnson was held, and abducted and lynched him from the Walnut Street Bridge.
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George Armwood was an African American who was lynched in Princess Anne, Maryland, on October 18, 1933. His murder was the last recorded lynching in Maryland.
Matthew Williams was a Black man lynched by a White mob in Salisbury, Maryland, on December 4, 1931.
On February 9, 1893, Alfred Blount, an African American and a Chattanooga native, was taken from his jail cell in the county jail and brutally beaten, stabbed, and hanged from the Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Blount was charged with assault of a woman by the name of Mrs. M. A. Moore. Moore, 51 and widowed, claimed she was cleaning her house when a man entered through her back door requesting food. Moore, assuming it was a neighbor of hers, invited the man in and called out to her African-American house boy Sam to bring the man some food. Upon realizing Sam's absence, Moore herself went into the kitchen to prepare food before reporting being grabbed by the arm and attacked by the man. After hitting the man with her hand, Moore fainted and laid unconscious in her house before recalling the incident to her neighbor, Mrs. DeRochement.
Ephraim Grizzard and Henry Grizzard were African-American brothers who were lynched in Middle Tennessee in April 1892 as suspects in the assaults on two white sisters. Henry Grizzard was hanged by a white mob on April 24 near the house of the young women in Goodlettsville, Tennessee.
Samuel Smith was a 15-year-old African-American youth who was lynched by a white mob, hanged and shot in Nolensville, Tennessee, on December 15, 1924. No one was ever convicted of the lynching.
David Jones was an African-American man who was lynched in Nashville, Tennessee on March 25, 1872 after being arrested as a suspect in a killing. He was mortally wounded while in jail, shot twice in the back while resisting white mob members who came to take him out; the whites pulled him into the Public Square and hanged him from a post outside the police station, with a crowd of an estimated 2,000 in attendance. The sheriff interrupted the hanging and took Jones down. Taken back to the jail, Jones died of his injuries on April 9, 1872.
Amos Miller was a 23-year-old African-American man who was lynched from the balcony of the Williamson County Courthouse in Franklin, Tennessee, on August 10, 1888.
Jo Reed was an African American man who was lynched in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 30, 1875, where he was taken by a white mob from the county jail after being arrested for killing a police officer in a confrontation. He was hanged from a suspension bridge but, after the rope broke, Reed survived the attempted lynching, escaped via the river, and left Nashville to go West.
The lynching of Paul Reed and Will Cato occurred in Statesboro, Georgia on August 16, 1904. Five members of a white farm family, the Hodges, had been murdered and their house burned to hide the crime. Paul Reed and Will Cato, who were African-American, were tried and convicted for the murders. Despite militia having been brought in from Savannah to protect them, the two men were taken by a mob from the courthouse immediately after their trials, chained to a tree stump, and burned. In the immediate aftermath, four more African-Americans were shot, three of them dying, and others were flogged.
William Andrews was an African American laborer who was lynched by a white mob in Princess Anne, Maryland on June 9, 1897. Andrews, then 17, was tried, convicted, and hanged all in one day after being accused of assaulting Mrs. Benjamin T. Kelley.
The Maury County Courthouse is a historic county courthouse building in Columbia, Tennessee, the county seat of Maury County. James Edwin Ruthven Carpenter Jr. was its architect.
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