Chatham County apologizes for former officials’ role in lynching of Black teenager

Chatham County has issued a formal apology for county officials’ role in the lynching of a Black teenager a century ago.

The apology comes just over 100 years after Eugene Daniel, 16, was killed by “a mob of residents” on Sept. 18, 1921.

Daniel was unlawfully taken from the Chatham County jail in Pittsboro and killed “on the basis of an unsubstantiated allegation,” the county said.

Evidence suggests that the county’s sheriff, coroner, jail keeper and a commissioner were complicit in the death, it added.

No suspects were investigated or prosecuted in Daniel’s lynching, the county stated.

Commissioner Karen Howard recalls being shocked when she first heard of his death.

“I had assumed that something of this level of horror would be a story around the county, would have taken on some local lore, and people would know about it,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “It stuck with me that there must have been an incredible level of terror to not mention it, to not have even those whispered conversations.”

The Chatham County Board of Commissioners agreed that an apology was overdue.

“We cannot be the first Board of Commissioners in a hundred years that knew of this,” she said.

“Once we know, we ought to do something,” she added. “We ought to do better, stand up and take ownership of it.”

‘A very important first step.’

Mary Nettles, president of the Chatham Community Branch of the NAACP and the Community Remembers Coalition, said she was pleased to hear about the formal apology.

“It’s a very important first step,” Nettles said. “Letting people know and understand what local Black people in the county have gone through.”

She added that her great-great-great-grandparents were slaves in Chatham County.

“It carried me back to my childhood,” Nettles said of learning about Daniel’s death. “I couldn’t do anything for [him] ... but maybe we can try to help the family come to some kind of terms or understanding of what happened years ago.”

Lynching, the unlawful public killing of a person without a trial, took the lives of thousands of Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is unknown exactly how many people were lynched in North Carolina, The News & Observer previously reported. Researchers estimate at least 100 lynchings occurred from 1882 to 1968, though there may have been as many as 300.

Across the United States, at least 4,743 lynchings occurred in those years, the NAACP estimates, though historians believe the true figure may be higher.

“This was 100 years ago and we would like to think that that’s a really long time ago, and America has changed, and we’ve all changed so much,” Howard said. “But those people are the grandparents and great-grandparents of people that we live with.”

“What story of Black people, of people of color, did they have handed down generationally?”

‘Never treated fairly.’

Nettles said Daniel’s story brings attention to the fact that Black people in Chatham “have never been treated fairly.”

“Accused of things we didn’t do,” she said.

Daniel was accused of trespassing inside a white home, after a white woman said she awoke to see a Black man standing in her bedroom, according to newspaper reports at the time.

Police used bloodhounds to track Daniel and said he confessed after they arrested him, reports said.

The 16-year-old was killed by a mob near Moore’s Bridge outside of Pittsboro.

The area was submerged by water with the creation of Jordan Lake in the 1970s, according to UNC-Chapel Hill’s Red Record project, which documents lynching sites in North Carolina.

In the decades after the lynching, Nettles said, other factors like segregated schools continued to drive inequity in the local Black community.

She hopes other counties will acknowledge those who died from lynchings.

“We’re not blaming absolutely anyone for what has happened,” she said. “Those who are still alive and here today, they didn’t do it.”

Daniel was one of at least six people lynched in Chatham, she said.

“I’m glad we did it,” Nettles said of the county’s apology. “I hope we get an opportunity to recognize the others.”

Howard said the work in Chatham County is just starting.

“We are really just at the beginning of that kind of conversation,” she said. “How do we begin to talk about the thinking, the attitudes, the prejudices, the unconscious biases, all of the things that allowed a human being to treat another human being this way?”

Some suggested recognizing all of the known Chatham lynchings at once, but Howard said the county intends to “delve more thoroughly into the story behind the lynching, and to lift each one out and give it its own ceremony.”

“Each of these has a different set of circumstances, a different victim, a different family that was victimized by it,” she said. “And [each] deserves its own apology.”

This story was originally published October 5, 2021 at 10:37 AM.