Today marks the anniversary of the "Waco Horror"- the lynching of Jesse Washington in 1916. Today, a local group seeks to remember the event and spur dialogue on race relations through a series of anti-lynching performances.
Ninety-nine years ago, 17-year-old Jesse Washington - an illiterate black farmhand – was convicted of the rape and murder of Lucy Fryer. What soon followed would become known as the “Waco Horror”. Washington was dragged to Heritage Square where he was chained, beat and burned all while an estimated crowd of 10 to 15 thousand observers cheered on. Today, on the anniversary of Washington’s death, a local group remembers the event by reviving an early 20th-century genre of theater known as anti-lynching plays.
DeShauna Hollie is one of the organizers of the event.
“Anti-lynching plays have, they were really popular in the early 1900s in African-American communities," Hollie said. "So they were performed in churches and community events and people would get together and read parts. They weren’t necessarily performed to relive the lynchings but they dealt with people’s emotions.”
The reading will be the start of a series of anti-lynching performances that Hollie hopes will acknowledge the city’s progress, but also highlight the steps towards equality that have yet to be made. Recently, anti-lynching plays have undergone somewhat of a revival. The New York-based art center JACK began performing the plays earlier this year as a medium to discuss events in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore. It’s part of what inspired Carrie Arroyo to team up with Hollie to create the event.
"That’s part of our goal too is bringing those narratives to life and hopefully opening up a space of what do we want our narrative to be as a community and how do we write that together."
The group will read W.E.B DuBois’ “Jesus Christ in Texas” – although not a play, the short story was inspired by Dubois’ visit to Waco after Washington’s lynching. According to the Texas State Historical Association, the heaviest concentration of lynch mobs was here, along the Brazos River, from Waco down to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s within that stretch that 11 counties accounted for 20 percent of all lynch mobs. It’s a history that Jo Welter says needs to be discussed. Welter is the Board Chair of the Waco Community Race Relations Coalition.
"Sometimes you have to open up those old wounds and clean them all out in order for people to heal."
The reading starts at 5:30 on the steps of the 5th-street side of the courthouse. The group will continue the readings throughout the year to urge dialogue about race relations and events that have occured on national and local levels.