Claude Neal was a 23-year-old African-American man who was arrested and lynched in Jackson County, Florida, on October 26, 1934, in one of the most widely publicized and brutal lynchings of the Great Depression era. He never got to trial.
The Spectacle Lynching of Claude Neal by Emory’s Associate Professor of African American Studies, Carol Anderson.
On October 19, 1934, Lola Cannidy, a young Euro-American woman who had gone missing the previous night, was found murdered and was believed to have been raped. That same day, authorities arrested Neal, a 23-year-old farmworker from Greenwood, Florida, and accused him of the crime. When arrested, he was working on a peanut farm belonging to John Green and had grown up across the road from the Cannidy family. He was taken into custody with other relatives who were initially suspected of involvement and questioned at length. Officials later claimed that Neal confessed and signed a written confession stating that he had acted alone, but given the climate of racial terror and the fact that he was questioned in isolated locations, it is highly likely that any “confession” was the product of physical coercion.
As soon as word spread of Neal’s arrest, Euro-American lynch mobs began to form. A band of several hundred armed men—carrying guns, knives, torches, and dynamite—began searching for him in every jail within a seventy-five-mile radius of Marianna. This manhunt forced officials to shuttle Neal from one lockup to another across the Florida panhandle, first from Marianna to Panama City by car, then to Camp Walton by boat, and finally to the sheriff of Escambia County. Fearing that his own jail was too dilapidated to withstand a mob assault, the sheriff ultimately ordered that Neal be removed from the state altogether and placed in the tiny town of Brewton, Alabama.
Despite these efforts, someone leaked Neal’s location. A lynching party of roughly one hundred men then drove several hours along Highway 231 in a caravan of about thirty cars from Florida to Alabama. Once there, they distracted the local sheriff, overpowered the deputy guarding the jail, and seized Neal, binding his limbs with plow rope before taking him back toward Marianna and Jackson County. There, he would be subjected to a prolonged and sadistic ordeal of torture before being killed.
Neal’s principal abductors—a self-described “committee of six”—informed newspapers that they intended to lynch him at 8 p.m. at the Cannidy farm, when most people would be home from work. They claimed that Neal did not deserve a trial because of the alleged “heinousness” of his crime. News of the planned “spectacle lynching” was published in the Dothan Eagle, announced on a Dothan, Alabama, radio station, and picked up by the Associated Press and International News Service, turning the event into a regional attraction. The governor of Florida was informed but insisted that he could only send the National Guard if local officials requested help; they did not.
Well before the announced hour, several thousand people had gathered at the Cannidy farm. The crowd, which included people drawn from other states by the advance publicity, grew so large and unruly that the “committee of six,” fearing a riot, decided to take Neal instead to a wooded area near the Chipola River, about four miles from Greenwood, and torture him there before killing him.
In the woods, the mob subjected Neal to extreme sexualized and physical torture. His captors castrated him, forced him to put the severed body parts in his mouth “and say he liked it,” stabbed him repeatedly, and burned his flesh with hot irons. They tied a rope around his neck and repeatedly hoisted him into the air until he began to choke, then lowered him only to raise him again, continuing this cycle of hanging and abuse until he died. One participant later gave a detailed account of this torture, describing how the mob sliced Neal’s sides and abdomen with knives, cut off his fingers and toes, and used red-hot irons “from head to foot.”
Because Neal was killed in the woods, the crowd gathered at the Cannidy farm never witnessed his final moments. After the killing, his body was tied to a rope attached to the rear of an automobile and dragged over the highway to the Cannidy home. When the car reached its destination, a man riding on the rear bumper cut the rope while a mob—estimated at between 3,000 and 7,000 people from at least eleven Southern states—waited in a state of frenzied anticipation. According to contemporary reports, Lola’s father, George Cannidy, furious that Neal had been killed before he could get to him, fired three shots into Neal’s forehead, saying, “They done me wrong about the killing. They promised me they would bring him up to my house before they killed him and let me have the first shot. That’s what I wanted.” A woman emerged from the Cannidy house and drove a butcher knife into Neal’s chest. The crowd then attacked his corpse, kicking and stabbing it and running over it with automobiles, while some people severed toes and fingers to keep as souvenirs; children were encouraged to stab the body with sharpened sticks.
Neal’s mutilated body, by now scarcely recognizable, was then taken to Marianna, roughly ten or eleven miles away, and hung from a tree outside the county courthouse around 3 a.m. When the sheriff cut down the body later that morning, a mob of up to two thousand people demanded that it be rehanged. When the sheriff refused, they attacked the courthouse and rampaged through Marianna, assaulting any African-American they encountered.
Photographs were taken of Neal’s nude, mutilated body, which would later be sold widely for fifty cents each. Scores of people came to view his corpse where it swung in the courthouse square until, in the small hours of the morning, someone draped a burlap sack over his midsection. The body was cut down at about 6 a.m. on Saturday, October 27, 1934, and buried by the sheriff.
In the days that followed, Euro-American mobs rioted in an effort to drive African-Americans out of Jackson County. They injured an estimated two hundred people, including law officers, and destroyed African-American homes and businesses. Only after the governor called out 129 troops of the Florida National Guard were the riots brought under control.
Although circumstantial evidence was assembled against Neal, nothing conclusively linked him to Lola Cannidy’s murder. The spectacle lynching provoked outrage across the United States; thousands of people wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanding federal intervention and anti-lynching legislation. The NAACP compiled a sixteen-page report on the case and maintained more investigative files on Neal’s lynching than on any other single lynching in its history. Yet no one was ever prosecuted or served a day in jail for his death: a Jackson County grand jury concluded, in the familiar phrasing of such inquests, that he had died “at the hands of persons unknown.”
Not long afterward, it emerged that Neal and Cannidy—who had known each other since childhood—had in fact been lovers, and that members of her family who discovered their relationship may have been implicated in her death for the “disgrace” they believed it brought on the household. The following summer, Cannidy’s father was convicted of assault with intent to kill his own niece because he suspected that her branch of the family had been involved in Lola’s death. In sentencing him to five years in prison, the judge remarked, “I hate to pass this sentence on an old man such as you, but I must do it. To be perfectly fair with you, I don’t believe you have any too many brains,” to which Cannidy replied, “Yes, judge. I am plumb crazy.”
For years afterwards, Neal’s severed fingers and toes were preserved and displayed in Marianna as grotesque trophies of the lynching. One man reportedly offered to divide a finger he possessed with a friend “as a special favor,” while another kept a finger preserved in alcohol.
Source:
http://www.nathanielturner.com/lynchingclaudeneal.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Claude_Neal
http://snakesonmccain.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-warmth-of-other-suns-florida-and.html
