Press release from Haywood County NAACP:
Haywood County NAACP plans a pilgrimage to Montgomery to see the Equal Justice Initiative’s new Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that commemorates victims of lynching. One of the names there is from Haywood County.
On March 4, 1900, in Haywood County, an eight-year-old girl was assaulted. Law enforcement arrested a suspect that same evening in Clyde, known as George Ratcliffe (sometimes spelled “Ratliff”), an African American man employed by the victim’s family on their farm near Clyde. After a hearing in Clyde, officers took Ratcliffe to the county jail in Waynesville.
At 1 a.m. on March 5, Sheriff Haynes was awakened from his bed in the county jail by an angry mob of 40 to 50 masked men. The Sheriff refused to open up, so they broke down the door to his office. When the Sheriff refused to open the door to the prison, the men broke through it. The cells were still locked and had sturdy bars. Deputy Henson refused to undo the combination lock on Ratcliffe’s cell. The prisoner crouched in his cell as the men fired several shots into him. After making sure the prisoner was dead, the crowd departed quietly from the prison. They did not appear to have been drinking.
This story was reported at that time in the local press, including the Citizen-Times of Asheville and the Mountaineer Enterprise.
This incident puts Haywood County in the exhibit at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Equal Justice Initiative found 4,400 lynchings of known individuals between 1877 and 1950. EJI issued a report, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” in 2018, (https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/):
“Racial terror lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. Lynchings in the American South were not isolated hate crimes committed by rogue vigilantes. Lynching was targeted racial violence at the core of a systematic campaign of terror perpetuated in furtherance of an unjust social order. These lynchings were terrorism.
The lynching era left thousands dead; it significantly marginalized black people in the country’s political, economic, and social systems; and it fueled a massive migration of black refugees out of the South. In addition, lynching – and other forms of racial terrorism – inflicted deep traumatic and psychological wounds on survivors, witnesses, family members, and the entire African American community.
EJI believes that publicly confronting the truth about our history is the first step towards recovery and reconciliation.”
The group will also visit some other Civil Rights landmarks as time allows. Anyone interested in learning more about the history of race in our country is welcome to join us.
The NAACP plans to take a bus, leaving at 6:30 a.m. on May 10 and returning on May 11 by 10 p.m. If you are interested in coming along, please call Chuck Dickson’s office at 828-456-8082 to reserve a bus seat and a ticket. Bus seats are $50; tickets to the EJI locations are $11. Travelers will stay at the Comfort Inn and Suites for the night of May 10. To arrange housing, you must call 334-409-9999, and ask for the Haywood County NAACP group rate. Rooms are $106.89 for 2 people; children under 18 can be added at no extra charge. Rooms must be reserved before April 10. Bus seats must be reserved by April 4.
For more information, see the EJI website at: https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum
See this event on the Haywood County NAACP Facebook page at:
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