Lynching in America / The Courthouse Lynching of Theo Calloway

Lynching in America, also, The Courthouse Lynching of Theo Calloway. Community Remembrance Project. Lynching in America. Between the end of the Civil War and the close of World War II, white mobs killed thousands of Black Americans in racial terror lynchings, and committed widespread violence that traumatized millions more. The Lowndes County Courthouse was built in 1856, when thousands of Black people remained enslaved in this community. For generations afterward, here and throughout the South, law enforcement offered Black residents little or no protection from racial violence. In addition to the 1888 lynching of Theo Calloway on these courthouse grounds, at least six more of Lowndes County's 16 documented African American lynching victims were seized from jail or police custody when killed: William Westmoreland (1896), John Jackson (1900), William Jones (1914), Samuel and William Powell (1917), and G. Smith Watkins (1935). During this era, white lynch mobs were also emboldened by legal systems that refused to arrest, prosecute, or punish mob members after lynchings took place. As late as 1948, in this courthouse, a grand jury refused to indict white men who admitted to shooting and killing Elmore Bolling, a prosperous Black businessman. Most documented Lowndes County lynchings never even resulted in a lyncher's arrest, and none ever led to a conviction for murder., The Courthouse Lynching of Theo Calloway. On March 29, 1888, a mob of at least 200 white men lynched Theo Calloway, a 24-year-old Black man, near this courthouse in Lowndes County, Alabama. Mr. Calloway was accused of killing a white man and insisted that he had acted in self defense, but he never had the chance to stand trial. During this era, Black people were regularly denied fair trials and due process, and seized from jails and police custody while armed officers made no effort to protect them. Aided by the local sheriff, the white mob abducted Mr. Calloway from jail just hours before he was scheduled to appear in court, hanged him from a chinaberry tree on the courthouse lawn, and riddled his body with bullets. Theo Calloway, one of at least eleven children, was from nearby Sandy Ridge. His parents, Johnson and Fanny Calloway, learned of their son's lynching when they arrived to attend his hearing and instead had to retrieve his mangled corpse. For months afterward, Lowndes County Black residents protested Mr. Calloway's lynching, but local newspaper headlines applauded the mob's act: "Taken from Jail in the Approved Style, and Judicial Expenses Saved." With support from the governor, the same local law enforcement and state officials who had failed to prevent the illegal mob murder violently confronted and arrested dozens of Black people for demanding justice for Mr. Calloway. No one was ever punished for his lynching.