Thread by @baynardwoods

This new @crimereads story is structured as a reverse murder mystery, where I learn at the beginning that my great-grandfather killed a Black man and the story is my investigative and moral journey to discover the victim of that crime. crimereads.com/baynard-woods-…

Peter J. Lemon, a Black county commissioner in Clarendon County, was one of thousands of Black elected officials or political organizers killed by the Ku-Klux and "rifle-clubs" between 1868-1876.

Lemon was born into bondage in 1842 and fought with the 5th Mass. Calvary during the Civil War. When he returned to Clarendon County, he rented farm-land from a carpetbagger to avoid the sharecropping system and was a member of a Black militia defending against the Klan.

Lemon won a county commissioner seat in the extremely violent election of 1868. Klan violence got worse after the election of 1870. It was so bad that on April 19, 1871, Congress passed the Third Enforcement Act, also known as the KKK Act.

That same evening, as the votes for the act were being cast, a band of white men ambushed Peter Lemon and killed him. I believe my great-grandfather was one. A neighbor found Lemon's body the next morning as Grant signed the Act.

I knew I.M. Woods had fled the state and I go into the evidence I find. But there was also something horribly obvious: Reconstruction was the only time in I.M. Woods' life when such a murder would really be considered a crime in SC.

But at this one moment, with federal enforcement, a white man in SC would be bound and not just protected by the law and a Black man would be protected and not just bound. This story should also make us all think seriously about what we consider crimes.

Almost all crime-reporting is geared toward demonizing Black and poor people while the crimes of white wealthy people are more often covered in the business section.

The news stories about Lemon's murder and the Black protest that followed it lay down the grammar for stories about Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and so many others.

These stories, this invention of "crime," served a purpose. Ultimately, despite his crimes, my great-grandfather did return to the state. And he helped overthrow Reconstruction and was then elected to the legislature that passed and enacted Jim Crow laws.

White nationalists had violently overthrown the nation's only real experiment in multiracial democracy and instituted an apartheid legal system that would last nearly 100 years.

It's not even been 60 years since that apartheid regime was legally undone. The violent transition from Reconstruction to Jim Crow provides today's white nationalists, in the seats and the streets, with models for destroying any semblance of democracy when it threatens whiteness

And the mainstream news is helping the authoritarians. During Reconstruction white supremacist papers also incessantly reported on Black crime and corruption as white supremacist historians did after.

This is to say that the militant vigilantes like I.M. Woods couldn't have overthrown Reconstruction alone. They needed all the "nice" white people and "objective" reporters to lend their support to insure they would have white rule rather than democratic rule.

We white people are all implicated by this and we have to actively fight against it if we don't want to see the same thing happen again.