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Leonard Woods Lynching
1927 Lynching took place on highway built by cooperation of states.
By MIKE STILL
Staff
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
By MIKE STILL / Media General News Service
(Another
Article depicting the same event)
Kentuckians and Virginians gathered on the state line at Pound Gap nearly 78 years ago to celebrate a new highway as a model of interstate cooperation.
Ten days later, a mob gathered there and cooperated in the lynching of Leonard Woods.
The event leading to Woods’ November 30, 1927 lynching was incendiary enough for a racially segregated time – the black Letcher County miner was arrested for killing a white man after he refused to give him a ride.
(The blacks were intoxicated).
On the night of November 28, mine foreman Herschel Deaton was driving back to Fleming, Ky. after a weekend visit with his wife and parents in Wise County, Va. Riding with Deaton were his friends Ernest Jordon and William Townsley.
According to an account in the Coalfield Progress, Woods and two black women flagged down Deaton between Jenkins and Fleming.
Woods asked for a ride as the women crawled onto the back of the car. Deaton refused and tried to remove the women, and Woods shot him.
Jordon and Townsley later told police that Woods fled after threatening to kill them. Deaton died about 15 minutes later before the two could get help.
As police and deputies learned of the shooting, according to various news reports, they blocked off roads and “started in to pick up suspicious looking Negroes.”
Police found Woods’ companions at a boarding house where they, “under pressure, squealed and gave the name of Leonard Woods.”
Jenkins police chief Sam Privitt and a patrolman found Woods in a hollow near the town on Monday, November 29 and took him and the women to the town jail. As word spread through the town and Letcher County about the shooting and Woods’ arrest, Privitt took the trio to the county jail in Whitesburg for their safety.
The Whitesburg jailer, Fess Whitaker, had died a month earlier in an auto accident and his widow now held the jail keys. She, county Sheriff McReynolds and Chief Privitt soon found themselves besieged by a mob of 200 men wielding crowbars, hacksaws from a nearby store, and high-powered rifles.
“Sheriff (McReynolds) said he pleaded with the mob leaders to let the negro alone, promising quick trial, but the reply was that they had come to Whitesburg to get the negro and were going to get him,” the Progress wrote.
The mob forced its way into the jail with gunfire and crowbars and then used the hacksaws to open Woods and the women’s jail cells.
Woods reportedly saved the women’s lives by telling the mob they had nothing to do with Deaton’s death. Even so, Privitt later told reporters that the crowd beat the women before returning them to their jail cells.
Other Whitesburg jail inmates took advantage of the mob attack to escape.
Privitt pleaded with the mob – now about 500 strong – not to carry out their plan to lynch Woods where Deaton had died.
At that moment, someone in the crowd suggested a ready-made venue - the grandstand where dignitaries from two states just days earlier celebrated the new Pound Gap highway as a means of bringing the two states closer together.
The mob’s choice for a lynching place would spark more controversy a few days later as police and two governors tried to figure out which state hosted the lynching of Leonard Woods.
According to various accounts as many as 500 cars with up to 1,500 people filed to the reviewing stand, set in a rock wall recess on the Virginia side of the state line.
Crawford’s Weekly, another Wise County newspaper, reported that the Kentucky lynch mob posed a question across the state line: “Do Virginians want the Negro lynched?”
Virginia answered.
By 3 a.m. Wednesday, the Kentucky mob arrived at the reviewing stand, along with 36 cars carrying Virginia lynchers who had gone first to Fleming, Crawford’s reported.
Even more Virginians, some of them wearing masks, awaited Woods. The crowd dragged Woods up the stand’s staircase and tied him to a two-by-four rigged on the platform.
And the spirit of cooperation grew as Woods prepared to die in the Old Dominion by a hail of gunfire from the Bluegrass state.
“One report heard Wednesday morning at the scene was that after Woods had been tied on the platform, which was on Virginia soil, the mob stepped back across the line into Kentucky and fired from the Kentucky side,” the Progress reported on Nov. 30.
“Blood spurted from the side of the Negro’s head when the first shot was fired,” Crawford’s reported. “ Then followed a vicious volley that riddled the lifeless form suspended from the timber. The rope which had held him to the timber was shot into shreds and he dropped like a dummy to the platform.
“The rock in the road cut behind the stand was scarred by probably five hundred bullets.”
As the mob gathered around Woods’ body, someone was heard to say: “Let’s burn the black bastard.”
A woman in the crowd, according to Crawford’s, offered to supply the gasoline and the crowd ignited their own pyre to interstate cooperation.
“The mob knew the Negro was dead,” Crawford’s reported. “The mob faded into the night.”
Gawkers and souvenir hunters crowded the site after sunrise Wednesday, taking cartridge cases, bloodstained pieces of wood, and even bullets from Woods’ body. Eventually, the weight of the sightseers collapsed the reviewing stand.
A photograph from that day showed several men standing around Woods’ charred body as well as several cars parked around the site.
Later that day, Woods was buried in a shallow grave about 100 yards away from the scene on the Virginia side before his friends recovered the body and took it back to Kentucky, Crawford’s reported.
In the days following the lynching, Kentucky Governor William J. Fields and Virginia Governor Harry F. Byrd tried to sort through accounts and investigations of the incident. Wise County Sheriff P.D. Kennedy telegraphed Byrd, saying that Woods was lynched by a Kentucky mob and not on Virginia soil, according to Crawford’s Weekly. Letcher County prosecutor Harry L. Moore countered, blaming the lynching on a party from Wise County coming into Kentucky.
The N.A.A.C.P. called on President Calvin Coolidge “as head of the armed forces of the United States to take cognizance of the break-down of orderly government upon the border of the states of Kentucky and Virginia . . .”
Coolidge, in his annual message to Congress, recommended the passage of anti-lynching legislation and said that blacks were especially victims of the “foul crime of lynching.”
Newspapers across the region blasted the act editorially, and Crawford’s noted the irony of the situation.
“Two weeks ago prominent Virginians and Kentuckians stood on an improvised platform at Pound Gap and spoke glowingly of the progress made possible by the highway whose opening at that place was then being celebrated jointly by the two states. Cooperation between the two states was the main thought on that occasion.
“Ten days later a mob of Kentuckians and Virginians, evidently not knowing just what sort of progress the notables were talking about, enacted a joint lynching on that same platform. Progress? Of a kind. Co-operation? Nothing else but.”
Copyright © 1995 2008 Annette Potter All Rights Reserved
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