The Greenbrier Lynching Case

 On November 22, 1931, at Leslie, West Virginia, it was alleged that two Negroes, Tom Jackson and George Banks, shot and killed two white constables, Brown and Myles, when ordered to be quiet at a dance. These Negroes were indicted for murder and were held in the Greenbrier County jail for trial. Early in the morning of December 10, a mob of between fifty and sixty armed and masked men stormed the Greenbrier County jail, took the two Negroes two miles out on the Midland Trail, hanged them to a cross arm of a telephone post and riddled their bodies with bullets.

After much investigation, none of the parties of the mob were apprehended. Suit was brought by the administrators of Jackson and Banks in the Circuit Court of Kanawha County against Greenbrier County under the Capehart Act which Harry J. Capehart, Negro delegate from McDowell County, proposed and got through the legislature of 1921. This law provides that:

 …the county in which a person is charged with crime, and wherein such person has been taken from a state, county or municipal officer and lynched and put to death, may be subject to a forfeiture of five thousand dollars which may be recovered by appropriate action therefore, in the name of the person representative of the person put to death, for the use of his dependent family or estate.

 The Greenbrier County official attacked the constitutionality of the Capehart Act, but the lower court declared the act constitutional and awarded damages to the administrators of Jackson and Banks to the extent of give thousand dollars in each case. Against the officials of the Circuit Court of Greenbrier County appealed to the Supreme Court. On Monday, May 22, 1932, the Supreme Court handed down a decision refusing to review the acts of the circuit court, thereby confirming the ruling of the circuit court that the act was constitutional.

Summary   

Around these walls of the Supreme Court of West Virginia we read these words: “The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management,” by Thomas Jefferson, and “Firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” by Abraham Lincoln. The spirit embodied in these quotations has truly been applied by the Court in dealing with its colored citizens.