Birmingham, Alabama July 5, 1933. Lynching had become so common in the Jim Crow South by this day in 1933 that all the local Alabama news sources had apparently agreed it wasn’t even newsworthy.
Elizabeth Lawrence was walking home on the afternoon of July 5th when a group of White children began jeering her and pelting her with rocks. She did what any mother would do and reprimanded the kids for their behavior. There would be consequences for this verbal redirection of terrible children as a mob of White men showed up at the Lawrence home later that night and drug Elizabeth out of the house and lynched her for the crime of disrespecting White children who were disrespecting her.
Her son came home and found his mother and their burned-out home he went to the local sheriff and tried to report the crime and was warned on his way there by another Black man that the mob was still looking for him so he ran away and headed north.
The story of Elizabeth Lawrence wasn’t even reported until her son Alexander had made it to safety in Boston and spoke to groups such as the International Labor Defense. Even then no news paper in the South mentioned it. The crime of being a Black woman scolding White children was once again a mortal one, like 361 other victims of the mob in Alabama during the Jim Crow era.
Sources:
https://crrjarchive.org/incidents/434
https://www.al.com/opinion/2018/04/new_memorial_ends_the_silence.html
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