NC county revisits apology to remember another Black man killed by lynching
Washington Morrow never made it to trial after he and his older brother Nelson were arrested on arson charges in August 1869 and taken to the Hillsborough jail.
The charges against the Black farmworkers were “dubious,” according to Deborah-Patrice Hamlin, who will talk about their story at a May 6 event at the Orange County Courthouse.
Masked Ku Klux Klansmen took Washington and Nelson Morrow from the jail on Aug. 7, 1869, and shot them. Washington Morrow died from his wounds a few days later. His brother survived, but Morrow’s father and his uncle were lynched just two months later.
They and others will be honored April 29 with a soil-collection ceremony at the Orange County Courthouse on Margaret Lane in Hillsborough. A Community Remembrance Project marker is also planned for the front lawn of the Old Orange County Courthouse.
The Orange County commissioners voted unanimously last year to erect the marker and issue a resolution apologizing for the deaths of five men killed in acts of lynching and racial terror during Reconstruction.
The apology calls out the county’s sheriff, judges and other elected officials, because they did not attempt to stop the lynchings or prosecute the killers, violating their oaths of office.
Washington Morrow’s name was left off that list, but on Tuesday, the commissioners voted unanimously without comment to rectify the oversight.
Orange County, NC lynching victims
The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has cataloged more than 6,000 “racial terror” lynchings in 12 Southern states between 1865 and 1950, but historians and others have said that estimate is far too low.
In North Carolina, more than 173 Black people were officially lynched following the Civil War, according to the A Red Record project at UNC-Chapel Hill. Countless more have been forgotten.
The justice initiative is providing Orange County and other communities with the markers, which cost about $500 to install and will be replaced at no charge if the originals are vandalized or damaged, county officials have said. A marker also is planned for Carrboro Town Hall.
Other lynching victims who will be honored are:
▪ Jefferson Morrow and Daniel Morrow: Orange County farmer Jefferson Morrow and his brother-in-law Daniel Morrow were accused of burning a barn and insulting women. They were taken from their homes near Hillsborough on Oct. 14, 1869, by a mob of masked Klansmen on horseback and hanged.
▪ Wright Malone: Accused of making “certain remarks” to a white girl, he was abducted on Sept. 6, 1869, by four white men while working with his father at the family’s coal kiln. Woods was hanged near the banks of the Little River, where his body was later found with a note attached to his foot that read: “If the law will not protect virtue, the rope will.”
▪ Cyrus Guy: The 20-year-old Afro-Indigenous farmer grew up in a family that gained its freedom before the Civil War, but on Dec. 2, 1869, Guy was seized from his family’s farm by a mob of Klansmen. He was hanged near the present day intersection of Faucette Mill and Lebanon roads.
▪ Manly McCauley: The 18-year-old Black man was seized after eloping with a married white woman who lived near Carrboro. McCauley was hanged from a dogwood tree on Oct. 30, 1898, near Hatch and Old Greensboro roads. Four white men were tried and acquitted of his murder.
Apologies, reparations for Black residents
A soil-collection event, hosted by the Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition, will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. April 29 in the Battle Courtroom of the Orange County Courthouse. The event will honor five lynching victims; a private ceremony was held for Manly McCauley in 2019.
The April 29 event will also include proclamations, a libation ceremony for those killed — pouring out liquid or grains to honor the dead — and a presentation to their descendants.
The group is collecting two jars of soil from each of the sites where a victim is thought to have been murdered. One jar will remain in Orange County. The other will be sent to the EJI Legacy Museum in Alabama, where it be displayed beside jars representing McCauley and lynching victims from other states.
Other communities have had similar conversations, while others have wrestled with the history of white violence, including in Durham, where the City Council in 2020 called for a federal reparations program, a universal basic income, federal or federally funded living-wage jobs, and a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour to start.
Asheville and Buncombe County elected leaders also have supported reparations for Black residents.
In Raleigh, The News & Observer reported this week that Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin twice delayed discussing a resolution that could include an apology from the city for how it treated Black people in the past. The issue arose as a local Quaker group was working with the city’s Human Relations Commission to address the reparative justice issue.
The N&O cited public documents that showed Baldwin asked a staff member to remove names from a public comment list if they wanted to speak about reparative justice, and later requested that the city attorney review the “reparative justice issue” before letting the Human Relations Commission examine the issue.
Baldwin has denied asking to have names removed from the public comment list, and told The N&O that she was only asking the city attorney for legal advice.
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