The Miners Journal (Pottsville, Pa.), 15 May 1903.
This brief account of the murder of T. Percy Jones snatched at my eye. A man killed by a mob in Wilson in 1903? The backstory is complicated … and surprising.
Jones was a white insurance salesman from Little Rock, Arkansas, who had been boarding at the Fryar Building downtown for several weeks. A crowd of at least eleven white men broke into Jones’ room to confront him about (1) black women occupying his room and (2) suspicions that he was a detective investigating Wilson’s flourishing gambling dens. Allegedly two weeks earlier, the police had gone to Jones’ room looking for Fannie Adams, a black woman from Goldsboro wanted for stealing a watch. Adams was not there, but a letter addressed to her was found, as was a different black woman. Jones allegedly also had been spotted in a “Negro eating house” with a black woman. A posse sent a message to Jones to get out of town. Anticipating conflict, Jones kept a loaded shotgun at the head of his bed. When the mob broke down Jones’ door, guns blazing, Jones fired back. His shot lodged in the ceiling, Jones was struck in the abdomen. (Two of the mob caught friendly fire as well.) The men scattered, jumping out of windows and shimmying down ladders.
The police rounded up fish dealer J.B. Piver, merchant tailor Samuel J. Walls; brickyard laborer, prison guard and whiskey still operator John Pittman; Times pressman George Whitley, who also drove a hose wagon for Wilson Fire Company; W.P. Croom; carpenter William W. Barnes; Lawrence Morgan, who ran a gambling house; William H. Rich, a cotton mill superintendent from Alabama; farmer J. Thomas Bass of Wayne County, N.C.; barkeep Gil D. Ward, originally of Wayne County; and barkeep and Pitt County native John R. Allen, the man who was shot. At the coroner’s inquest, Mayor Doane Herring, who was among the first on the scene, gave testimony unfavorable to the arrested men, and feeling in town ran against them. Additional testimony hinted that police officers W.P. Snakenburg (a 21-year veteran and former police chief), Frank Felton, and George Mumford had been encouraged to make themselves scarce the night of the attack, and A.C.L. Railroad night watchman Peter Nichols had failed to stir when he saw the crowd moving. (Snakenburg was soon fired; Felton drew a ten-day suspension; and Nichols was stripped of police power.)
At trial, Barnes turned state’s evidence, and others each swore their innocence, claiming they had never conspired with their codefendants, were not on the scene, and in general knew nothing about the incident. A single black witness, George Moye, testified:
The Farmer and Mechanic (Raleigh, N.C.), 19 May 1903. This paper carried a blow-by-blow of both the coroner’s inquest and the trial.
In his summation, defense attorney Frederick A. Woodard thundered: “… when this crime came to my knowledge there also came to my mind the fact that a man was living here in sight of a church steeple in adultery with a negro woman. … And had he gotten what his acts deserved he would have been driven out and this horrible killing would have been averted.” Prosecutor F.S. Spruill, who had been brought in from Louisburg, N.C., shot back, “They not only killed the body but this defense has attempted to raise over this body the black name of infamy. Let those who are not guilty throw the first stone. Rich, in [Cora Duty‘s] bawdy house; Morgan in the home of a harlot when arrested and Ward, the slayer of his [black] mistress [in Wayne County.] Can these man point at a man who, it is claimed, has committed adultery?”
The first trial ended in mistrial, but in February 1904, Whitley, Ward, Rich, Pittman, Allen, and Bass were found guilty of the reduced charge of manslaughter and given sentences of six to ten months’ hard labor at the state penitentiary. Piver and Walls were tried separate from the others and were acquitted.
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In the 1900 census of Wilson, Wilson County: kinship laborer George Moye, 52, widow, and boarders Annie Graves, 40, widow, and Cora Williamson, 23, both day laborers.
