A Lynching in the Family

In 1970, at age 17, when Emmett Traylor Jr. and his father locked the door to his law office in Pontiac, Michigan and sat down to have a heart-to-heart talk about Emmett Jr.’s resentments and hurt, Emmett Jr. really didn’t expect to hear what he did. Emmett Jr. just couldn’t understand why he didn’t have a regular father—the kind who showed up at Father-Son days; Boy Scout meetings, class trips, sporting events, and all of the activities that fathers used to display their feelings for their sons. And he was mad about it.

“I didn’t know I hurt you like that,” his father said behind those locked doors. “I didn’t know those things were that important to you. I never had a father to do those things with me.”

That was because Emmett Traylor Sr.’s father, Cary J. Traylor, was lynched in Cobb County, Georgia in 1921, when Emmett Traylor Sr. was 16 months old. And the silence in the family that enveloped that awful event has ricocheted into the present day.

Lynching Impacted Thousands of Families

On December 31, 1952, Tuskegee Institute reported that for the first time since 1892, a year had passed during which no one had been lynched. Tuskegee had been keeping records since its founding in 1892, and since then they had recorded at least one death a year from lynching until 1951.[1] The Chicago Tribune inventoried many different kinds of deaths, including lynching, beginning in 1881. The NAACP began keeping track when it launched its anti-lynching crusade in 1912.[2]

The Tuskegee reports are often viewed as “conservative estimates.” Indeed, the idea of “at least one death a year” really doesn’t seem like very many. But many years saw hundreds of lynchings, and their impact on communities was devastating. The Equal Justice Initiative, the organization focused on combatting death penalty cases and other kinds of malfunctions in the justice system, recently “documented 4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 800 more than previously reported.”[3]

No matter who produced them, all of the tabulations were based on newspaper accounts. But we have many reasons to question at least some of the reported details. First, think about news reports of police-involved shootings of unarmed victims today. The fact that someone was killed is generally undisputed. We know that Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Walter Scott, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, and Philando Castile et al were killed. The socially and legally acceptable reason for police shootings is that the police officer “feared for his or her life.” After a while, this sounds like a talking point: the “I’m late because of traffic” explanation that you know your workplace will readily accept, even if you know that your real reason for being late is that you overslept.

During the lynching era, newspapers reported different socially or legally acceptable justifications for murder. Usually, the victim was said to have committed a crime of some type (the same way that victims of police shootings are described as emergent criminals). Lynch mob leaders never explained why the justice system could not handle whatever crimes the victims were alleged to have committed. But that’s another story.

A second reason to doubt the complete accuracy of newspaper accounts is that they frequently lacked detail about both the lynching and the lynch victim. Spokespeople for lynchings rarely—if ever-- provided any kind of proof of the alleged crime or that the victim had committed it.

Many times, the “crime” was that the victim had tried to assert his or her rights. In 1918, Mary Turner, for example, was eight months pregnant in Valdosta, GA. “After learning of the lynching of her husband, [she] vowed to find those responsible, swear out warrants against them, and have them punished in the courts… A mob of several hundred people wanted to ‘teach her a lesson.’ After “tying her ankles together, they hung her from a tree, head downward. Dousing her clothes with gasoline, they burned them from her body. While she was still alive, someone used a knife to …cut open the woman’s abdomen. The infant fell prematurely from her womb to the ground and cried briefly, whereupon a member of this Valdosta, Georgia mob crushed the baby’s head beneath his heel.”[4]

Details about the lynching victim were also rare. A person’s educational level, or whether a person was married, worked, was a business owner, or many other details simply weren’t reported, most likely because when black lives don’t matter, what difference would these details make?

Third, there were many other lynchings that newspapers never found out about, or were considered too inconsequential to cover. Perhaps if the crowd watching the lynching was small, the murdered person was a child, or the person’s social status was too low to provide the object lesson that lynchings were intended to convey, newspapers just didn’t bother. For all these reasons and more, scholars believe that it is impossible to know with certainty just how many people were lynched.[5]

This brings us back to the lynching in the family. The death of Cary J. Traylor in 1921 does not appear in any newspaper account. It also does not appear in any of the recent scholarship on lynching, either by social scientists or the Equal Justice Initiative. Cary J. Traylor’s death certificate simply reads, “came to his death by being struck on back of head (murder).”

The fog created by a lynching in the family is very difficult to clear. In some ways, the situation seems more suitable for literature than history; the versions of the story are hard to verify. But in the case of Cary J. Traylor, there are at least two versions that stick like lumps in the family’s throat.

Cary J. Traylor was married three times. His first wife, Jesse Baker Traylor, died soon after the birth of their daughter, Jesse Viola Traylor, in 1904. Jesse Viola, who came to be known as “Sugar,” went to live with Cary’s sister Viola in Troup County, GA, sometime before 1910.

Her account, as told later to her own daughter, was that “Cary J. Traylor purchased land in Cobbs County, GA and began to clear trees with the intention of selling the lumber. The former owner of the property told him to stop clearing the trees. She wanted the trees to remain on the property. Cary refused, stating that the property belonged to him. Cary was found dead in the wooded area he had been clearing soon after this encounter. He had been lynched.” Since she was not there, we don’t really know how she came to know these details.

The second version is the account of Cary’s son, Lorenza Traylor, born in 1916. Lorenza was Cary’s eldest son by his third wife, Daisy Traylor, who was also Emmett Traylor Sr.’s mother. Lorenza Traylor told his daughter Donna that he and his mother “found his father in the area where he was clearing trees, and that he had been lynched. His mother turned to him and said that he was ‘now the man of the house.’ He soon began selling apples out on the road.” At the time, Lorenza was 5 ½ years old.

These two accounts, though different, do not conflict. Both leave many questions unanswered. How long was it before Cary’s disappearance led to a search for him? Was there an investigation of his death? What happened to the property Cary purchased? If the family shared these stories among themselves and their neighbors were they frightened that whoever did the lynching would threaten them as well? Who actually did it? And if the “former owner” of the property was a woman, did she use the mythology of rape and insult to southern white women to recruit Cary’s murderer in order to re-possess the property?

Unfortunately, the family may never get the answers to these and other questions. This can happen when there is a lynching in the family.

Emmett Sr. and Emmett Jr. repaired their relationship. Emmett Sr., who graduated from college and law school in 4 ½ years, practiced law throughout Michigan. Emmett Jr. worked with him as an investigator and paralegal until his father died. We will never know exactly what Emmett Sr. thought about the lynching of his father, but we do know that he was licensed to carry a gun and was stopped by the Michigan National Guard during the 1967 Detroit uprising. We also know that he defended members of the Detroit branch of the Black Panther Party for free, and had cases that involved going against the mob. Because of that, and because of his relationship with them, the Black Panther Party provided a kind of security detail for him, following him home from his office every day for about two years. We can’t really say that there was a direct line from his father’s lynching to the man he eventually became, but just these bits and pieces of a life let us know that Emmett Sr. has a story to tell.

Every family has stories that deserve to be known, remembered, and shared.

We are Lift Every Voice LLC, and we do stories.

[1] “1952 IS THE FIRST YEAR WITHOUT A LYNCHING IN U. S. (December 31, 1952),” 23, accessed July 3, 2017, http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1952/12/31/page/A7/article/1952-is-the-first-year-without-a-lynching-in-u-s.

[2] Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 5.

[3] “Legacy of Lynching,” Equal Justice Initiative, accessed July 3, 2017, https://eji.org/racial-justice/legacy-lynching.

[4] Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, First Paperback Edition edition (New York: Vintage, 1999), 288–89.

[5] Bailey and Tolnay, Lynched, 5.

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