"The Baker Family" [1898]

Shortly before 1:00 in the morning on February 22,1898,Frazer Baker,an African American postmaster in the predominantly hamlet of Lake City,South Carolina,awoke to discover a raging fire deliberately set in the back of the small wooden structure that housed both his family and the town's post office.Caught between the rising flames,and a group of hostile and and well-armed white men outside the building,Frazier,and Lavinia, (his wife),and their six children sought unsuccessfully to douse the blaze.As they prepared to flee the post office,the mob opened fire.The postmaster was shot several times and collapsed,fatally wounded.The barrage of gunfire continued unabated,and the three eldest Baker children were all seriously injured before they they could escape through the open door into the night.Lavinia attempted to follow with her infant daughter Julia,a bullet passed though her hand,killing Julia,and tearing her from Lavinia's arms.Struck in the leg by a second bullet,Lavinia collapsed beside the burning building.The mob then dispersed as quietly as it had appeared.As flames consumed the wooden structure,local African Americans drawn by gun fired offered sanctuary in their homes to the new window and her five surviving children.The reluctance of most southern whites to condome the murders of Frazier & Julia presented a chink in the armor of white supremacy which early antiplynching  activists--and ultimately the federal government-- might attach lynching.For ounce Washington replaced rhetorical equivocation with a forceful response.The reaction of the federal government grew less out of moral outrage,than in response to the political pressure skillfully applied by African Americans.Anti lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett and U.S.Representative George White of North Carolina" "Black Second"Congressional district,the last African American in Congress two decades after the end of Reconstruction,helped to mobilize grassroots protests aimed at forcing the government's hand.African American in South Carolina's throughout the South,and northern cities attended mass meetings protesting the lynching of the Bakers and signed memorials demanding a federal effort to bring the guilty parties to justice.Fourteen months later,after an extensive investigation,federal prosecutors arraigned thirteen white men in federal court in Charleston,South on charges of conspiracy to deprive Frazier of his civil rights.Since South Carolina's legal system had failed to take any effective action to apprehend Bakers'lynchers,the federal relied on a series of Congressional statues collectively known as the Enforcement Acts to prosecute mob members for felonies committed pursuant to a conspiracy against Frazier.The Enforcement Acts,passed during Reconstruction in 1870 & 1871,were intended to protect African Americans'civil rights as guaranteed by the Thirteenth,Fourteenth,and Fifteenth amendments from infringement  by southern whites.After a federal grand jury there was sufficient evidence to try the accused lynchers,the government's attorneys found their best efforts stymied by the resolve of the white Lake City community to protect its own.In the subsequent trial,friends and relatives of the accused perjured themselves repeatedly to provide alibis for the men.As closing arguing began.the U.S.District Court proceedings in Charleston degenerated into a grand political circus.Lawyers for the thirteen white defendants largely ignored the government's well-constructed case and even glossed over the evidence they had presented in rebuttal;riddled with internal contradictions,it had been equally damning.Instead,they resorted to a naked appeal to the racist sensibilities of an all-white jury.(Three years after South Carolina's Constitutional Convention of 1895 stripped the state's African American of the ballot,they were already being systematically excluded from juries.)white supremacy,the lawyers,argued,demanded acquittal of the defendants.The government lawyers responded to the legal farce with lily-white protestations of their own.They agreed with the defendants that the Republicans'appointment of Frazier to the post mastership of Lake City had been a grievous error,they insisted mob rule was an effort to the civilization whites professed to be defending. On that basis,and with the overwhelming weight of the evidence,the jurors,should convict those accused of lynching Frazier & Julia baker.In his final appeal to the twelve impaneled white men,the chief prosecutor spoke eloquently of "outrage justice."Without true justice--as opposed to the grisly sentences meted out by bloodthirsty lynch mobs--southerns might just as well "shut the school houses,burn the books,tear down the churches and admit to the world that Anglo Saxon civilizations is a failure.After twenty- two hours of deliberation,an irreconcilably divided jury produced a mistrial;evidence suggested approximately half of the jurors had voted to convict the white men for the lynching of the Bakers.The federal government never resumed prosecution of the case.The proceedings in Charleston had been relatively unusual in that whites were so rarely brought to trial at all for the crime of lynching.It was uncommon for corner's juries in the South to conduct cursory investigations into lynchings,the inquests,often composed of participants in the mob itself,were apt to be open mockeries of justice.One jury investigating a lynching reputedly rendered the solemn verdict:"the deceased came to his death by swinging in the air";another.the deceased came to his death by taking too great a bite of hemp rope."Within this context, the willingness of a federal grand jury made up of white southerns to indict the lynchers and the refusal of a second jury to grant outright acquittals in the trial might be considered evidence of progress.Any optimism in this respect should be tempered by the knowledge that the federal government rarely took such aggressive stance against lynching following the Baker case,and the turn of  the century saw ongoing lynchings joined by an even more deadly phenomenon: "race riots in Phoenix,South Carolina,Wilmington,North Carolina,New Orleans,Atlanta,and other cities.These explosions of violence  left scores of African Americans dead and were less "riots than massacres,clearly illuminating the extent to which some southern whites were willing to go to perpetuate white supremacy.From the time of the attack on the Bakers in 1898,African American anti-lynching advocates in Boston considered asking the surviving family members to leave Charleston-- where they had lived while waiting the outcome of the trial-- to settle in the North.In late July of 1899,a young white woman named Lillian Clayton Jewett electrified a Boston meeting of African Americans when she offered to lead personally a campaign to "rescue"the Bakers ,who were reportedly in dire financial straits.Lilian appearance touched off an acrimonious debate those African Americans Bostonians who supported her efforts and others who resented the sudden intrusion of an unfamiliar white woman into what what had been an exclusively African American effort.Against the wishes of many of the city's African American elite,Lilian secretly boarded a train heading south.In Charleston she convinced the Bakers of her good intentions,and the family agreed to accompany her.On the trip North Lilian rested in a sleeping car,while in a day coach the Bakers struggled to make out the charred ruins of the Lake City post office when the train passed within yards of the site of the lynching.Lilian African-American supporters in the North likened her to Harriet Stowe,an earlier white heroine of the anti-slavery moment.By bringing the Bakers out of the benighted South,they eulogized,she had performed veritable "underground railroad work."She appeared with the Bakers before large gatherings as an object lessons against lynching,she strongly denounced President McKinley for his failure to take public stand against mob rule in the South.Audiences responded enthusiastically to Lilian political message,but they were less eager to meet her request for donations to provide for the Bakers'future.When contributions continued to drop off in subsequent meetings,her crusade quickly faltered.In the South,white critics following media coverage of Lilian charged her with exploiting the Bakers'misery for profit.An African American nurse who had accompanied the family from Charleston voiced similar concerns:"The Bakers had not come North for exhibition purposes...they are not to be treated like monkeys in a cage and trotted around from place to place."What ever Lilian's true intentions,the Bakers soon realized that the controversy surrounding the young white woman was harming their chances of obtaining economic support.In September Lavinia Baker made direct appeal to the public for support.Interpreting the plea as rebuff,Lilian declared herself finished with the family.William Lloyd Garrison II,the son of the abolitionist,raised twelve hundred dollars to provide a home for the Bakers near Boston.Glade to escape the notoriety that had followed them for nearly two years,the survivors of the Lake City lynching finally retired from the nation's newspapers headlines.During the next twenty years,four of the Baker childernfell victim to tuberculosis,a disease endemic among Boston's poorer African Americans.When her last died in in 1942,Lavinia returned to South Carolina.She died in 1947 Florence County,less than twenty miles away from Lake City.