On May 15, 1916, in the town of Waco, Texas, nineteen year old Jesse Washington was lynched. Jesse Washington was a farm hand who was convicted of raping and murdering Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer. There were no eyewitnesses to prove the guiltiness of Jesse Washington. He was taken to Waco’s City Hall for his trial when spectators of the trial dragged him to the front of the building, after being guilty to the jury, and began the lynching of Jesse Washington.
This lynching was probably one of the most torturous lynchings that have happened from racist mob violence with over ten thousand spectators. During the lynching the mob had castrated him, cut all of his fingers off, then doused him in coal oil and hung him over a fire on a tree and repeatedly lowered him into the fire for two hours until he was burned to a crisp. After they hung him over the fire, they dragged his charred body through town and sold his body parts as souvenirs. Pictures that were taken by a professional photographer, were printed and sold as postcards. Disturbingly, some of the spectators included city officials, police officers, and many children who were on their lunch break from school. The Jesse Washington lynching is now known as …show more content…
In To Kill a Mockingbird, those in the community of Maycomb county had a nearly a completely different reaction to Tom’s conviction and verdict than. As read before, those in the community of Waco had a very barbaric reaction to the guilty verdict from the jury. Also in Tom Robinsons trial, he had people like Atticus Finch’s family and friends to help Tom have a better chance of a fair trial of an innocent jury and to help protect him. Another way to compare these is to look at the aftermath, even after over one hundred years of the lynching, people still use this as a way to show how violent our society has been just because of the race of a human