The Naturalista

October 31, 2015

Halloween with the Weatherspoons. Kelly and Titan as Minnie and Mickey Mouse. How cute.

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Spectacle: The lynching of Claude Neal

Allie Mae Neal pushed through the screen door and found a shady spot on her porch where the summer sun didn’t bite. Kittens purred at her feet and wasps flitted in and out of holes in the roof. The few neighbors who passed by saw an old woman in a wheelchair, blue eyes lazy and unfocused behind thick glasses. She’d wave and they’d wave back. Black or white. She has never held a grudge.

"I never blamed nobody," she said. "I never knew who to blame."

She never knew because nobody was ever charged with a crime, and because no man spent a single second in a cell for the things they did to her father, with knives and rope and hate.

Seventy-seven years have passed. She can’t remember his face. If she ever wanted to look, she could study the single photograph of him that exists. But in it, he is hanging from a tree.

The story of her father’s death ran in newspapers from New York to Los Angeles, detailing how a small band of men killed him, and how a mob mutilated his corpse. They called it a spectacle lynching, and historians say it was perhaps the worst act of torture and execution in 20th century America. The killing became Florida’s shame. President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew her father’s name.

Claude Neal.

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