Where lynching trees still grow: Remembering Claude Neal
The Tuesday Talking Points
On Oct. 19, 1934, Claude Neal, 23, was arrested following the death of a 19-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy. At the time Neal worked as a field hand on a farm owned by Cannidy's father in Greenville, Florida, a small town barely an hour away from Tallahassee, Florida’s capital. While Neal and Cannidy had grown up playing together as friends (and were rumored to have been romantically involved), when her body was found, suspicion immediately turned toward Neal.
Local authorities, including Sheriff Floyd Chambliss, claimed that Neal confessed; the accused was denied anything remotely resembling due process of law, as Neal was interrogated for hours without assistance of counsel. (Nota Bene: Neal's arrest occurred 32 years before all suspects were forever required to be instructed of their right to remain silent per the U.S. Supreme Court's Miranda vs. Arizona decision although even at the time of Neal's arrest, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, at least on paper, provided protection against self-incrimination—rights that were often ignored by law enforcement officials).
Neal's arrest began an odyssey that would find him first placed in custody in nearby Chipley, Florida, then driven across the state line to Brewton, Alabama. The need for the trek was obvious; local white citizens, eschewing a formal legal process in favor of vigilante “justice”, had already indicated that they would kill Neal without a trial.
The Florida NAACP petitioned then-Gov. David Sholtz to send National Guard troops to protect Neal's rights, but Sholtz, more concerned about being re-elected that Fall, hedged—and ultimately did nothing.
On Oct. 26, 1934, 87 years ago today, Neal was abducted from the Brewton, Alabama Jail and subsequently beaten and tortured by a self-styled “Committee of Six,” a motley crew of cowards who took turns torturing him and by some later accounts, forcing Neal to eat parts of his own penis and scrotum. The "Committee" then shot Neal more than 50 times before returning his lifeless corpse to the Cannidy farm, where an estimated 3,000 white men, women and children watched as the more deranged spectators took pictures or cut portions of his remaining extremities for souvenirs.
In a final act of barbarity, Neal's corpse was doused with gasoline and torched, and his charred remains were strung up in the town square—right outside of Sheriff Chambliss’ office—to reinforce a message to local Blacks as United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney had written over seven decades earlier in his Dred Scott opinion, that Blacks "had no constitutional rights that whites were bound to respect."
No one was ever prosecuted or held accountable in civil court for Neal's gruesome murder despite the fact that some of his tormentors lived well into the 1990s—and sometimes boasted about the macabre spectacle that they participated in during the Fall of 1934.
Lest we forget…
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Souvenirs. Sick, sick animals.