The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP.

The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP. By Patricia Bernstein. Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 252. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-58544-544-4; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 1-58544-416-2.)

The photographs of Jesse Washington's charred, dismembered body have long haunted American imaginations. Patricia Bernstein's The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP offers a meticulous reconstruction of Washington's 1916 lynching and shrewdly analyzes its local and national repercussions. Vividly written and superbly researched, this monograph will interest scholars of racial violence and Texas history.

Bernstein notes that the lynching of Washington was one of several in early-twentieth-century Waco, a rapidly growing city located on the eastern edges of central Texas--"where the casual violence of the frontier met the mad-dog racism of the Deep South" (p. 16). In May 1916 police officers pressured Washington, a black farmhand, into confessing to the violent murder and rape of his white employer's wife. Seven days after the crime, a jury convicted him of murder in a trial that lasted approximately eighty minutes. White men dragged Washington from the courthouse to the town square before a crowd numbering over ten thousand. A white resident of Waco snapped photographs as the mob sliced body parts from Washington, chained him to a tree, and slowly burned him alive.

Bernstein painstakingly pieces together the series of events that culminated in Washington's lynching. She provides evidence that casts doubt on the authenticity of Washington's confession and on white assertions that the murder victim had been raped. Bernstein uncovers the identities of key mob leaders and traces their lives after the lynching. She examines why law enforcement officials failed to protect Washington after the trial and concludes that their intervention could have prevented the lynching. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, armed with the grisly photographs and incriminating details of the lynching, publicized the brutality of the mob in The Crisis and initiated a campaign that raised nearly $12,000. Its efforts helped intensify national white opposition to lynching. The black residents of Waco have only recently rediscovered the Washington lynching--an incident that local histories and civic leaders have long suppressed.

Bernstein's well-crafted narrative will help ensure that future generations remember this tragic event and recognize the role of local officials in allowing it to take place. Yet the author expresses little interest in tracing the broader social and cultural forces that predisposed white Texans to mob violence. Bernstein implies that powerful whites throughout the South contributed to lynching chiefly as a result of their failure to confront white mobs, which were "preponderantly made up of drunks, bullies, and cowards" (p. 28). This unsubstantiated claim ignores a historiographic tradition that has long portrayed white planters and politicians as active proponents and beneficiaries of mob violence during the early Jim Crow Era. Bernstein suggests that many members of the mob that brutalized Washington were from the farming areas surrounding Waco, but her intensive focus on the site of the lynching leads her to largely ignore the role of rural social tensions in stoking white racist hatreds. Despite these interpretative issues, Bernstein's skill in recounting the Washington lynching makes her book a valuable resource for scholars and general readers.

DAVID FORT GODSHALK

Shippensburg University