Fifteen thousand people gathered in a Texas town square to watch a 17-year-old be burn€d alive. A professional photographer set up in advance, because the pictures were going to sell. Schoolchildren were let out to attend. The mayor watched from a window. Jesse Washington. Waco, 1916. He was a farmhand with limited schooling, convicted in a trial that took roughly an hour. Before the sentence could mean anything, the crowd took him from the courtroom itself. We will not describe what was done in that square. It is in the NAACP's investigation, gathered by an undercover investigator named Elisabeth Freeman, who arrived in Waco days later and got the whole thing on the record. The photographs were printed as POSTCARDS and mailed.

They organized to demand fair pay for their own cotton. In response, a mob, U.S. troops, three days of hunting Black sharecroppers through the fields—and the deaths of 100 to 200+ Black men, women, and children. This is the The Elaine Massacre of 1919. Their crime was organizing a union so cotton planters would finally pay them a fair price for their own crops. When white landowners found out, they didn't send lawyers. They sent a mob of hundreds, backed by U.S. troops. Twelve Black survivors were then sentenced to death for "inciting" the violence done to them. They organized for fair pay. The response was armed violence, a massacre, and then death sentences for the people who survived it. The Elaine Massacre is one of the histories we documented in our book. They tried to punish the victims and bury the story. We put the story back on the record savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…