In the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 32:35), God tells the people of Israel, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” For members of Waco’s Black community steeped in faith, God seemed to be exacting his revenge, albeit 37 years later.
Tyler B. Davis’ book God of the Whirlwind revisits the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington, which W.E.B. DuBois called the Waco Horror, and the deadly tornado that tore through Waco on May 11, 1953.
Native American legend held that Waco was immune from tornadoes because of the geography in the region, a myth that was quickly dispelled by the strongest and deadliest tornado in Texas history that laid waste to the city’s downtown before heading north. Thunderstorms made it difficult to see the funnel cloud as it approached, and dozens of people sought shelter from the rain in buildings that quickly collapsed.
The tornado has been described as “agonizingly slow.” Moving at a pace of just 5 miles per hour, it seemed to last forever, inflicting massive damage over a long period of time, leaving 104 people dead and 600 injured in its wake.
Eyewitnesses found it eerily coincidental that the twister appeared to follow the path of the Waco Horror. While divine justice for Jesse Washington may have been as agonizingly slow as the tornado itself in coming, scripture is full of references to God’s timetable. 2 Peter, 3:8 reminds “that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
The details of the lynching are disturbing. Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old farmhand, was indicted for the murder of his employer’s wife, Lucy Fryer, and found guilty on May 15, 1916. After the verdict was read, he was seized by an angry mob, stabbed and beaten. At city hall, a group of people gathered wood for a bonfire. After his body was doused with coal oil, he was hanged from a tree by a chain, and raised and lowered into the flames until he burned to death.
The German historian Manfred Berg, who serves as the Curt Engelhorn Chair in American History at Heidelberg University, suggested that the point was to keep him alive long enough to inflict as much suffering as possible. It was reported that a group of children pulled the teeth out of Washington’s mouth as souvenirs before his charred remains were tossed into a bag like trash, dragged through the city’s streets, and transported to Robinson where he was hung from a telephone pole.
Fred Gildersleeve, a local photographer, arrived at city hall before the lynching and produced postcards from the photographs he took that day. In some of them, you can see children as young as 12 gathered around the body. No one was arrested even though lynching was illegal in Texas. Later that day, a constable brought Washington’s remains back to Waco where they were buried in an unmarked grave.
In the Black community, however, Jesse Washington has not been lost to history. Those who remembered the Waco Horror had been passing his story and the story of the whirlwind down to their children and then their grandchildren for decades. To write God of the Whirlwind, Tyler B. Davis — who holds a Ph.D. in theological studies from Baylor — recorded the oral histories of nine Black Wacoans, many who believe that the tornado was a “sign of poetic justice in a place — in the place — where racial injustice had been a viciously defining feature.” Others contend that the “whirling tower of wind revisiting the scene of Washington’s lynching was a revelation of the justice of God.”
Stevie Walker-Webb, a Tony Award-nominated, Obie Award-winning director and playwright, who wrote the Foreword to the book, remembers growing up in Waco where he heard stories about Jesse Washington from his grandmother, Lucille Webb.
“Our stories, our songs, our survival, and our culture,” he said, “are our greatest inheritance.”
Michael Babers learned about Jesse Washington only after leaving Waco to go to college. Since discovering, in his own family, an oral tradition that connects the lynching to the tornado, he has devoted himself to works of remembrance, acknowledgement, and truth-telling.
While in 1916 the sentence for murder in Texas was hanging, Babers points out that Washington wasn’t hanged — he was lynched. The difference between the two, he said, is profound.
“He was taken out of the cell. He was burned. He was hanged. He was shot. His genitals were cut off. Fingers were cut off, toes cut off. Then, he was dragged throughout the city,” Babers said. “That’s lynching. That’s a whole lot different than hanging.”
Babers has always been conflicted about Washington’s guilty verdict, which was based on a written confession he made under duress in Dallas, deprived of sleep, with the mark of an X.
Bettie Beard was a child in 1953 when the tornado touched down (she hid under the bed). While she remembers hearing the whirlwind story when she was growing up, she prefers to focus on the historical facts about Jesse Washington.
“Not many Blacks that I’ve come into contact with believe Jesse Washington was guilty,” she said. “They felt he was simpleminded and it was easy to paint him as guilty.”
LaRue Dorsey, whose grandmother was born into slavery, is a giant in Texas education. She taught for 62 years and was director of the renowned LaRue’s Learning Center, which supported the education of Black and low-income children. She still has vivid memories of segregation in Waco where she was not permitted to use the restrooms downtown at any of the stores. Instead, she had to walk eight blocks to the interurban railway station.
“Waco was different in that even going to the store to buy clothes, we were not allowed to try the clothes on. You had to hold them up to see if it was going to fit. You couldn’t try on shoes, hats, or anything,” remembered Dorsey, who knew that a good education was key if she wanted to avoid spending the rest of her life in the field picking cotton.
Still, she didn’t see segregation in a bad way when she was growing up.
“When you’re a little kid, you’re not paying too much attention. You say, ‘Oh, this is our neighborhood. This is what we have to do,’” she said.
It was only later when she was denied jobs for which she was more than qualified that she began to see segregation for what it is: racism.
Ramad Carter grew up in East Waco, a predominately Black community, and had never experienced prejudice until he moved to North Waco, which he describes as culture shock. He only learned about Jesse Washington after hearing the song “Strange Fruit” for the first time. His take on the whirlwind story has metaphysical undercurrents.
“I think that when you hurt Black people — African folks — you anger the ancestors. They come back for revenge. It may not be instantaneous, but at some point, that energy from that comes and manifests itself,” he said. “I really believe that that’s what the tornado was. I believe it was manifested energy of ancestral magic.”
Reverend George Oliver learned to look for meaning in the wind from his grandmother, who read the Bible by a kerosene lamp during Gulf Storms in Edna. Sometimes she read the Psalms, other times it was Lamentations. If she was reading Job, it was understood that this storm was going to be a really bad one, and she’d tell her grandson, “Be still while God is doing his holy work.”
As for the whirlwind story that has been passed down for generations, Oliver believes it was a way for Black people to “work out the goodness of God.” If the God of love is also the God of accountability, he said, then there’s hope for people who feel dispossessed.
Baylor University published a front-page story the day after the lynching apologizing for the “horrific, dehumanizing treatment of Jesse Washington.” Beard believes that as a Christian school, it was the right thing to do.
Babers has been active in political life in Central Texas for years, first with the NAACP and later with the Community Race Relations Commission (CRRC). Charged with rehabbing Waco’s reputation, which had been sullied by the lynching of Jesse Washington, members worked tirelessly to get a resolution condemning the murder of Jesse Washington read on the steps of the courthouse.
Ray Meadows, a former McLennan County commissioner, had no interest in apologizing, telling NPR, “It’s a very ugly part of history, I will say that, and I regret it happened. But as far as me coming out and apologize, I didn’t have anything to do with it.” Nevertheless, a small interracial group of Waco residents, none of whom it must be noted had anything to do with it either, did show up on May 15, 2006, exactly 90 years after the Waco Horror to acknowledge difficult truths about the city’s past.
According to records maintained by the NAACP, 4,743 people were lynched in the U.S. between 1882 to 1968. On March 21, 1981, two members of the Ku Klux Klan in Mobile, Alabama, lynched Michael Donald, a 19-year-old Black man. It is the last recorded lynching on record in the United States. That doesn’t mean the country seen the last of racially motivated killings.
In 1992 white supremacists in Texas chained a Black man, James Byrd Jr., to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to his death. In 2008, an Ecuadorian immigrant named Marcelo Lucero was killed by a group of teenagers in Patchogue, New York. In 2010 a white supremacist shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, while in Georgia in 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was shot to death by three white men who had been stalking him while he was jogging.
So, what can we do to prevent hate crimes in our communities? Babers believes that if we talk to one another, clear up misconceptions that may exist, and keep those conversations going that there’s no room for hate. That’s why gathering on the courthouse steps with other members of the community to read a resolution condemning and apologizing for the lynching of Jesse Washington was so meaningful for him.
“It’s important that we go back, remember and repent,” he said. “So that we can move forward.”
