'That sends you to hell': The unsolved 1927 lynching of Henry Choate

A  mob lynched 18-year-old Henry Choate from the second-floor balcony of the
Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., on Nov. 11, 1927.
(CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

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The cemeteries along Old Zion Road in Columbia, Tennessee, lie only 300 yards apart — but they might as well be worlds away.

Is this Henry Choate's grave?

The grounds of Zion Presbyterian Church Cemetery are immaculate. Its trees are neatly trimmed, its stones upright and legible. Among the more than 1,500 buried here are Confederate veterans —including Sam Watkins of Company Aytch fame, — and soldiers from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Slaves built the Greek Revival brick church that anchors the property. 

Across a narrow two-lane road lies another resting place: Salem Church Cemetery. Here, weeds and wildflowers grow unchecked. Broken markers jut from the soil. 

The headstone of Marsh Mayes, who lived 99 years, leans against a tree. Deary Armstrong’s marker is nearly hidden beneath purple blooms. Dixie Lou Bates — dead at 24 in 1943 — rests among stumps and debris. Most inscriptions are too weathered to read. 

“Watch out for the holes,” a woman warns me as I walk the grounds.

Subsidence has left the cemetery pocked and uneven, like a World War I battlefield in France or Belgium. A stagnant ditch borders one side — a grim punctuation mark.

“Watch out for the holes,” warned a woman who lives next to Salem Church Cemetery.
Some of the graves have subsided, giving the grounds the look of a World War I battlefield.

The Salem Church Cemetery gravestone of Marsh Mayes, who almost lived a century.

Somewhere in this forlorn place lie Freeman and Mattie Choate, their daughter Myrtle and their son Henry. Freeman, a former phosphate miner, died in 1945 at 72, cause unknown. Mattie succumbed to kidney disease four years earlier. Myrtle died in 1939 of food poisoning and “insufficient diet.” 

And Henry — just 18 when he died in 1927 — may lie beneath a small stone marked only with the initials H.S.C. There’s no last name, so perhaps he isn’t buried there at all. But I know he’s out here somewhere. And I know what killed him. The word, written in cursive on his death certificate, says it plainly: “Lynched.”

Henry Choate is why I’m here.

Henry Choate's death certificate. Cause of death: "Lynched."  (Courtesy Tina Cahalan Jones)

'Maury County has been disgraced'

The headlines in the Nashville Tennessean on Nov. 12, 1927, remain as jarring as they were when they came off the printing press:

“Negro Lynched in Columbia for Attack on Girl.”

“Unmasked Mob Estimated at 350 Men Storms Jail With Sledge Hammers.”

“Deaf to Pleas.”

Front-page headlines in the Nashville Tennessean
 on Nov. 12, 1927.

From 1882-1969, according to records maintained by the NAACP, 4,743 people were lynched — an indelible stain on our history. The vast majority of victims were Black. Most of the lynchings occurred in the South. Henry Choate’s death, on Armistice Day 1927, was one of them — and one of the most horrifying.

Earlier that day, Choate had been accused of assaulting Sarah Harlan, a 16-year-old white girl, as she waited for a school bus on a remote stretch of road five miles from Columbia. Choate denied he was the attacker. 

The assailant reportedly nearly tore away Harlan’s clothing and attempted to shoot her. She screamed. According to the Tennessean, the attacker struck her on the forehead with the butt of a pistol and apparently attempted to strangle the teen, one of nine children raised by a widow. Sarah scratched her assailant and bit his finger, drawing blood. The assailant fled when she told him her brother was approaching, a ruse.

“Now I’ll guess you’ll get it,” Harlan said, the Tennessean reported.

The Nashville Tennessean
published Sarah Harlan's
photo on Nov. 13, 1927. She couldn't
positively indentify Henry Choate
as her assailant. 

Using bloodhounds named Queen and George, a law enforcement posse went to the house of Choate’s grandfather, where they arrested Henry. According to officers, Choate had changed from his bloody shirt and trousers and hidden a 22-caliber pistol, which they alleged he used to club Sarah. Sheriff Luther Wiley said Choate had a wound on the middle finger of his left hand, a bite mark inflicted by the victim. Whether any of this is true, well, we may never know.

Law enforcement took Choate to the house of Harlan’s uncle, where Sarah was staying. She couldn’t identify him positively as her assailant. A mob formed and surged into the house. The girl’s mother and the sheriff “asked them to spare the negro for trial,” the newspaper reported. Officers rushed Choate out another door and then by car to the Maury County Jail, 300 yards from the county courthouse.

Eager to storm the jail, a white mob formed at the two-story, late-19th-century building on 6th Street. Attempts to swipe the keys to the jail from Wiley’s wife failed. Deputy sheriff Ed Pugh of Nashville, who owned bloodhounds George and Queen, warned the crowd about attempting to exact its perverted version of justice on the eve of the election for county sheriff. Wouldn’t want to make Sheriff Wiley look bad after all.

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Country star Jason Aldean films music video at lynching site

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At 7 p.m., the scene at the county jail was calm. By 8, the crowd was back — angrier, larger, wielding sledgehammers. They battered through the jail doors. Sheriff Wiley begged them to stop. His wife did, too. Someone — maybe even the sheriff himself — handed over the key to Choate’s cell.

Across the street, Nashville Tennessean editor James Finney was attending an American Legion banquet with local ministers. Hearing the commotion, he and others rushed outside to intervene.

Two days after the lynching, the Nashville Tennessean
published this image of voters casting ballots at the
Maury County Courthouse in the Democratic primary
 for sheriff. The "X" shows where the mob
 tossed the "hanging rope." Background:
The scene today.

“Go ahead back to your banquet!” a man in the mob shouted. “You’re having your fun over there. Now let us alone while we have ours out here.”

Finney and a Presbyterian minister — “a critic of hooded orders,” a reference to the Klu Klux Klan — attempted to contact the governor by “long-distance telephone” for assistance from the state militia, stationed nearby. They apparently failed.

“They planned to tell the governor,” the Tennessean later wrote, “that no determined effort was being made to protect the negro against the lynchers.”

Dragged from the jail, Choate reportedly  confessed at the door of the courthouse to J.R. Parsons, a Methodist minister, who urged the mob to let the teen stand trial. Choate's alleged “confession” was heard by a man nearby holding a rope.

“Well, that sends you to hell,” that man said.

The mob hauled Choate to the courthouse balcony, still decorated with red, white, and blue bunting from Armistice Day celebrations. The men pushed through the double doors that led outside, tied the rope to the stone balustrade and hurled Choate over. 

Some reports said Choate was already dead — stabbed or bludgeoned — before they hung him. His body dangled for 10 minutes. Relatives later retrieved his remains.

Inside the banquet hall, Finney announced the “success of the lynching.”

“Maury County,” the newspaper would later write, “had been disgraced.”

'Courthouse is lynch gallows'

The story made national news.

“Courthouse is lynch gallows,” declared the New York World.

 The day after the lynching, 
Luther Wiley lost in the Democratic
primary for Maury County sheriff.

“Tennessee Whites Close Armistice Day With Lynching,” reported The Black Dispatch of Oklahoma City.

That paper noted the grotesque irony: the same courthouse balcony from which speakers had celebrated justice, freedom and America’s role in “the Great World War” now served as a platform for a lynching.

“In the memorial Building,” The Black Dispatch wrote, “the spirit of patriotism which led 400,000 Negroes in the World War was being expressed. In front of the courthouse was the usual Southern patriotism being enacted.”

Elsewhere in Tennessee, newspapers blamed Sheriff Wiley for not protecting Choate. “One shot fired into that crowd,” a Clarksville newspaper wrote, “would have saved that negro’s life. Mobs are always cowardly under such circumstances as that.”

The Bristol (Tenn.) Herald Courier, meanwhile, railed against "mob lawlessness."

"If the members of this mob are not hunted down and punished, would-be lynchers will have little reason to be deterred by any fear of the consequences to themselves of their lawlessness, and Tennessee will have the rule of the mob instead of the rule of the law when and where the mob cares to rule," it wrote.

A week after the lynching, editor Finney of the Tennessean weighed in on the pages of his newspaper. “Executions by mob are murder,” he wrote, “nothing more, nothing less.”

Maury County citizens, a Chattanooga newspaper wrote, “will not be judged alone by the lynching of Henry Choate, but also what they do toward bringing the lynchers to the bar of justice and seeing that they are properly punished for their crime against the state of Tennessee.”

A grand jury convened. No one was charged. Predictably, a judge called Maury County law enforcement “blameless.” Beyond demanding justice, journalists apparently didn't do any digging of their own into who committed the crime. 

The only "justice" in this case came on Election Day, Nov. 12, 1927. Luther Wiley — who “stood by and meekly submitted to the battering down of the doors of his jail,” according to an account — suffered defeat in the Democratic primary, squashing his bid for a third term as county sheriff.

The scene of the crime

Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn. A white mob lynched Henry Choate,
a Black teen, from the second-floor balcony in 1927.

Ninety-three years later, on an overcast Saturday, I stand before the Maury County Courthouse. The three-story brick building, completed in 1904, looks much as it did that night. A massive American flag flutters above the second-floor balcony — the same balcony from which Henry Choate’s body hung.

I circle the courthouse, searching for any marker that acknowledges what happened here. I find none.

Steps from the front door stands a granite memorial listing the names of U.S. Colored Troops. But nothing mentions the 18-year-old who was lynched within sight of where I stand.

A few yards away, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” drifts from a music store. Outside a nearby barber shop, a stylist named Todd listens as I explain why I’m here.

“Black kid… lynched… 1927… right over there,” I tell him.

“No kidding,” he says. “Some of the old locals talk about that. They know everything.”

I wonder what they'd tell me, but perhaps my questions are unanswerable. Still, I have so many. 

Who was Henry Choate — beyond the name in the headline?

What became of Sarah Harlan?

Who stood among the men who formed that mob?

And who, in the end, slipped the rope around an 18-year-old’s neck on that November night in 1927?

Almost a century later, Columbia still has questions to answer.

A view of the "lynching porch."

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 SOURCES

• Bristol (Tenn.) Herald Courier, Nov. 13, 1927
• Chattanooga Daily Times, Nov. 27, 1927
• Find A Grave
• Lancaster (Pa.) New Era. Associated Press account
• Morristown (Tenn.) Gazette, Nov. 15, 1927
• Nashville Tennessean, Nov. 12, 13, 18, 1927
• The Black Dispatch, Oklahoma City, Dec. 1, 1927
• The Leaf-Chronicle, Clarksville, Tenn., Nov. 14, 1927.