the case of Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old African-American high school student found hanging from two belts attached to a wooden swing set in a largely white trailer park in Bladenboro, North Carolina. The date, August 29th, 2014. At the time of his death, Lennon Lacy was dating an older white woman. Local authorities quickly determined his death to be a suicide, but Lacy’s family and local civil rights activists feared authorities may have been covering up a lynching.
Jacqueline Olive talking:
Lynching, for more than a century, was the ultimate tool of racial terrorism. It was the way, on a continuum of tactics, to maintain white supremacy. It was the way to keep black people policing themselves. It was the ultimate terrorism.
And so, I had been filming in communities for five years across the country where lynchings happened, looking out what people are doing right now in their communities for justice and reconciliation around historic lynchings, because it’s a long-term impact on the entire community. I thought I was finished filming, when I came across the story of Lennon Lacy, 17, found hanging from a swing set in 2014. My son was 17 at the time. And I couldn’t imagine how a mother could deal with so much trauma. And I knew what the community must be going through, because of what I had learned from filming over the years.
Lennon was found in a trailer park not far from his home. And it was in the morning, so about 7:15 or so in the morning, in the middle of a trailer park, surrounded by probably about 200 to 300 feet of trailers surrounding him. And so, people were moving from school. It was a school day. It was a Friday, August 29th, 2014. People were moving from school. People were working, doing shift work, going to the local factory, Smithfield, and leaving about—going about their day. Yet no one saw what happened.
There was a 911 call at about 7:15. There was a woman who made that call. Lennon was 240 pounds. And his body was deceased, and so that’s heavy weight. The woman who made the 911 call is about 5’2”, 5’3”, and 125 pounds. And yet, somehow she cut him down. She had scissors on her and was able to cut him down. There are all kinds of inconsistencies in what turned out to be evidence in the case, and, sadly, turned out to be evidence that was quickly brushed under the rug.
Claudia Lacy talking:
I was on the phone with my sister. A knock came at the door. The police officer, Chris Hunt, which is the sheriff of Bladen County, he said that “I need you to come and go with me.” And he wouldn’t go into detail why. So I got in my vehicle, and I followed him over to the trailer park. When I got out of my vehicle, state bureau investigator introduced himself to me. He said, “I need you to see if this is your son that we found.” I went inside the EMT, and I saw my son’s dead body in there.
In the ambulance, yes, ma’am. In the ambulance. And I looked at him, and I examined his body like a mother would—in disbelief. But it was him. And like I told the state bureau investigator, whoever did this, it took more than one person to take him down, because my son was very physical, very healthy. And like I said, he would not have been taken down or do this to himself, because he was planning his football game, which was Friday, their first home game of the year for the school, the first school year, on that day. We had talked about it. He had worked very hard to get his position on the football team.
He was hoping to get a college football scholarship. That was our plan.
I saw a large abrasion over one of his eyes. And the thing that really puzzled me was that I saw no dirt, no grass, no blood. I saw the tear ducts had, you know, went down the side of his face. But I didn’t see any blood or anything like that. It was so dark in the EMT, I didn’t see the marks around his neck. But I felt them, because, like I said, I touched his body. And I’m like, “This is unusual.” And it really was shocking to me. I didn’t tell anyone at the time, but I smelled chlorine when I was close. And I’ve got very close.
Like a pool. And I didn’t say anything to anyone about it until later on, because, like I said, when I walked onto the scene, they were wrapping up the crime scene tape. The police of Bladen County were.
But I didn’t know anything about it until after 12:00. I was not notified, because they didn’t know who he was, until after 12:00.
Jacqueline Olive talking:
So, that’s the mortician, local mortician, who prepared Lennon’s body. F.W. Newton. And he prepared Lennon’s body. He actually knew Lennon. He had met Lennon for the first time a few days before at his uncle’s funeral. And F.W. Newton, in addition to talking about the bruises on his arm, on his forearm, that indicated that he might have been in a fight, as opposed to on the back of his arm or the top of his arm, he—there were many things that made him think that Lennon had been murdered. And he was convinced that people would see that, and was really shocked that it had gone all the way to the medical examiner’s office with the assumption that it was—still holding assumption that it was suicide.
And I want to point out, too, that that interview with F.W. Newton was the only official interview that we got. We tried to interview the medical examiner, tried to interview the coroner, the DA, the chief of police, and no one would talk. I don’t know the motivation, but they declined an interview.
The day they completed their investigation, which was approximately four days after. Matter of fact, if you listen to the 911 call, she called it, that time, when she made the call, “He hung himself.” he 911—the person that called, in the call.
Claudia Lacy talking:
The 911 person that found his body. She was the one that said he hung himself. Suicide was then determined, if you ask me, because after that, that’s all—that’s the way it went. They didn’t come and check for any evidence of—you know what I’m saying? Suicidal note, no—they didn’t question any of the family to see if any of his behavior changed or any of that. There was none of that done. None of it.
Jacqueline Olive talking:
one of those communities where I had filmed is in Monroe, Georgia, where a group, a diverse group of people, they get together annually to re-enact a 1946 quadruple lynching of two couples, the Malcolms on the Dorseys. And they do that to make sure that the victims are never forgotten. And the lynching was in 1946. My mom was alive in 1946, so that’s a generation ago. And so they believe that some of the perpetrators may still be living there.
So, the Dorseys and the Malcolms were murdered on July 25th, 1946. And so, around that time, that weekend, in Monroe, which is about 40 minutes outside of Atlanta, a group of people get together, and they dramatize scenes from the narrative of that lynching. And it’s their way of writing their own history and writing their own narrative, a history that’s been undocumented, in some ways, and incorrectly documented, in others.
And so, the re-enactment begin on a hot July day. It’s really hot, if you know anything about the Atlanta area and the South, and still people come out, and they caravan from scene to scene. They begin at a church that is the site of the gravestones where the victims were buried. And then they move to the jail, where one of the victims, George Dorsey, was held. And then they re-enact that scene. Because what happened is, George Dorsey had come home from the war and had got into a fight. He was a sharecropper and got into an altercation with the landowner that he was working for. The landowner wasn’t killed, but George Dorsey was arrested. And then someone came to bail them out—another landowner—on the pretense that there was work for them. And so George called his wife, and his wife called her cousin, and Dorothy got her husband, Roger Malcolm. And they all came together, thinking that they were going to work. And the landowner drove them into the ambush on the Moore’s Ford Bridge. And so the final scene of the re-enactment happens in that site where the lynching actually happened.
Absolutely. And sometimes the crowds were more than a thousand people. In Waco, Texas, in 1916, 15,000 white men, women and children came out to watch the lynching of Jesse Washington. And that has happened many times across the country, for over a century, from about 1872 to 1964. Experts believe that there were probably—they’ve recorded about 5,000, nearly 5,000, lynchings. And most of those victims were African Americans. They actually believe that the numbers are probably closer to 15,000. Those are just the numbers that they could document.
And so, the thing that really drove me about understanding this history is the impact, because if you can imagine that, in communities where half the people in your community came out to watch a lynching, by the thousands, and what that feels like to hear thousands of people in your community cheering the violence on, hearing the screaming, the laughing, the roaring, even if you weren’t in the midst of it, even if you didn’t agree with it, you still were impacted by it. And so, the question for me is: What’s been passed along from generation to generation in families, both black families and white families?
Claudia Lacy talking:
That’s what I wanted to do: start the conversation, so we can stop the hate and killing. Start the conversation, so no one can think they’re above the law. Start the conversation, so that when you have a job to do, do it regardless of color, creed, your circumstances. Whatever happen happen, but it needs to be done in a professional manner at all times, regardless of your social status. People need to be respected as human beings, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers. If it was your child, wouldn’t you want to know that everything possibly legal, human and right was done to find out what happened?
– Did anyone come forward in this case?
Lots of people did, but they were intimidated, just like she said. It’s a repeat of history—ran away, threatened, scared, locked up. Some of them was killed. My son and I heard a actual killing, but it was like an accident. You didn’t hear anything about it. There was tape, the whole nine. By the time we got to the scene where the car hit this person, it was all cleared up. You couldn’t see anything but the bloodstain on the sidewalk, in Bladenboro.
The trailer that was directly across from the swing set.
Shortly after Lennon’s death, within 24 hours, was killed in a hit-and-run.
One of the many parallels to what’s gone on historically, that Claudia and Pierre and many people in Bladenboro have had to deal with, is that the trauma, the real tragedy of a possible lynching, is compounded by the denial and the cover-up. Not only do you have to deal with the death, but then you have to deal with people telling you that you don’t know what you’re talking about, that it’s not possible that your son might have been murdered. And so it’s a compounding tragedy that nobody should have to deal with.
Be kinder to each other. Watch the movie as though it was your family. Understand what we’re trying to say and show you. It’s time to stop, and start healing.
________
Jacqueline Olive
director of Always in Season.
Claudia Lacy
mother of Lennon Lacy.
— source democracynow.org | Feb 01, 2019