Lynching of Joe Winters

This article is about Joe Winters, the Lynching victim. For the British poet, literary critic and translator of poetry, see Joe Winter.

Lynching in Conroe, Texas

Part of Jim Crow Era
News coverage of the Lynching of Joe Winters
Date	May 20, 1922
Location	Conroe, Montgomery County, Texas
Participants	A white mob made up of hundreds of people. "A larger crowd than ... the circus"[1]
Deaths	Joe Winters

Joe Winters was a 20-year-old African-American man who was lynched in Conroe, Montgomery County, Texas by a mob on May 20, 1922. According to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary it was the 27th of 61 lynchings during 1922 in the United States. [2]

Background

A 14-year-old girl was allegedly assaulted on Friday, 4:00 PM, May 19, 1920, near Leonidas, Texas. Rudolph Manning was initially rounded up and smuggled to Houston, Texas by his employer W.H. Biggers, M.A. Anderson, former sheriff of Montgomery County and J.W. Baker but present day Montgomery Sheriff Hicks brought him back to Conroe and then to Leonidas where the victim said it wasn't him. [3]

A large crowd gathered in Conroe and rumours swirled that a new suspect, Joe Winters, had taken a horse near Waukegan, Texas. He was spotted 2 miles (3.2 km) from Waukegan on his way to Youens, Texas. Police arrested him at 2:00 PM on Saturday, May 20, 1922, and he was taken to Leonidas where the victim was allegedly able to identify him.[4]

Lynching

Since the alleged attack, local newspapers had been calling for a crowd to gather and by the time of the positive identification thousands of people had gathered in Conroe, Texas.[1] When Montgomery Sheriff Hicks returned to Conroe, he was quickly overpowered and the mob seized Winters and chained him to an iron post in courthouse square, where he had oil boxes stacked around him. The pile was ignited and he was burned alive proclaiming his innocence.[5]

See also

• List of lynching victims in the United States

Bibliography

Notes

1. The Crisis, November, 1922, p. 37.
2. United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary 1926, p. 17.
3. Conroe Courier, May 26, 1922.
4. New York Times, May 21, 1922, p. 18.
5. The Chicago Defender, June 3, 1922.

• "Farmers Hasten From South to Escape Murders". The Chicago Defender. Chicago, Illinois. June 3, 1922. ISSN 0745-7014. OCLC 18766972.
• "Joe Winters Burned Here". Conroe Courier. Conroe Courier Pub. Co. May 19, 1922. OCLC 14148348.
• "The Looking Glass". The Crisis, Vol. 25, No. 1. NAACP. November 1922. pp. 1–48. ISSN 1559-1573. Retrieved February 27, 2022.
• "Two Negroes Lynched for Attacks on Girls". New York Times. May 21, 1922. ISSN 1553-8095. OCLC 1645522. Retrieved July 15, 2020.
• Robertson, Campbell (April 25, 2018). "A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It". The New York Times. Retrieved January 29, 2022.
• United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary (1926). "To Prevent and Punish the Crime of Lynching: Hearings Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on S. 121, Sixty-Ninth Congress, First Session, on Feb. 16, 1926". United States Government Publishing Office. Retrieved January 23, 2022.