The World of Broadus Miller: Homicide, Lynching, and Outlawry In
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THE WORLD OF BROADUS MILLER: HOMICIDE, LYNCHING, AND OUTLAWRY IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA by KEVIN WAYNE YOUNG (Under the Direction of John C. Inscoe) ABSTRACT In the summer of 1927, an African American named Broadus Miller was accused of killing a fifteen-year-old white millworker in Morganton, North Carolina. Following a manhunt lasting nearly two weeks, Miller was killed and his body then publicly displayed on the Morganton courthouse lawn. This dissertation uses Broadus Miller’s personal history as a narrative thread to examine the world within which he lived and died. Miller’s story exemplifies much larger patterns and provides a unique lens on race relations and criminal justice in early twentieth-century North and South Carolina. In Miller’s native South Carolina, white supremacy was maintained through lynching, but violence permeated all forms of human interaction and most homicides featured same-race perpetrators and victims. In the early 1920s, Miller spent three years in the South Carolina state penitentiary after killing an African American woman. The court process in his case illustrates the role of race within the South Carolina legal and judicial systems, while examining conditions in the penitentiary during his incarceration demonstrates that rather than serving any rehabilitative function, the penitentiary was a highly lucrative enterprise designed to benefit penal officials. Following Miller’s release from prison, he embarked upon the same journey as thousands of other black South Carolinians in the early 1920s, when the boll weevil ravaged the state’s cotton fields and precipitated a mass out- migration of farm laborers. Like Miller, many of these migrants moved to North Carolina, where they faced a hostile and unwelcoming environment in which the Ku Klux Klan and other nativist groups flourished. By the 1920s white supremacist violence in North Carolina was largely masked by formal law. A unique feature of North Carolina law was the state’s outlawry statute, which was used against Broadus Miller and which gave private citizens the legal authority to kill him. The statute’s origins and application cast a stark light on the nature of state-sanctioned violence. The killing of Miller and exhibition of his dead body took place on the borderline between lynching and state-sanctioned execution—and showed how indefinite that borderline was. INDEX WORDS: Homicide, Lynching, Outlawry, Racism, South Carolina, North Carolina, Asheville, Morganton, Greenwood County, Ku Klux Klan, Boll weevil, Julian Shakespeare Carr, Chain gang, Penitentiary, Junior Order United American Mechanics, Samuel McDowell Tate, Beatrice Cobb, Henry Berry Lowry THE WORLD OF BROADUS MILLER: HOMICIDE, LYNCHING, AND OUTLAWRY IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA by KEVIN WAYNE YOUNG B.A., St. John’s College, 1992 M.A., Appalachian State University, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2016 © 2016 Kevin Wayne Young All Rights Reserved THE WORLD OF BROADUS MILLER: HOMICIDE, LYNCHING, AND OUTLAWRY IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA by KEVIN WAYNE YOUNG Major Professor: John C. Inscoe Committee: E.M. Beck Kathleen Clark James C. Cobb Electronic Version Approved: Suzanne Barbour Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2016 DEDICATION To the memory of my father and mother, Wayne Young (1934-2012) and Helen Dellinger Young (1933-1997) iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation could not have been written without the unwavering support of my advisor John Inscoe. His generosity and kindness are legendary, and I am grateful to have him as a mentor and friend. I thank the members of my dissertation committee at the University of Georgia. Knowing that my work had to pass muster under James Cobb’s keen gaze was a strong incentive to put forth my best effort. I was delighted that noted lynching scholar E.M. Beck agreed to be on my committee, and he was very generous in sharing research material with me. Having Kathleen Clark on my committee made me much more aware of how remarkable Morganton News-Herald editor Beatrice Cobb’s role was within in the male-dominated world of early twentieth-century journalism and politics. My interest in the Broadus Miller case was sparked in the spring of 2006, when I took a cultural studies course taught by Edwin Arnold, who later oversaw my master’s thesis on the case. Sandra Ballard served on the committee for the master’s thesis, and since that time she has been a constant source of much-needed encouragement and support. I first learned of Broadus Miller from reading Bruce Baker’s essay “North Carolina Lynching Ballads,” and he kindly provided me copies of his notes on the case. Bruce Stewart generously shared research material on the North Carolina Klan, and some of my research on the Broadus Miller case appeared in a book that he edited, Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2012). I have benefitted from conversations or correspondence with numerous other individuals, including Karl Campbell, Claudia Gould, Tom Rusher, and v Orville Vernon Burton. A valued friend and former colleague, Jonathan Bradshaw, read and provided feedback for early drafts of my writing on the case. In the summer of 2007, Sandra Coffey of the Collettsville Historical Society interviewed several elderly residents of Caldwell County, North Carolina, preserving the last surviving memories of the large manhunt that had taken place in the county eighty years earlier. She then transcribed these interviews and sent me copies of the transcripts. Within weeks of conducting the interviews, she was diagnosed with cancer. Her enthusiasm for the project matched my own, and I regret that I never had the chance to thank her personally. In July 2014, George Rush— former mayor of Ware Shoals—gave me a guided tour of the region around Shoals Junction, which proved essential in reconstructing the history of Broadus Miller’s boyhood home. Mr. Rush arranged interviews with a number of local residents, including present-day members of Dunn Creek Baptist Church. I thank Mr. Rush for his kind hospitality, which was one of the highlights of my dissertation research. I owe a special thanks to librarians Gail Benfield and Dottie Ervin of the North Carolina Room in the Burke County Public Library. I am indebted to Commodore Burleson’s children— Margaret Burleson Crumley, Charles Burleson, and Pat Burleson Howell—who were all very generous with their time, their memories, and their openness about their father. I thank Gladys Kincaid’s younger brother and sister, Cecil Kincaid and Elizabeth Kincaid Conley, for speaking with me about a painful episode in their family’s history. Jeannie Logan arranged and facilitated interviews with a number of Morganton residents. Marjorie Fleming was ten years old in 1927; eighty years later, she still vividly remembered the events of that summer, and speaking with her made an indelible impression on me. I thank Carl Evans and Willette Chambers for sharing their memories with me. Ronald Huffman kindly provided me with copies of the photographs that vi were taken on the Morganton courthouse square; Mr. Huffman disapproved of the treatment of Miller’s body, but recognized the historical significance of the photographs. Other Burke County residents—including Bobbie Wakefield, Terry Helton, Charles Tate, Jr., and Charles Graham— also provided valuable information, as did members of the Burke County Historical Society. Lifelong Ashford resident Buford Franklin grew up only a few hundred yards from the scene of Broadus Miller’s death. He had a keen memory and was very insightful, and I am glad that I had the opportunity to speak with him before he passed. Ethel Philyaw Crump shared her memories of the 1927 manhunt with me, and Clyde Dula’s daughter Brenda Gail Pitts provided me with information about her father. During my research, I have been greatly assisted by numerous librarians and courthouse clerks. In South Carolina, I was helped by the staff of the following institutions: Greenwood County Public Library; Ware Shoals Public Library; South Carolina Room of the Anderson County Public Library; Anderson County Clerk of Court; Greenwood County Clerk of Court; the Thomas Cooper and South Caroliniana libraries at the University of South Carolina; South Carolina State Archives. In Georgia, the staff of the University of Georgia Libraries, including the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, were of great help. In North Carolina, the staff of the following institutions facilitated my research: D.H. Ramsey Library at the University of North Carolina Asheville; Old Buncombe County Genealogical Society; Buncombe County Register of Deeds; North Carolina Collection at Asheville’s Pack Memorial Library; Iredell County Public Library; Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, especially the North Carolina Collection and the Southern Historical Collection; Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University; North Carolina State Archives; Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University; Charlotte Public Library; Yancey County Public vii Library; Belk Library at Appalachian State University, especially the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection; Burke County Historical Society; Burke County Clerk of Court. I have presented on topics relating to the