Lynching of Willie Earle

On February 15, 1947, a Greenville, South Carolina cab driver named Thomas Watson Brown was robbed and stabbed to death in Pickens County. Based on circumstantial evidence, Willie Earle, a 24-year-old Black man, was charged in the attack. He was arrested the next day at his mother's house and taken to the county jail.

On the evening of February 16, 1947, a convoy of taxi drivers drove to the jail and forcibly procured Earle's release. The jailer, J. Ed Gilstrap, later said he turned Earle over to the mob because they had guns. The mob then beat, stabbed, and shot Earle to death. This killing is considered the last lynching to occur in South Carolina, although the 1978 killing of Betty Gardner by four white people has also been described by some as a lynching.

Newly elected Governor Strom Thurmond condemned the murder and directed state police to work with the FBI on the investigation. He also summoned Solicitor Robert T. Ashmore, described as the state's foremost prosecutor, to try the case. More than 150 suspects were questioned, and 31 people — all but three of them taxi drivers — were charged with the crime. Many of the men signed confessions, and some implicated Roosevelt Carlos Hurd as the mob's leader and as the person who killed Earle with a shotgun.

The trial opened in the Greenville County Courthouse on May 5, 1947, presided over by Judge J. Robert Martin. Martin dismissed charges against three defendants for lack of evidence and reduced the charges against seven others to being accessories before the fact to murder, leaving 21 defendants on trial for murder before an all-white, all-male jury of 12. The trial drew significant national and international press attention, including coverage by Rebecca West for The New Yorker and by Life Magazine. Defense attorneys John Bolt Culbertson and Thomas A. Wofford represented the defendants; Culbertson told the courtroom "Willie Earle is dead and I wish more like him was dead," while Wofford criticized law enforcement's handling of the case. The defense called no witnesses. After deliberating five hours and 13 minutes, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all counts on May 21, 1947.

The New York Times editorialized on May 23, 1947, that despite the acquittals, "a precedent has been set" regarding public scrutiny of lynching. In 1950, NAACP lawyers, citing an 1895 provision of the South Carolina constitution assigning financial responsibility for lynchings, won a $3,000 settlement from Greenville County on behalf of Earle's family. That same year, state representative Fritz Hollings wrote an anti-lynching bill, signed into law, making lynching punishable by death. No further lynchings were recorded in South Carolina afterward.