TENNESSEE: Two Stories

There were two Negroes in the city jail at Mount Pleasant, Tenn., and there was a mob outside. That was enough to set the news wires chattering. Out came the railroad type and the exciting radio bulletins. Soon the story began to trickle in.

It ran this way: the Negroes had been caught trying to ram a handkerchief down a white man’s throat. The white man said he was being beaten and robbed. The police chief of Mount Pleasant said he had got there just in time, or the white man would have been killed. The Negroes had been kicked and pummeled by an angry group of vengeful whites, had been saved from immediate lynching by being hustled off to jail. But a menacing mob was forming outside, and everybody knew what that meant.

Then came more excited bulletins: state highway patrolmen had got the Negroes away from the mob. They had paused with them in Columbia, but there was no safety there—the white folks were still on edge, remembering the ugly outbreak in Mink Slide last spring (TIME, March 11). So the Negroes were taken to safe haven in Nashville. Many of the people of the Bluegrass Bowl and the Highland Rim felt better because a lynching had been averted.

The Truth Is Slow. It had, and it was well that it had, for the real facts in the case were ugly:

Henry Bone, a white restaurant keeper from Waverly, had set out in his 1946 car on a drunken spree. At the wheel was “Blue” Pearson, his chauffeur for 15 years. Beside Pearson sat Roy Lee Johnson, who also had worked for Bone. Both, in the words of Mount Pleasant’s white folks, were “good niggers.”

When Pearson drove into a filling station for gas, Bone found that he was out of whiskey. He yelled for more. Then he put on an act which he had used before: he shrieked that he was being beaten and robbed, then stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth. Scared, Pearson and Johnson drove off in a hurry (with Bone still in the back seat), were soon overtaken, dragged from the car and beaten by the hastily formed mob.

It had been front-page news when the mob was forming. Next day in the Nashville Tennessean the item reporting that the Negroes were innocent appeared on page 31.