2 Black men were lynched in Charlotte a century ago. There’s more to the story, group says

When artist Hannah Hasan drives past Bank of America Stadium, she remembers. Not a football game or a concert but Joseph McNeely, a brother, a son and a Black man who was killed by a white mob in 1913.

On Aug. 26 of that year, McNeely was dragged from a hospital bed to the street where he was fatally shot. His death became the first documented racial terror lynching case in Mecklenburg County.

Hasan’s acknowledgment of McNeely’s death is part of a project that seeks to inform and remind all Charlotteans that lynchings, like McNeely’s, happened right here in this city.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project is part of a national movement to memorialize those killed by racial terror lynchings but also share their stories in the hope that as people face the truth, these atrocities don’t happen again.

In Mecklenburg County, there are two documented lynching cases: McNeely and Willie McDaniel, a tenant farmer who was found dead on June 30, 1929.

The Remembrance Project launched its website this week — exactly 111 years after McNeely’s death — where readers can learn about or learn more of McNeely, McDaniel and why sharing their stories matters today.

“We hope people look (at the project) and say ‘we believe ‘and ‘we need to tell the truth about this history’,” said Helen Schwab, a member of the Remembrance committee and a former Charlotte Observer editor. “We also hope that people are going to talk about it because we don’t talk about it here.

“Each of these men’s stories were covered in the daily newspapers for about two, three months and then they don’t appear again for another 100 years.”

What is the Remembrance Project?

In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative launched its “Community Remembrance Project,” which sought to help local groups learn about those killed in racial terror lynchings and ultimately erect historical markers so that their stories could be shared.

The Justice Initiative is a human rights and legal services group based in Alabama that has documented more than 6,500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950.

In 2019, several community groups in Charlotte visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where they learned about the community project, according to Krista Terrell, the project’s communication coordinator and former Arts and Science Council president.

The museum, created by the Justice Initiative, holds over 800 six-foot monuments with the names of each county where a lynching occurred and who was killed.

The monument for Mecklenburg County lists McNeely and McDaniel.

Sharing fuller stories

The stories of McNeely and McDaniel are out there but they are told from a white perspective, Schwab said.

“If you Google these men, you will find wrong information,” Schwab said. “When people just look at headlines that were all, at this time, headlines of white run newspapers written for white audiences, you will see that police versions of these stories were taken as fact and headlines reflected rumors.”

With the help of the Justice Initiative and local historians, the Remembrance Project pieced together old newspapers clippings, land records and other documents to give a fuller account to what happened to McNeely and McDaniel.

For both men, the project fixed gives a short and lengthy version of events, starting from days before their deaths to the days after.

Who was McNeely?

In contemporary newspapers, including The Charlotte Observer, McNeely was called a “cocaine-crazed negro” who shot at several people and later a police officer. The officer returned fire, hitting McNeely, who was later taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, the segregated Black facility in Charlotte. The hospital was located where the Panthers stadium now stands.

This is the surface level story, according to the Remembrance Project. Through its research, details such as McNeely being on cocaine couldn’t be corroborated.

The project’s timeline on McNeely’s death adds that in the following days, newspapers continued to say that the officer would likely die. However, those same outlets would go on to quote doctors who said otherwise.

News reports also said that McNeely wouldn’t be in danger of retaliation because Charlotte was different. The Observer wrote that Mecklenburg County had “never had a lynching in its history and it never will have one.”

But on Aug. 26, 1913, McNeely was dragged out of his hospital room, stripped and “riddled with bullets.” No one was arrested for his death. The officer made a full recovery.

Schwab said finding the details illuminates how skewed things were and that adding nuance to McNeely’s story paints a fuller picture.

Who was McDaniel?

The same goes for McDaniel.

About 16 years after McNeely’s death, McDaniel worked and lived on property owned by Mell Grier, a prominent white farmer. McDaniel was owed money and asked Grier for payment. Grier refused and McDaniel turned away saying something quietly. Grier became agitated, picked up a rock, threw it at McDaniel and the two began to tussle. Grierwent went to retrieve a gun and McDaniel ran away.

A day later on June 30, 1929, McDaniel was found dead, face down near his home.

In the days and months that followed, details of McDaniel’s death became clearer and murkier at the same time. One officer told news outlets that he was sure “a party of men” hung McDaniel and discarded his body. The coroner’s office also confirmed that McDaniel had a broken neck.

But papers only “suggested” that McDaniel was lynched. No one was ever charged in McDaniel’s death.

The Remembrance Project notes that the Observer doesn’t call McDaniel’s death a lynching until 2018.

Not just victims

While the project details their deaths, there are no notes on who McDaniel and McNeely really were.

This is where Hasan comes in.

Hasan is a poet and storyteller who co-started Epoch Tribe, a production company, and “I Am Queen: Charlotte,” a yearly event celebrating Black women and their stories. Schwab and Terrell agreed that the remembrance project needed an art component. Something that could humanize both McDaniel and McNeely’s stories.

Hasan, who hadn’t known about McNeely or McDaniel, immediately agreed to the project, especially after discussing it with her brother.

“He said to me, ‘I wonder what their story is.’ I was like, yeah they were lynched and he said, ‘No, who were they?’ He said you don’t ever think about who these were (as) people before they became a lynching victim,” Hasan said. “The pieces open up seeking to share a story, a narrative, about them as humans before they were ever lynching victims…These were two humans who I’m sure did not want their legacy to be the worst thing that ever happened to them.”

Hasan wrote three spoken word poems and two focused on McNeely and McDaniel.

She painted McNeely as a son and a little brother who was “probably annoying” and a “partner in mischief.” Hasan described McDaniel as a “partner in life” who probably came home after work and “loved on and hugged on (and) cherished his wife.”

Hasan talks about the lynchings in each poem as well but said it was important to not just label McNeely and McDaniel as victims. They were more than that.

“This project gave me an opportunity not only to shed light on lynching, what it is and the fact that it happened, but on the fact that these people had stories before they were victims,” Hasan said.

Hasan’s longer piece was turned into a film produced by Loyd Visuals, which was also released at the launch of the project’s website.

The project’s future

The website’s launch is just the beginning for the project, Schwab and Terrell both said.

Part of the project includes collecting soil from the lynching sites. McNeely’s was collected in 2021 and plans are in the works for McDaniel’s collection.

There’s also plans for historical markers to be placed where McDaniel and McNeely passed. The city of Charlotte and Tepper Sports & Entertainment have already agreed to place a marker at Bank of America Stadium, as did the county for McDaniel’s marker in Reedy Creek.

The project may also begin to look for other people who were possibly killed by lynching, Schwab said. Again, McNeely and McDaniel are the only documented cases of racial terror lynching.

For now, Terrell said, project members want the community to dive into the information on the website. There are personal essays, information from the Justice Initiative, along with the detailed timelines and poetry from Hasan.

There’s no rush, Terrell said. It is heavy information. Overall, the goal is to get people speaking about McNeely, McDaniel and the lynchings in Charlotte’s history and acknowledging that it did happen here.

“This is ongoing work,” Terrell said. “This resource will be here to continue to have community conversations.”

“We hope people will come to it and share it and they’ll know the history,” Schwab said, “so that when we erect these markers and when we collect the soil, it will mean much more.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the number of racial terror lynchings the Equal Justice Initiative has documented.