Book talk by William B. Gravely: THEY STOLE HIM OUT OF JAIL

Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury.

In They Stole Him Out of Jail, William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives.

PURE WOW called They Stole Him Out of Jail a “true crime book we can’t wait to read in 2019.”  This story was recently profiled in VICE: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gya9v3/the-horrific-story-of-a-mob-of-white-cab-drivers-getting-away-with-murder.  Books will be available for sale.

William B. Gravely, professor emeritus at the University of Denver, is the author of Gilbert Haven, Methodist Abolitionist, as well as numerous articles on religion and social change. He is a native of Pickens County, South Carolina, where the murder of T. W. Brown occurred and where Willie Earle was jailed before his abduction.

“With arresting detail, this book documents a gruesome and haunting chapter in South Carolina’s history. Willie Earle’s tragic death in 1947 sparked intense scrutiny among citizens, journalists, white supremacists, and civil rights leaders. In a meticulously researched volume, Will Gravely offers a captivating assessment of Earle’s brutal lynching and its impact in South Carolina and across the nation.” — Bobby J. Donaldson, University of South Carolina