Bertie County NcArchives History .....Lynchings In Bertie County 
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Gerald Thomas gerald_thomas00@comcast.net February 4, 2019, 3:43 pm

LYNCHINGS IN BERTIE COUNTY
by
Gerald W. Thomas

Author’s introductory comments: During my childhood (1950s and 1960s), I was
reared in the small community of Sandy Point, situated a little more than a mile
from downtown Windsor about the junction of Highway 17 North (also known as the
Edenton Highway) and the present-day Cooper Hill Road. Sandy Point Baptist
Church is located at the intersection of the two roads and during my childhood a
large oak tree with widely spreading limbs stood on the church grounds a few
yards from Highway 17 and immediately adjacent to the Cooper Hill Road. I and
other neighborhood kids at times played about the tree, which some local
residents called the “hanging tree.” As a kid, I never considered why the tree
was called the “hanging tree.” But, recently, I discovered information which
leads me to believe that an African American man was lynched from the tree in
April 1883. The discovery of that information prompted me to conduct research
into lynchings which occurred in Bertie County after the Civil War. This paper
presents the results of my research. By the way, the old “hanging tree” no
longer stands as years ago highway workers removed it to widen the Cooper Hill
Road.

* * * * *
Three daughters of James Freeman, the oldest seventeen or eighteen years of age
and the other two, ten years and twelve years, respectively, were walking home
from school “in the suburbs” of Windsor during the afternoon of Friday, April 6,
1883, when the oldest girl was stopped and assaulted by a stranger. The
stranger, John Collins (aliases Isaiah Council and Ike Blunt), was an African
American lumber worker supposedly from Portsmouth, Virginia. The girl screamed
and struggled with her attacker who knocked her down several times and succeeded
in partly tearing off her clothes. She was “badly choked and villainously
bruised.” One account of the incident indicated that Collins “sprang upon her
and attempted to outrage [rape] her.” The girl’s screams alerted a laborer in a
nearby field who ran to her aid and drove the assailant away “before he had time
to accomplish his hellish purpose.” Shortly, a Bertie County constable and posse
arrived and captured Collins. He was immediately lodged in the county jail to
await trail at the next term of the Superior Court.
	News of the assault spread quickly among the people of the area. By Saturday
morning the “usually quiet” town of Windsor “had been thrown into a state of
great excitement.” Local residents were enraged by Collins’ act upon the
daughter of one of Bertie County’s most prominent citizens. James Freeman was a
Bertie County magistrate and county commissioner. The potential outcome of a
forthcoming trial did not curb the citizen’s anger. North Carolina law provided
that if Collins were convicted of the charges, he would be sentenced to the
State penitentiary for “a term of years.” Such a sentence was not acceptable to
the citizens. The citizens in, and about, Windsor adamantly felt that Collins
“justly merited” quick punishment from a rope thrown over a tree limb. An
unidentified individual, writing from Windsor to the Scotland Neck newspaper,
The Commonwealth,” on April 9, forthrightly conveyed the anger and attitude held
by the citizens. The writer noted: “Why is it that our Legislators will not rise
to the importance of the occasion and provide a remedy and a check for these
increasing outrages? There is no reason on earth why an attempt at rape should
not be punished with the death penalty in our State as it now is in other States
and as it formerly was in this State, and are no longer worthy to be accounted
the protectors of female virtue and innocence, and will not be until proper
legislation provides the one thing needful. There should be no discrimination
between a rape attempted and a rape accomplished, and man need not try to be
more just and merciful than God, for He who said ‘Thou shalt not commit
adultery,’ who also has told us that ‘he who looketh after a woman and lusteth
after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ Yes, He who
searches the heart and trieth the reins makes no discrimination in favor of
unsuccessful guilt and crime, and sound legislation should run parallel there
with.”
The citizens’ anger continued to fervently boil, ultimately morphing into mob
mentality. They decided to wield their own form of “justice.” Under the cover of
early morning darkness of Tuesday, April 10, a mob of “white men and negroes” –
variously estimated upwards to two hundred individuals – went to the jail. In a
ruse to deceive the jailer (identified as a Mr. Godwin), two members of the mob
escorted a bound man to the jailer’s residence (located in close proximity to
the jail) and demanded that the man be secured in the jail. The mob – reportedly
all of whom were wearing masks to conceal their identities – overwhelmed and
gagged the jailer, and forced him to “give up” the jail keys. The mob converged
on the jail and seized Collins from his cell. They took him to the site of
Cashie Baptist Church (present-day Sandy Point Baptist Church) about a mile and
a half outside of town. There, about four o’clock in the morning, Collins was
“hanged to an oak tree.” According to the News and Observer reporter, when the
sun arose Collins’ “carcass dangle[d] from a limb. A merited fate for such a
scoundrel is the opinion of all.”
	Mr. Godwin later stated that he could not identify any of the members of the
mob. He logically surmised: “I expect a good many of them belong to this town.”
Following the lynching, “great excitement” still prevailed in “the Windsor
section over the affair.” 
	The lynching of John Collins was widely reported in newspapers across North
Carolina and in some newsprints of other states. During late April, at least
three North Carolina papers – The Roanoke News (Weldon), The Wilson Advance, and
the Farmer and Mechanic (Edenton) – published a syndicated article which
strongly supported the positions and actions taken by the Bertie County
residents over the attempted rape of James Freeman’s daughter. The papers
positioned: “The women of North Carolina must be protected. They must be made
secure against such assaults upon the public highway[s] or elsewhere. And it can
only be done by promptly killing maddogs and human brutes wherever found. The
delay for months, awaiting the slow processes of a legal trial is to lessen the
moral effect, whereas if brutes learn from repeated lynchings that Death follows
fast after the crime – there will be fewer cases. Moreover, we hold that but one
thing can justify the dragging of the unfortunate victim into court, and that
is, – a reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the prisoner. Where there is no
possibility of mistake, – the men of the neighborhood, both white and black, –
should see that the publicity of a crowded court-room, and a prolonged trial, be
not added to her sorrows. Since the law did not protect her, let not the law
protect her wronger.”
	Sixteen and a half years after John Collins was hanged, another Bertie County
prisoner was killed while incarcerated in the jail. The unidentified individual
was shot inside the jail about late September or early October 1899. The Wilson
Advance reported on October 5, 1899, “Breaking into jail and shooting a prisoner
on suspicion is a new method of lynching, just introduced in Bertie County.” The
paper condemned the killing, noting that “Lynching on suspicion is liable to
mistakes that cannot be remedied very well after the work is done.”
	In July 1898, the Bertie County sheriff opined that a white prisoner in his
custody, Romulus “Rum” Bazemore, might be lynched by local citizens. Bazemore
had been arrested and charged with poisoning his wife, who had died suddenly a
few weeks earlier. “Rum” had disappeared about the time of her death, causing
authorities to “suspect foul play.” An autopsy conducted in Raleigh on Mrs.
Bazemore’s body revealed that she had been poisoned. Bazemore, after
disappearing from Bertie County, had enlisted in the Second Regiment North
Carolina Volunteers in Raleigh, where officers located him and turned him over
to the Bertie County sheriff. (The Second Regiment was one of two white
regiments recruited in the state for service during the Spanish-American War,
April 25, 1898 – August 12, 1898.) The sheriff transported Bazemore to Plymouth
where he was “placed in jail for safe keeping, as fear of lynching [was]
entertained in Bertie.” In September, a Bertie County grand jury indicted
Bazemore for killing his wife. He was returned to the Plymouth jail. Bazemore
was tried in Bertie County Superior Court in mid-May 1899. A jury deliberated
only twenty minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty.
	In April 1902, Bertie County court officials once again were concerned that
several prisoners were potential targets for lynching. Three African Americans –
John Stephenson, Junius Bishop, and John Belfield – had been charged with
murdering Thomas Stephenson, a white clerk who was killed at Peele Brothers
Store in Kelford. Because of some difficulty, Stephenson had run the three men
out of the store. Later, he was found lying face down, having been shot several
times in the back. A coup de grace shot had been made at close range to
Stephenson’s neck. John Stephenson, Bishop, Belfield, and Milton Belfield were
arrested for the clerk’s murder. Law officers shot and wounded Milton Belfield
during his arrest in Weldon, and he supposedly made a declaration implicating
his acquaintances. The men were kept under “strong guard” and on April 19, 1902,
two Bertie County magistrates quickly tried the men at Kelford “to save the
prisoners from being lynched.”
	The prospect of lynching was widely recognized and promoted as a method of
intimidation. On July 30, 1903, The Roanoke News, (Weldon) July 30, 1903,
repeated an article originally printed in the News and Observer. “The News and
Observer says nobody has ever heard of a lynching or a crime that causes it in …
Bertie [County]. The people there treat the negroes well but let them know that
the whites will rule. They [the whites] are firm, just, kind.” (Twenty years had
passed since John Collins was lynched in Bertie County.)
	On Saturday afternoon, March 16, 1918, Peter Bazemore, a nineteen-year-old
African American, entered the home of a “well-to-do farmer” in the western
section of Bertie County and caught the farmer’s wife alone in the house.
Bazemore advanced on the woman who attempted to draw the attention of her
husband who was working in a nearby field. Bazemore struck her in the head with
a piece of stove wood and fled. In less than an hour a posse had been formed and
trailed Bazemore, capturing him more than ten hours after initiating the
pursuit. Information reached the posse that the woman’s condition was
“precarious.” Infuriated, the “crowd” hanged Bazemore about thirty minutes after
they captured him. The hanging occurred about one mile from Lewiston. The
Wilmington Dispatch reported on March 26, 1918, that Bazemore “was charged, and
it is claimed, confessed to the criminal assault on the wife of … [the] farmer.”
Unfortunately, “her recovery was very doubtful.”

* * * * *
 
Lynching, the unlawful killing of a person by a mob and one of the most extreme
forms of community sanction, has occurred in North Carolina on numerous
occasions throughout its history. Although lynchings were carried out by a
variety of means, hanging was the most common method in North Carolina, followed
by shooting. A few white Republicans were killed by mobs, but the overwhelming
majority of victims in North Carolina were black. According to Vann R. Newkirk,
author of Lynching in North Carolina: A History, 1865-1941, from the end of the
Civil War through 1941, there were 168 North Carolinians who lost their lives to
lynching. A current project undertaken by the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, “A Red Record,” lists 173 persons who were lynched in sixty-two
North Carolina counties. Legal attempts to deter lynching – including an 1893
law that classified it as a felony and sought to hold a county liable for
damages – generally failed because of a lack of local support and ineffectual
enforcement by state officials.




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