For lynching victim’s family, Gwinnett memorial a mix of emotions

Willie Williams died in 1981, but she was just 20 years old in 1911 when a mob of about 200 people pulled Hale out of jail, hung him from a telegraph pole and shot him. They left him hanging overnight and placed a sign at his feet: PLEASE DO NOT WAKE.

People posed for pictures with his body. A postcard was made.

“How did Aunt Willie spend that night?” asked Inger Williams, 62. “Did they sit up all night? Did they cry all night? How did Aunt Willie stay in Lawrenceville that night? ... I was afraid for them all over again Saturday.”

For decades, Hale’s lynching was practically a family secret. Inger Williams said she learned about it from her father, Willie Williams’ sister, but that her aunt didn’t talk about her first husband’s death.

The family secret spilled out into the open recently after the Gwinnett Remembrance Coalition held a ceremony honoring Hale by collecting soil at the Lawrenceville Square, near the place where he died, to put in an Alabama museum.

Credit: Steve Schaefer

Credit: Steve Schaefer

Some family members who attended the event were glad for the recognition. But for Inger Williams, who grew up next to her aunt in Atlanta and is Willie Williams’ closest known living relative, it was a burden. For the past week, she said, she’s been angry. She’s had trouble sleeping.

“The wound has just been reopened, and I wasn’t even born,” Inger Williams said. “We were done — we packaged that and put it away.”

It was packaged away so well that Linda Almond, 59, didn’t know there was a lynching victim in her history.

“I never heard any of my family mention him until the Saturday before,” said Almond, a great-great-great-great niece of Willie Williams and Hale. “For them to do what they did is awesome. You can’t right a wrong, but to me, it was the beginning of a healing.”

Almond, who lives in Cobb County, said the Juneteenth soil collection felt like a scene from a movie. Politicians read proclamations, volunteers recounted the details of Hale’s lynching and musicians performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “Strange Fruit.”

The event was heart wrenching, she said, but made her want to know more about the family history. She intends to go to the Legacy Museum, near the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., where the jar of soil with Hale’s name will be housed.

“This is the beginning,” Almond said. “It wasn’t a good thing that happened, but a good thing came of it. I can’t wait for my children and grandchildren to see.”

‘That was not justice’

Carolyn Joy Taylor, who lives in Douglasville, is more circumspect. Willie Williams was her great-aunt, and while she only met her briefly, Taylor’s questions of Inger Williams’ father led to him sharing Hale’s story. But Taylor said she learned more from the ceremony than she did from her uncle. The family has a videotape; Inger Williams went back this week to watch her father’s retelling.

“My emotions were all over the place,” said Taylor, 75. “My family has someone that was hung in the county I was born in, in the courthouse square. That was devastating.”

Hale was accused of assaulting a prominent white woman, but Taylor doesn’t believe he did it. Besides, she said, her white great-grandfather raped her Black great-grandmother. It’s hard to think about white men being able to assault Black women repeatedly without consequence, she said, while her Black great-uncle didn’t even get the benefit of a trial.

“Justice was never served for him,” she said of Hale. “That was not justice.”

Hale is buried in an unmarked grave, on private property, and while organizers of the soil collection event arranged a shuttle to go over after the ceremony, family members declined to do so.

“You still did not humanize my uncle. Do I want to view a pauper’s grave? No sir, I do not,” Inger Williams said. “You put him in a yard like a dog.”

She said the family is beginning to talk about getting Hale a headstone, about moving him to a “respectable grave,” about other ways he might be memorialized. Having him referred to through the ceremony as Mr. Hale ― as a man with a family — helps, she said. But the devastation lingers.

While the Aunt Willie she knew was strong, Inger Williams said she doesn’t know the ways in which her husband’s death might have destroyed her.

“It just gives me chills,” she said. “They mutilated him.”

Inger Williams said her aunt bought herself a diamond solitaire that she wore in her husband’s memory. The couple had a daughter, Sarah, who Willie Williams sent to California with her mother. She doesn’t believe they ever spoke again.

Willie Williams married twice more, her niece said, but had no more children.

After the ceremony, Inger Williams said, she couldn’t leave Lawrenceville fast enough. She’s grateful Hale is becoming part of the city’s known history. She wants more people to learn his story.

But she said she felt an overwhelming desire to protect her aunt. And Inger Williams said she’ll continue to process Hale’s death, and the memorial, “for the remainder of my whole, entire life.”

“What was the end game for this? Just to say we gave him an hour and a half ceremony and Lawrenceville was cleared of their awful sins?” she asked. “I just did not realize the depth of the sins of this country.”

Credit: Steve Schaefer

Credit: Steve Schaefer