The lynching of Lige Daniels
W–067
On the back of a postcard showing a hanged teenager, someone wrote: “Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle.” The postcard survives with the inscription; the sender and recipient have not otherwise been reliably identified.
Lige Daniels, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager, was held in the jail at Center, Texas, accused of killing a white woman. His case never reached trial. On 2 August 1920, a mob broke into the jail and hanged him from an oak near the county courthouse. The following day, the Plainview News reported more than a thousand participants and placed the killing at about three in the afternoon.
The Without Sanctuary collection dates the photograph to 3 August. The newspaper report, carrying a Center dateline of 2 August, says the killing happened that day. Equal Justice Initiative uses that date too.
The mob killed Daniels despite the Texas governor’s order to protect him. According to the Without Sanctuary collection, Captain W. A. Bridges received orders from Austin but later said he had been unable to assemble his company in time.
The Plainview News claimed that Daniels had confessed before the grand jury and the district attorney. That was the account published the day after the lynching. The allegation and testimony were never tested at a trial: Daniels had already been killed.
The photograph of the lynching was printed as a real photo postcard. The full image shows the body in the tree and the people gathered around it. Their identities and individual involvement in the killing are unknown. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, no one was held accountable for Daniels’s murder.
On 15 December 2018, local residents and the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a historical marker in Center. They had collected soil in Daniels’s memory and pursued the marker despite resistance from local officials. Nine members of his family attended the unveiling.
Photographs and documents
1. The crowd on the square
Sources and provenance for frame 1
The submitted detail is preserved unchanged. Without Sanctuary dates the photograph to 3 August; the newspaper and EJI date the event to 2 August. People in this detail are unidentified.
The historical photograph was published as a real-photo postcard; Wikimedia identifies it as public domain in the United States. The provenance of this particular supplied digital copy is unknown.
File: 2064 × 1370 px. Downloaded bytes preserved unchanged; separate uncropped WebP preview.
Photographer unknown / owner-supplied copyFile on WITNESS · 2064 × 13702. The complete postcard
Sources and provenance for frame 2
Wikimedia Commons file: a small reproduction, not an archival master scan. The collection gives 3 August; the event date follows the newspaper and EJI.
The source identifies the historical image as public domain.
File: 442 × 685 px. Downloaded bytes preserved unchanged; separate uncropped WebP preview. Source file.
Photographer unknown / Without Sanctuary collectionFile on WITNESS · 442 × 6853. The postcard reverse
Sources and provenance for frame 3
Small available digital copy. The names do not establish full identities or a relationship with anyone in the photograph.
The source states no open licence; an available copy does not document acquired rights.
File: 330 × 209 px. Downloaded bytes preserved unchanged; separate uncropped WebP preview. Source file.
Without Sanctuary collectionFile on WITNESS · 330 × 2094. The newspaper report
Sources and provenance for frame 4
Complete page rendered from the retrieved PDF without cropping; the link opens the eight-page issue. Not a photograph of the event.
Newspaper published in 1920. Its historical text contains racist language, not adopted in the story.
File: 2133 × 3000 px. The page was rendered as an uncropped JPEG from the source PDF; separate WebP preview. Source file.
Southwest Collection / Texas Tech UniversityFile on WITNESS · 2133 × 30005. Soil in remembrance of Daniels
Sources and provenance for frame 5
Photograph from the organizer’s report about the memorial. Individual photographer not specified; the source-published version is retained.
The source states no open licence; an available copy does not document acquired rights.
File: 1024 × 492 px. Downloaded bytes preserved unchanged; separate uncropped WebP preview. Source file.
Equal Justice InitiativeFile on WITNESS · 1024 × 4926. Unveiling the historical marker
Sources and provenance for frame 6
Photograph from the organizer’s report about the memorial. Individual photographer not specified; the source-published version is retained.
The source states no open licence; an available copy does not document acquired rights.
File: 1024 × 492 px. Downloaded bytes preserved unchanged; separate uncropped WebP preview. Source file.
Equal Justice InitiativeFile on WITNESS · 1024 × 492