The Attempted Lynching of Caesar Griffin

I've mentioned elsewhere that the underlying facts of Griffin's Case, a Section Three precedent that will be discussed next month by in the Supreme Court, are very disturbing. Here is one account written about twenty-five years ago in a biography of Robert E. Lee. The shooting for which Griffin was convicted occurred in the town where Lee was the President of the College (now Washington & Lee).

"Mrs. John Brocken-borough, wife of the judge, was walking home with her son Francis, who was not quite old enough to attend the college. A group of black men were standing about the sidewalk in front of the Brockenborough house. They 'refused to give the pavement,' as a student put it, forcing Mrs. Brockenborough and her son to step into the gutter to get around them and to their front gate. Enraged, young Francis saw his mother to the door, came back down the walk, and attacked one of the blacks with a stick. The black drew a pistol and shot him in the chest." The account goes on to say that an angry crowd of students then searched the town for the gunman and "[o]ne party succeeded in getting him and they came very near to lynching him." 

They came very near indeed. The black, Caesar Griffin, would certainly have been hanged from a tree had not it not been for one of those timely arrivals that had quelled earlier disturbances. This time the students had a rope around their intended victim's neck and had marched him to the courthouse square--the preferred place for lynchings, since it implied that justice had been done. Assistant Professor Harry Estill, a former Confederate captain, strode out of the night. The slender, black-bearded veteran ordered the students to turn their captive over to the jailer, which they did.

The Supreme Court should be made aware of these background facts. The source is Charles Flood, Lee: The Last Years 184-85 (1998). There are similar descriptions in other Lee biographies.