At first glance, the faded black-and-white image looks like an idyllic scene from a picnic in the years just before the turn of the 20th century, with men in suits, boys in straw hats and a carriage and horses in the background of a tree-filled meadow.
But take a closer look, and the photo is chilling. At its center, a Black man in a black suit dangles from a chain tied around a sycamore tree, his neck crooked at a seemingly impossible angle.
The image, taken June 13, 1891, by a professional photographer, was captured just after the lynching of Robert Clark in Bristol.
It is Bristol’s only documented lynching. It didn’t happen in the shadows of night, and there were no masks or hoods. The lynching occurred in broad daylight amid a mob of hundreds, possibly thousands, most likely between 1 and 1:15 p.m., according to newspaper accounts at the time.
As was often the case in such lynchings, Clark was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. He denied the charges until his dying breath.
What really happened has been lost to time.
“Some 130 years later, it’s doubtful we will ever know if Robert Clark raped Mary Johnson Warren, if he died for the crimes of another person or if Mrs. Warren had simply been discovered in a consensual, extramarital affair with a Black man,” says a video about the lynching by the nonprofit Black in Appalachia.
“We do know that Robert Clark was not given the right of a full and fair trial and that he was killed at the hands of a lynch mob on that afternoon in June 1891.”
And like many of the images of lynchings, that photo — which was shot by Hodges Photography in Bristol — was made into a postcard.
Today, there’s an effort underway to erect a marker in remembrance of the lynching. The local project is part of a larger state and national campaign to recognize that these lynchings took place and to mark the sites. More than 4,400 African Americans were lynched across 20 states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
In Bristol, the process has been complicated by incomplete or unreadable documents, and by questions about exactly where and when it took place, due to different accounts.
Uncertainty over details is not uncommon in lynching cases that happened so many years ago. But in the case of Clark’s lynching, the planned marker won’t be placed at the site where leaders of the project believe Clark was killed by the mob that day, nor did the soil that was collected as part of the remembrance process come from that site.
The owners of the private property won’t allow it, saying they’re not sure that Clark’s death happened on their land.
Historical accounts of the case
The alleged sexual assault of Warren is believed to have happened around 3 a.m. June 7, 1891. Her husband worked for the Norfolk and Western Railroad and was known to be out of town every other week, according to newspaper accounts.
A Black man described as drunk and wearing socks with no shoes is said to have entered the home and threatened Warren, the 31-year-old mother of four children, with death.
After three days, Clark was arrested at his girlfriend’s house, where he was found asleep.
On June 12, the day before the lynching, a “preliminary trial” was held, presided over by the city’s mayor. According to testimony, muddy sock prints were found around the Warren home and several witnesses testified that they’d seen Clark drunk that night and that he was bragging about the crime.
Several newspaper accounts of the case said authorities had a strong circ*mstantial case against Clark, but a review of these reports found no details of the exact charges against him.
Clark, who was 20 years old and a handyman, according to newspaper accounts, admitted that he was drunk that night and that he’d gone out on the town without shoes. But he maintained that he was innocent.
The crowd that became the mob, mostly men, began gathering near the jail the next morning. Several speeches asking the mob to let justice take its course were made but were unsuccessful, according to newspaper accounts.
When given a chance to speak by the mob, Clark, in a calm voice, again said he was not guilty. He prayed for those in the crowd, asking God to forgive them for making such a mistake. He ended his remarks by asking those present not to mutilate his body or riddle it with bullets, as was done with many corpses after a lynching.
After several botched attempts at hanging Clark using a horse chain, the effort eventually resulted in Clark’s death around 1:15 p.m. According to newspaper reports, the body remained hanging there until around 5 p.m.
According to the indictment of five men in connection to the lynching, Clark was badly beaten. It’s not clear whether the cases against the men moved forward. Copies of some court documents pertaining to the indictments are too light to read and the handwriting is illegible.
‘Telling the truth about all of our history’
In October 2018, Tina McDaniel was on vacation with her husband, Billy, visiting the newly opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Located in Montgomery, Alabama, it’s the first national memorial to lynchings in the U.S.
She saw the huge hanging Corten steel monuments that represent counties where racial terror lynchings had taken place — one of which featured the name of Robert Clark. It stated that he had been lynched in Sullivan County, Tennessee, the county that includes Bristol, Tennessee. McDaniel had spent most of her life in Bristol, but she’d never heard of the lynching.
Her interest was piqued.
She began researching, and the first account she found was from The Roanoke Times. Since then, she’s discovered nearly 20 sources, including The New York Times and The Knoxville Journal, which documented the lynching in the following day’s edition.
Nearly all accounts have the mob murder of Clark taking place in Bristol, Virginia; the location will be corrected at the memorial, McDaniel said.
McDaniel began working with William Isom, director of Black in Appalachia, a nonprofit that highlights the history and contributions of African Americans to the Mountain South and its culture. Together, they createda video about what happened to Clark, “An Intense Feeling: the Lynching of Robert Clark,” which was released in early 2023.
She learned later that she knew some of Clark’s family members.
In the winter of 2019, the Virginia General Assembly unanimously approved identical House and Senate resolutions acknowledging with “profound regret the existence and acceptance of lynching in the Commonwealth.”
The resolutions note that the Equal Justice Initiative created the Community Remembrance Project to foster greater awareness and understanding about racial terror lynchings, and to work with communities to commemorate and recognize the “traumatic era of lynching” by collecting soil from lynching sites and erecting historical markers and monuments in those spaces.
Over the last six years, EJI has worked with hundreds of communities to erect nearly 100 markers that tell the stories of these lynchings, according to Sia Sanneh, a senior attorney with the organization who helps develop and manage many of its historical research projects and cultural sites in Montgomery.
The timing of the resolutions was helpful in getting local officials on board with efforts to place markers in Southwest Virginia, according to Preston Mitchell, a Bristol native who is a deacon for the Episcopal Church in Southwest Virginia. He got involved with the marker effort after he attended the 2017 opening of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta, where he learned of the effort to recognize documented lynchings.
“I can’t overemphasize how important that House Resolution 655 was,’’ he said. “It took it, in my opinion, out of this partisan Republican or Democrat, conservative, liberal. … So this is about just telling the truth about all of our history, the uncomfortable and the glorious. And to say, this is who and what we are.” The resolution “made it real easy” because it encourages local communities to get involved, he said.
Mitchell, a retired adjunct history professor and former basketball coach at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, helped get markers approved for three documented lynchings in Wise County. The markers were erected in 2022 and 2023. One was stolen six weeks later, but it was replaced in February.
Mitchell and McDaniel began working jointly on the Robert Clark marker after being brought together by Isom with Black in Appalachia.
As co-chairs of the Bristol Community Remembrance Project, they’ve spoken about their efforts to clubs and organizations in the region, and have also gotten resolutions of support from the city council and school board in Bristol.
Before she really started talking about the project, McDaniel received the postcard photo of the lynching, which has been digitized and is now part of Cornell University’s research archives, anonymously through an email. She also received a current photo of the United Company site that compares the two photos.
Collecting the soil
One of the most important aspects of the efforts to get local markers involves getting soil from the site where the lynchings occurred.
McDaniel said the soil represents “the individual and what they went through — their blood, sweat and tears.”
Based mainly on newspaper accounts, particularly the Knoxville Journal article, Mitchell and McDaniel believe that the lynching took place on what later became the campus of Sullins College, near the back parking lot off Piedmont Avenue.
Today, the property is owned by the United Company and is the site of the coal and energy company’s headquarters.
Since December, Mitchell and McDaniel have made three attempts to get permission to collect soil from that site, but officials with the United Company won’t allow it. In a statement released to Cardinal News, they said they’re not sure that the lynching took place on their property.
“First and foremost, we are sympathetic to this request, and have given it significant consideration,” the statement reads. “We respect and honor the coalition’s work to shine a light on this tragic incident in Bristol’s history. Unfortunately, there is not clear, definitive evidence establishing where the lynching occurred. A well-respected historical source points to it happening elsewhere. A memorial of such importance to our community deserves to be recognized in a fully accurate manner. We remain committed to working with the community on this effort.”
Asked what historical source they referred to, a spokesperson for the company said it was a book called “Pioneers in Paradise,” written by the late historian V.N. “Bud” Phillips.
Phillips’ book tells a very different story. He says the lynching occurred on Dec. 15, rather than on June 13, 1891, at the northwest corner of Wood and Mary streets in Bristol. He quotes a grand jury indictment of five men believed to have been involved in the hanging as a source.
However, a copy of the indictment from a file on the lynching in the Bristol Circuit Court clerk’s office does not say what month or day the lynching took place, only that it happened in 1891. The spaces for that information on the documents are blank.
The indictment also does not say where the lynching took place, and Phillips does not provide a source for his information.
His book, published in 2002 by Overmountain Press, does not include a bibliography or reference source material, with only an index at the end.
Phillips also claims in the book that a “lewd suggestion” rather than a sexual assault resulted in the lynching, and says that the suggestion was made the same day as the lynching.
Sanneh said soil collection is important because most lynching victims could not be buried with dignity.
“There are numerous cases where not only was the victim killed in an extremely gruesome and violent way, but then their body would be dragged through a Black neighborhood or to a Black church as a warning, or displayed prominently for days in the Black community. So for most families and communities there was no safe way to acknowledge and mourn the death,” she said.
Sanneh added that the soil collection project was started so communities could reflect on and honor the loss of the individuals. More than 800 jars of soil gathered from local communities are now on display at the EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, which focuses on racial injustice.
After the last refusal from United Company officials, Mitchell and McDaniel went back to EJI to ask if there had been other cases where permission could not be obtained to get dirt from the site. They were told to consider another site connected to the lynching, and they settled on the site of the old jail, where Clark was being held when he was taken by the mob.
On June 15, a group gathered near today’s city courthouse and outside the WCYB-TV building downtown, where the old jail stood, and soil was taken from both sites.
Members of Clark’s extended family, including Sally Lavette Clark, her two daughters and granddaughter, participated in the soil collection.
Clark, who believes Robert Clark was her grandfather’s uncle or great-uncle, said she heard about the lynching from her mother and aunt when she was a little girl, but it didn’t seem real to her at that age. She’s appreciative that her ancestor is now being remembered, and she thanked McDaniel for working to make that happen.
“I will tell you when we got to the collecting of the soil, I was very, very surprised about how much support was there from all races. And I loved it,” she said, adding that she wishes her late mother had lived to see Robert Clark’s lynching remembered.
The dirt will be sent to EJI and displayed in a glass jar in the museum there, while the plan is to place the marker in the old Citizen’s Cemetery, which is just over the hill and about a quarter-mile from the site where those involved in the project believe the lynching happened. The historic cemetery, at the end of Piedmont Avenue, dates to the 1800s and is currently overgrown with weeds.
The hope is to erect the marker during a ceremony in September, and Clark said she and her family will be “honored” to be there.
