The pattern was as old as the South. Just before 5 a.m. the armed men arrived at the jail in Pickens (pop. 2,866). Shotguns leveled, they demanded 25-year-old Negro Willie Earle, suspected of robbing and killing a Greenville taxi driver. An hour and 45 minutes later, the sheriff was called to identify the slashed and blasted body of Willie Earle. It was the South's first lynching this year; the first in South Carolina since 1941.
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