Jesse Washington

I watched Jordan Peele’s Candyman last Thursday night, and it freaked me out. Especially as a Texan. Can acts of injustice curse a place? Can acts of monstrosity—as Peele et al. suggest—stain a community? A quasi-sequel to the 1992 film of the same name, Candyman explores the affirmative answer to these questions. And that’s what […]
The post Say Their Names first appeared on Dissident Voice.

One hundred years ago this week, Jesse Washington, an eighteen-year-old African American man, was burned at the stake in Waco, Texas.
On May 8, 1916 a 53-year-old white woman named Lucy Fryar was bludgeoned to death outside her home, seven miles south of the city. The chief and only suspect was Washington, an illiterate farm hand who worked for Lucy and her husband George.