The ceremony marking a century since the lynching of Raymond Byrd had just begun when the heavens opened.
Claudia Perry, a member of the board of Wytheville Training School Cultural Center, started the event, in African-American fashion, with a song. “Soon I Will Be Done With the Troubles of This World” is believed to have originated among enslaved people. The lyrics describe a place beyond grief and suffering.
As Perry sang — thinking, she said later, about Byrd’s ordeal — the drops fell on Black and white alike. Some went to fetch umbrellas, others stood in the rain.
Patricia Austin, board president of the center, gave a brief speech, and then attendees were invited to lay carnations at the base of a historic marker.
The location of the Sunday ceremony, Wytheville’s Withers Park, is today a peaceful green oasis with a LOVE sign, but 100 years ago, it was the site of the Wythe County jail.
In 2021, local researcher John M. Johnson published “A Death Mob Gathered,” a study of the Byrd case.
Raymond Byrd (sometimes spelled Bird) was born in Wythe County in 1895, the grandson of Dennis Byrd, a formerly enslaved man. Raymond married Tennessee Hawkins in 1917 and served in France during World War I.
In the 1920s, he was working as a farm hand for Grover Grubb, a white landowner, about nine miles from Wytheville. The Grubbs had three daughters, Essie May, Minnie Louise and Mary Nell. In 1926, Essie and Minnie were adults; Mary was 11 or 12. The oldest two “were said to be sexually involved with Raymond Byrd,” Johnson wrote, and both got pregnant.
There are conflicting accounts of what happened next.
Stuart Campbell, a lawyer retained by Grubb, and county Commonwealth’s Attorney H.M. Heuser questioned all three daughters. The investigators concluded that Essie and Minnie had given their consent; therefore, Byrd could not be charged with rape.
In Johnson’s account, Grover Grubb then pressured Mary to tell the commonwealth’s attorney that Byrd had touched her improperly, and this was the charge that got Byrd arrested.
A 1993 article in The Roanoke Times says it wasn’t Grubb, but a neighbor of his, who took out a warrant charging Byrd with rape, apparently of Minnie.
According to Roanoke attorney Paul Beers, who published a study of the case in 1994, Byrd was arrested on Aug. 7, 1926, and charged with raping Minnie and Essie Grubb.
Regarding the investigators’ conclusion that a rape charge wasn’t supported, “I think the prosecutor reached that conclusion after Byrd … was arrested and jailed awaiting trial but before the charges had been formally dropped,” Beers wrote in an email to Cardinal News.
“News probably began to spread that Bird was about to be released, which inspired the mob to form and administer extrajudicial punishment.”
Byrd was imprisoned in the Wytheville jail. It wasn’t Grover Grubb, but a relative who rounded up the lynch mob, according to Johnson.
On the early morning of Aug. 15, men wearing masks, some dressed as females, all armed, appeared at the jail. Johnson put the number at 30 to 50, some crowding into the jail, others waiting outside. The jailer surrendered his keys.
The mob dragged Byrd from his cell into the hallway, beat him and shot him. His lifeless body was then dragged 600 yards behind a car. The body was then hanged from a tree near the Grubb farm.
A local investigation into the murder of Byrd produced charges against a single Wythe County resident, who was acquitted in July 1927. The failure to bring the murderers to justice was condemned by state newspapers. The Roanoke Times wrote: “Almost without exception the dailies from one end of the state to the other have condemned the lynching in ringing terms.” Louis Jaffe, editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, called for the governor to be invested with power to investigate lynchings and oversee prosecutions.
Gov. Harry F. Byrd was a supporter of segregation and later coined the term “massive resistance” to integration. Even the savagery of Raymond Byrd’s murder did not prod him into action.
It was not until another lynching, on the Virginia-Kentucky border in 1927, that momentum began building for a new law. The bill that the governor signed on March 14, 1928, was the first in the nation to make lynching a state crime.
The governor saw mob violence as a threat to efforts to attract business and industry, Beers said.
“Around 1900 Virginia’s governors began in earnest to search for ways to prosecute and deter lynchings of Blacks at the same time they vigorously defended white supremacy and racial apartheid through enactment of Jim Crow laws,” Beers wrote in an email. “Although he was a committed segregationist, Governor Harry Byrd was determined to end lynching in Virginia. My fascination with this seeming paradox prompted me to research and write about the 1926 lynching in Wytheville. “
The murder of Raymond Byrd was one of the last lynchings in the state.
After the flower-laying, the gathering reconvened at the Wytheville Training School Cultural Center. Speaking to the crowd, Austin, the board president, said, “As I was planning this process, a lot of people asked me, ‘Why do you think that it’s important to dredge up the past, something that was so horrific?’ You know, we learn from the past, we learn from truth.”
In an interview before the ceremony, she said, “When we remain silent when an injustice has been done, the healing is slower. The intention of this is to continue to help unite this community, and really for us to all be in one accord. History deserves the truth.”
Brandi Quinn, great-granddaughter of Raymond Byrd, came from Toledo, Ohio, to attend the gathering.
“It feels so beautiful when I see the community coming together and not letting something that was so tragic to just keep a dark cloud over this city, over this state, over our country,” she said. “That’s the beauty right there, that we can take tragedy and turn it into triumph.”
Questions remain about the Raymond Byrd case. The lynching cut short the legal process that would have generated a documentary trail of events that happened 100 years ago — in addition to cutting short the life of an accused person who did not receive a fair trial, or any trial at all.
