Bernstein to discuss First Waco Horror

Patricia Bernstein will discuss her book
The First Waco Horror: the Lynching of Jesse Washington and the
Rise of the NAACP

Thurs., Oct. 6
3:30 pm
569 Hamilton Hall

Author Patricia Bernstein

The First Waco Horror: the Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP, published by Texas A & M University Press, is the first complete telling of the story of one of the great watershed atrocities of the lynching era, the mob murder by beating, stabbing, burning and hanging of a 17-year old black farm laborer behind Waco City Hall, on May 15, 1916, before a crowd of 10,000 screaming, cheering spectators--while the mayor and chief of police looked on from the mayor's office and the town's principal photographer snapped souvenir photos.

The book also describes how a few smart, determined reformers were able to confront a great evil by telling how the fledgling NAACP sent a young, white women's suffrage activist, Elisabeth Freeman, to investigate the lynching and then publicized the facts mercilessly throughout the country to shame Waco and kick off a vigorous national antilynching campaign. Elisabeth Freeman used all of her street smarts to get the facts, get the photographs, and even get the names of the lynch mob leaders. The author of The First Waco Horror was even able to track down two grandsons of one of the alleged mob leaders, and, with their help, paint a full portrait in the book of the kind of man who would lead a mob in the torture and murder of a teenager.

The First Waco Horror has re-ignited an ongoing controversy in Waco, and in many other lynching towns, as to how--or if--towns should formally acknowledge and apologize for this ugly past when the actual perpetrators of the lynching are long dead and beyond the reach of the law. Many Southern and Midwestern communities are confronting the same issue, as more and more of these terrible old tales are exposed.

Patricia Bernstein holds a Degree of Distinction in American Studies from Smith College and has managed her own public relations firm in Houston for the past 20 years. In 1993, she published Having a Baby: Mothers Tell Their Stories with Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. The book is a collection of women’s first-person accounts of their childbirth experiences, ranging from the 1880s to the 1990s. She has also published numerous magazine and newspaper articles, appearing in publications as diverse as Texas Monthly, Cosmopolitan, and The Smithsonian. Bernstein is married and has three daughters.