This story, a collaboration between WKNO-FM and the Institute for Public Service Reporting originally aired as three episodes on Oct. 24-26, 2022.
This half-hour version premiered at a public listening event at the Memphis Listening Lab on Oct. 24, 2022.
EPISODE 1: A LYNCHING IN MEMPHIS
105 years ago, on a Tuesday morning, thousands of people headed to the outskirts of Memphis to watch a man be burned alive. It was just one of many brutal lynchings of the era, but also one covered in great detail by the media.
The story — one of racial profiling, false confessions and mob violence — is as much present as it is past. The road to civil rights is paved with civil wrongs.
Margaret Vandiver knows it well. We meet her near a used car lot on Summer Avenue, a little ways past the old drive-in movie theater.
"This is the part I was hoping would be mowed, but as you can see, anything but," says the retired University of Memphis professor, leading the way into this wooded area.
A quarter mile into thick brush, we are on the banks of a pond, the former footprint of the Wolf River. Vandiver points to power lines and a concrete structure on the other side, which once marked the course of the old Macon Road.
On a spring morning, 15-year-old Antoinette Rappel got on her bike and headed to school. A search party found that bike two days later, a few hundred feet off the road. The girl’s belongings were still in the front basket. Her body was nearby.
As the newspapers of May 3, 1917 reported, it was no doubt murder. Her head had been cut off, apparently with an ax.
Three weeks later, in this same spot, a mob of thousands publicly executed the prime suspect. For Antoinette Rappel, this would not be justice served.
"Most of the evidence against him was preposterous," Vandiver says. "There is no reason to suspect him more than any one of the other men who were in this area at that time."
So why him? Let’s peel back the layers.
During the time of the First World War, Black woodcutters lived in the area near the Wolf River Bottoms, working largely for white landowners.
Ell Persons was one of them. So little is known about his life that reports differ on his age, ranging from 38 to 50.
At first, even police considered him an unlikely suspect. Crime scene evidence included a white coat and a white handkerchief, neither of which were commonly worn by Black laborers.
But the public was of a different mind. The papers reported that one local woodcutter hadn’t come to work the day of Antoinette’s disappearance. Persons, it was said, could not locate his ax.
Dr. Darius Young, a history professor at Florida A&M University, says the case against Persons was baseless, but it wasn’t unexpected.
"As I'm going back through the documents and looking at the previous months, I'm seeing all of this talk about Black folks voting in Memphis, which is something that's very unique when we talk about the South in 1916," Young says.
A prominent Black citizen named Robert Church Jr. — one of the country’s first Black millionaires — had recently organized and funded one of the largest Black voter registration drives in the country.
"In learning his story and him organizing over 10,000 Black men to vote the previous year that I started to understand the root of the racial tension in the city," Young says.
The city’s Black voting bloc — an estimated third of the electorate — could throw its weight behind whichever political party did more for the Black community.
"Locally, [the idea was] let me try to negotiate things where we can get some concessions," Young says. "Can we get a school? Can we get sidewalks? Can we get a park?"
White political panic had already prompted a crackdown on Beale Street’s Black-owned businesses.
It’s why racist dogwhistles, like “brute,” appear early on in newspaper articles about the Rappel killing. And how the slimmest circumstantial evidence put Ell Persons in the crosshairs.
For example, Persons’ white boss had fired him a few months earlier for allegedly frightening his boss’s wife.
Vandiver says the only so-called forensic evidence was the outlandish belief that human eyes imprinted the last image seen before death.
"They actually took this seriously enough to exhume the body of Antoinette Rappel," Vandiver says. "One of her eyes had decomposed; they examined the other one. The Commercial Appeal said that in her eye there was an image of a large- featured man. The News Scimitar said that in her eye there was an image of Ell Persons."
After questioning Persons twice and finding no evidence he was involved, Sheriff deputies conducted a brutal interrogation. Two detectives, “coaxed, cajoled, beat, whipped, [and] threatened” him. They ultimately claimed they found human blood on Persons’ shoes, an assertion later determined false by an NAACP investigation. A local paper, the Memphis Press, reported that Persons then confessed to the crime and was immediately whisked to a jail in Nashville to avoid a lynching.
Sheriff Mike Tate tried to conceal Persons’ return to Memphis for trial. But mob leaders abducted him from the train in Potts Camp, Miss., just south of Holly Springs.
On the morning of May 22, they brought him to the site of Antoinette Rappel’s murder. An estimated five to fifteen thousand people came to watch the spectacle.
Food vendors sold drinks and sandwiches.
What happened next was so widely reported, that the famed writer James Weldon Johnson, author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” made his own journey to Memphis to record its aftermath for the newly organized NAACP.
Here is what Johnson wrote of the incident:
On the day I arrived in Memphis, Robert R. Church drove me out to the place where the burning had taken place. A pile of ashes and pieces of charred wood still marked the spot. While the ashes were yet hot, the bones had been scrambled for as souvenirs by the mobs. I reassembled the picture in my mind: a lone Negro in the hands of his accusers, who for the time are no longer human; he is chained to a stake, wood is piled under and around him, and five thousand men and women, women with babies in their arms and women with babies in their wombs, look on with pitiless anticipation, with sadistic satisfaction while he is baptized with gasoline and set afire. The mob disperses, many of them complaining, “They burned him too fast.” I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.
The sheer brutality of Ell Persons’ lynching wasn’t just a miscarriage of justice. It was an intentional warning to Memphis’ newly empowered Black community. Over a century later, the incident is still coming into focus as Memphis — and America — confront its dark history.
NEXT: Part Two of Civil Wrongs examines how this event is still affecting lives today, including distant relatives of people involved.
EPISODE 2: THE TIES THAT BIND
Out on Summer avenue, near Sycamore View Road, two historic markers tell the story of public lynching.
The markers note the details of two crimes: One, the murder of a 15-year old white girl, Antoinette Rappel. The other, the lynching of the suspect, Ell Persons, on May 22, 1917, watched by more than 5,000 people.
Alex Williams was in the crowd.
"They asked this girl's mother how she wanted him punished and someone said she told him to make him suffer as much as he made her daughter suffer," Williams recalled 50 years later. "So, they carried him over to that log and tied him to that log and started piling. There was wet logs and things on him, they couldn't start a fire and then went out up on the highway got this oil truck and brought it down there and emptied the oil all over the wood and set it on fire."
Steve Haley, a retired Southwest Tennessee Community College history professor, cried when he first recorded these words as part of a family oral history project in 1970.
They were coming from his grandfather.
"Afterwards he he told me that he was not the least bit — I think he never used the term 'racist,' Haley said. "But he would have laughed and said, 'oh I was never a racist.'
It’s a contradiction that Haley and others often face when examining their ancestors’ attitudes about racial violence. He says his grandfather was considered fairly liberal for his time. Yet he stood by while a Black man was burned alive.
"My impression was that 95% of the people out there were cheering it out," Haley says. "You know, even though they may not be vocally cheering it on. They were all for it."
Haley would like to think his grandfather was among the few white people whose perspective of Black people at the time was what he calls “neutral.”
But he and other historians, like Dr. Darius Young of Florida A&M University, say the truth is more complex..
"It's economics. It’s politics. It’s religion and the role that that plays..." he says. "And all these things that make us uncomfortable are being discussed in the details of this lynching."
He says the brutality was meant as a warning to the Black community. After cutting off Persons’ fingers and toes as souvenirs, the mob then took his head and tossed it into the economic heart of Black Memphis.
"It's not a mistake," Young says. "It's not something that just happened. it was they very much intended. To send that message not just to the black community, but also to the black entrepreneurs and political leaders."
When Michele Whitney’s mother died in 2016, she felt that she had lost her last connection to her family history.
So she turned to ancestry.com. From there, she was contacted by a researcher for the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis. The group was looking for descendants of Ell Persons in preparation for the lynching’s 100th anniversary in 2017.
Persons was Whitney's great uncle. She had never heard this part of her family’s story.
"You know it was... It was shocking," Whitney says. "I kept saying to myself we're not that far removed from a hundred years. Like there are people that are 100 years old, right?"
For many Black families, trauma of this magnitude is left in silence – sometimes because of the misplaced shame, and sometimes because it’s just too painful to speak aloud. But Whitney said the knowledge was worth the hurt.
"You don't have to get stuck in, you know, anger or whatever about what may have happened 100 years ago, but it's important to stay connected with it so that you can see things through that lens as you move forward as a person in the future," she says. "So, I think it's just a matter of connectedness."
Those connections kept growing.
Laura Miller, born Laura Wilfong, is a relative of Antoinette Rappel, the 15-year-old girl whose murder led to Ell Persons' lynching.
Her great-grandfather found his niece’s beheaded body.
Growing up, Miller even saw the crime scene evidence kept by her grandmother.
She would show me her books, her bicycle basket, her gloves that were with her the day they found her," Miller says. "And then some of the story about what happened with Ell."
She, too, was contacted by the Lynching Sites Project. As a fuller picture of the murder and lynching became clear, she also had to take new stock of the past.
"I had to undo a good amount of some pre-programming, you know, from the way I was raised or things I had heard or preconceived notions, whatever," Miller says. "I mean, I had to really take some time and just become very different about the way I viewed things. And have a lot of conversations with my daughter about that too."
In May of 2017, about 100 people gathered under a tent on Summer Avenue. The unveiling of a new historic marker included speeches and prayers. Michele Whitney performed "Life Every Voice and Sing" on her flute.
Laura Miller says it felt less like closure and more the beginning of a new conversation.
"I remember sitting at dinner that night and having this overwhelming need to apologize," she says. "And I don't know that I ever did because I felt awkward, but... that was what I was feeling at that time. You know it was a lot of, just, emotions and unsure."
Michele Whitney says she’s only become more inquisitive in the five years since the marker went up.
"There were consequences — long-term consequences — that occurred as a result of the treatment of Black people in America," Whitney says. "And it's just, you know, you won't understand it unless you understand the root of it and deal with it."
That same root that brought Ell Persons to his death still runs through America’s criminal justice system. Dealing with it, however, is easier said than done.
NEXT: In Part three of our Civil Wrongs series, journalist Laura Faith Kebede explores how police interrogations and false confessions — a major question in the Ell Persons lynching — are still common in modern criminal investigations.
EPISODE 3: A CONFESSION'S WORTH
Police interrogations are a routine part of crime fighting. While interrogations can, and do solve cases, they can also result in false confessions. And that is more common than people realize.
When Ell Persons was accused of murdering a white teenage girl in 1917, police say he confessed, though the evidence was slim. His confession — and those still legally obtained today — can lead to potentially tragic outcomes.
James Bolden knows how it can happen. As a kid in rural Fayette County, he saw firsthand how police abused the local Black community.
"They had what we call field interrogations, where you were interrogated right there on the spot," he says.
Which is how his life changed course in 1962, after his family moved to Memphis. Police stopped him to ask about one of his friends.
"He wanted me to put my head into the car. And what they would do is take and roll the window up," Bolden says. "While you had your head in the car and they would hit you on the head with the nightstick."
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Bolden didn’t take the bait. He was sent away with a warning.
"I went home, I walked into the house and my mother saw me crying and she wanted to know what happened," he says.
That’s when Bolden told his mother what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
"She said that doesn't make sense. Why would you want to be a police officer?" Bolden says. "Because I'm going to make sure that they don't do that to another young boy."
When Ell Persons was interrogated for the 1917 killing of Antoinette Rappel, local newspapers said it involved what was commonly known as the “third degree,” including threats, beatings and false evidence. Most of that was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court 19 years later.
Most of it…
Dr. Hayley Cleary, associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond who studies how psychology plays out in interrogations, says coercion continues in the psychological tactics that have replaced the "third degree" tactics of the past.
"And these methods, for example using trickery or deception to trick suspects, have been pretty consistently upheld by the courts and in many departments have really become the norm," Cleary says.
Cleary says that while they may be perfectly legal, and may even look harmless to a layperson — say, a member of a jury — people who are mentally vulnerable or under duress may be more likely to confess to something merely to end the interrogation.
"The reaction that folks in my field get constantly is 'why would you confess to a crime you never committed?'" says Cleary. "And in that moment, confession can actually seem like the best most rational choice because it ends the stress. And people time and time and time again will tell you, 'I just wanted to go home. I wanted it all to stop and I wanted to go home.'"
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, one in every eight people cleared since 1989 had confessed to the crime.
"Many times we confuse interviewing with interrogation," says Bolden, who did become a decorated member of the Memphis Police Department, rising to chief of police in 2003.
He confirms what many researchers say can trigger those stressful responses in some suspects.
"Sometimes we enter into an interrogation assuming that the person is guilty," he says. "And you have to be extremely careful."
In recent years, Memphis reporters found several instances of false confessions at the MPD. Such as Terrell Johnson, who was 17 in 2013. He was arrested on suspicion of robbery and murder. His mother, Hope Chambers, told the Institute for Public Service Reporting that when she left the interrogation room, her son was then pressured to confess. The real perpetrator was identified later, but not before Johnson spent months in juvenile detention. Bolden says cases like these erode the public’s trust in police work.
"We can't do what was done 40, 50 years ago and expect it to be acceptable," Bolden says. "We have to adapt to the times. Society is not going to adapt to law enforcement. Law enforcement has to adapt to the will and the culture of the society in which we live."
Currently, 30 states mandate recorded interrogations of suspects in serious crimes, according to the Innocence Project. Tennessee is not one of them. It’s not for a lack of trying. Three times in the past 20 years, lawmakers have proposed recording laws.
Representative Eddie Bass, a former sheriff, calls it a "bad bill," arguing in 2011 that a single glitch in a recording could help a child rapist go free.
"All we’re going to do with this bill is give them avenues to get out of what they’ve done," he said in a public hearing.
Nationally, U.S. Representative Steve Cohen cosponsored a bill in July 2020 to provide sheriff departments with funding to buy recording equipment. The bill hasn’t moved forward.
But the City of Memphis has. In 2019, MPD instituted the recording of every homicide interrogation following an investigation by the Institute for Public Service Reporting. Those recordings are all treated as evidence.
Ell Persons’ confession was never used against him in a court of law. The media cited it as proof of guilt and before Persons could be tried, a mob abducted him and brought him to the scene of the crime, a wooded area off what is now Summer Avenue.
Margaret Vandiver, a retired University of Memphis professor and Ell Persons researcher, has visited often.
"We are in a site that seems rural and yet Memphis is all around us," she says.
In a few years, the Wolf River Conservancy is expected to bring a walking trail to this site, the place where Persons was burned alive.
"It was left in a condition that surprisingly similar to what it was a hundred years ago," she says.
Which is partly why Rep. Cohen introduced a bill to make this place among the first lynching sites protected by the National Park Service.
Vandiver says it's urgent to preserve the site because there are not many remaining in their original condition.
For Vandiver and others, this small tract of land remains a crime scene that puts Memphis itself on trial. And each new generation that discovers this place is asked to sit on the jury to determine how far we’ve come.
LEARN MORE
Civil Wrongs is a project of the University of Memphis' Institute for Public Service Reporting and WKNO. Learn more at our Civil Wrongs project page.
