On this day in 1889, George Meadows was lynched

By Jefferson County Memorial Project Core Members, T. Marie King and Abigail Schneider

How can we remember what our institutions have tried to erase? How can we remember when events are painful and traumatic?

When the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in 2018, it charged our counties—and the residents in them—to reckon with the long-standing emotional, social, and economic consequences of racial terror. The grassroots coalition, the Jefferson County Memorial Project (JCMP), and our JCMP Fellows, are helping answer these questions for our county.

To begin this reckoning, we knew we needed to understand our history; we asked our young people to help.

In 2019, JCMP Fellows from Jefferson County's six colleges scoured newspaper archives, census records, marriage certificates, and coroners’ reports to understand the lives of our county’s 30 racial terror victims. Local activists, librarians, and historians helped them craft best practices for telling these stories. They uncovered additional lynching victims and pinpointed places of these murders. We started telling our county’s story.

Their research opened up more questions than answered. So, our 2020 JCMP Fellows are digging deeper. They’ve found more undocumented lynchings and new details on the victims’ lives. They've analyzed our county’s broader systems of power, highlighting the nuances of how institutions oppressed people of color in our county. (We'll be publishing their Report this February as well.)

In 2020, at each lynching anniversary, we hope to publish our 2019 and 2020 Fellows’ analysis. The dialogue you’ll see between these fellows shows research as it unfolds. We hope this transparency will help us build a better archive, better collectively remember this history, and advocate against racial injustice today.

Thank you for reading.

If you know anything about these histories, we would love to hear from you. You can email info@jeffersoncountymemorial.com.

George Meadows: Religion, Retaliation, or a Guilty Conscious?

By Devyn Troy, Miles College, JCMP 2020 Fellow

“On January 15, 1889, a mob of white men lynched George Meadows at Pratt mines and then riddled his body with bullets. Mr. Meadows was accused of assaulting a white woman, Mrs. Kellam. Photos were taken of his hanging body and distributed. Later, his body was brought to an undertaker and left out in the public for crowds to view. Mrs. Kellam had begged the mob not to lynch Mr. Meadows because she was unsure if he was the right man. The following day, the sheriff decided Mr. Meadows was not in fact the perpetrator of the crime and arrested another black man, Lewis Jackson. George Meadows was buried in a paupers grave in the old Red Mountain Cemetery. Today that land base has been transformed for the most part into Lane Park, home to the Birmingham Zoo and the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.” - Tony Bingham, JCMP Advisor and Professor at Miles College, JCMP 2019 Residents Report

The song of George Meadows rings a familiar tune: a black man, a white woman’s accusations of foul play, a lynching. However, the song takes a turn at the bridge when there is a plea of mercy for the black perpetrator from the alleged victim and her husband. Mrs. Kellam expressed her verbal reservations. She could not guarantee the identification of Meadows as her attacker. In my research, I also found a letter Mr. Kellam wrote explaining his position. He wrote:

"Fellow Citizens of Pratt Mines and Vicinity: --

Please read and ponder well the words I saw. I am the sorrow-stricken husband of Mrs. Kellam, and I thank the tired and worn out gentlemen for the respect they have shown me and my family and have sacrificed their nights' rest in hunting down the villain … my good fellow citizens, will you for the sake of helping to restore my loved one to me, by no means use the mob law. Let the law take its course….

I have weighed both sides of the matter and I find this to be by far the wisest way, and therefore I take this to be the Christian side of this case …. If I were to allow my passions to control me, I would torture him in the most painful manner: but let us remember the passage in God’s word, “Vengeance is mine. I will repay saith the Lord.” So let us be governed by the Supreme Rule of the Universe.

- Husband"

Mr. Kellam, the victim’s husband, used his Faith as the reason he wanted Meadows to have his day in court. It was the Christian thing to do. He called upon Romans 12:19, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Was he using God to soften the heart of the mob? To him, the Christian choice was the wisest choice. As far as his conscious is concerned, it was also the safest.

Kellum may have not more strongly prevented the lynching because to do so had its ramifications. It sometimes meant the same act of violence to those who tried to stop it.

There is no doubt Mrs. Kellam was attacked. The question is by whom? Mrs. Kellam, was sure, then unsure, then sure again. The Kellam’s attitude towards Meadows shifted drastically between statements. She doesn’t want him hung because she is unsure if he is the one who raped her. She wants him hung. She wants him hung just not by the mob? Mr. Kellam does not want to persecute a man if his wife cannot positively identify the man, yet if he had it his way, he would torture him with his bare hands? One thing is clear and that is uncertainty.

Their attitudes represent the guilt of killing an innocent man while keeping up appearances to their peers. To avoid backlash or side eyes it was important to agree, at least publicly, with the mob’s sentiments no matter how gruesome. The mob felt as though it was their right to commit these acts in order to ensure the hierarchy of society remained where they wanted it to be. At the end of the day, the Kellam’s knew there wasn’t any justice in the mob lynching because they had doubts about Meadows’ guilt. No punishment is fit because punishment is not justifiable.

Selected Sources

“A Prisoner’s Fate,” The Courier-Journal, March 20, 1888, page 2.

“Swung to a limb!" The Tuskaloosa Gazette, Jan 25, 1889, page 1.

“Hung Him Up,” The Evening News (Birmingham), Jan 14, 1889, page 1.