It wasn’t until 2011 that Paulette Alden first learned about the lynching of Willie Earle in the pages of the New Yorker.
The piece was written by British journalist Rebecca West, who was sent to cover the trial in Greenville in 1947. Earle, a 24-year-old Black man, had been charged in the death of a white Greenville cab driver who was found bleeding and beaten on the side of the road after being robbed by a Black passenger. Earle was arrested and taken to the Pickens County jail, where he was seized by a mob of angry cab drivers and brutally killed.
