CHESTER -- What about Nelson Brice and John Crosby?
It is justice that two black men from Chester County were pardoned Wednesday for the 1913 murder of a white Civil War veteran that they very likely did not commit.
It is far too late to change history. We cannot turn back the clock.
Meeks Griffin and Tom Griffin, who received those posthumous pardons — believed to be the first in a S.C. capital case — were executed in the electric chair in 1915.
It is terrific that Tom Joyner, the rightly famous radio host, found out Meeks and Tom Griffin were family and did all he could with help from big shots with good hearts to exonerate his great uncles.
Civil court records found this week at the Chester County Courthouse, with the help of Clerk of Court Sue Carpenter and Chester lawyer Bill Marion, show the Griffins sold two different tracts of land totaling 137 acres for $650 to pay for their defense.
But what about Brice and Crosby?
These two black men were executed in 1915 on the very same day as the Griffins, convicted of the same crime — killing white Confederate veteran John Q. Lewis of the southern Chester County hamlet of Blackstock.
Nobody has asked the South Carolina board of pardons to give the descendants of Brice and Crosby relief that has waited almost 100 years.
Court records found deep in the basement of the Chester County Courthouse show Crosby at the time was 30 years old. Brice was 21. Who their relatives are today is unknown.
“The wrongs of the past are constantly being addressed,” said Eddie Lee, a Southern history professor at Winthrop University and the mayor of York.
Lee grew up in Chester, and his late father was born in Blackstock in 1905.
“Race was always an issue in Blackstock,” Lee said. “Race in Chester County's history has always been right below the surface. The question now is, who will speak for Nelson Brice and John Crosby, and what will be their final verdict?”
The case is a fascinating look back at how justice and race played out a century ago.
The Griffins were likely the wealthiest — in terms of land ownership — blacks of their time in Chester County.
The Herald in 1915 wrote that the trial was packed inside the courthouse and outside on the lawn. Lewis, the victim, is portrayed in documents as having left his wife and family years earlier and that he had an “intimate” relationship with a black woman.
That woman and her husband were initially suspects in the April 1913 shooting.
“The most sensational murder trial in the annals of Chester County,” is how the story of the conviction and death sentence was reported.
Chester lawyer Bill Marion and clerk of court Sue Carpenter helped me locate many of the old civil and criminal records in the Chester County Courthouse this week.
“Any time a man had left his family, then there was a murder,” Marion said, “it probably was bound to be viewed as sensational.”
After the 1913 conviction but before the 1915 execution, 122 people signed a petition that was sent to the governor, maintaining the innocence of the four men. Included in those signatures were many whites, including a judge, a sheriff's deputy, and the foreman of the county's grand jury.
Yet another even larger group of 198 people, described in court documents as “a large number of prominent white citizens of this county,” signed a different petition that claimed the jury's verdict should stand.
“The crime is too diabolical to be condoned or placated,” read the petition.
That petition was sent in 1915 by the late A.L. Gaston, a prominent Chester lawyer who was assistant prosecutor in the case.
His grandson, equally prominent Chester lawyer Arthur Lee Gaston, said Thursday that he doesn't recall the case ever being mentioned by family or anyone else.
But the fact that so many white citizens publicly signed a petition saying that the defendants were not guilty, along with a petition signed by others who believed the right men were convicted, likely means the race of the defendants was not the core issue of the trial, Arthur Lee Gaston said.
Andrew Dys 803-329-4065
adys@heraldonline.com
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