As artist Hannah Hasan drives past Bank of America Stadium, she remembers. Not a football game or a concert, but Joseph McNeely, a brother, a son, a black man murdered by a white mob in 1913.
On August 26 of that year, McNeely was dragged from a hospital bed to the street, where he was fatally shot. His death became the first documented racially motivated lynching in Mecklenburg County.
Hasan’s acknowledgement of McNeely’s death is part of a project to inform and remind all Charlotte residents that lynchings like McNeely’s happened in this city too.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project is part of a national movement to remember the victims of racist terrorist lynchings and share their stories in the hope that these atrocities will not happen again as people face the truth.
There are two documented lynchings in Mecklenburg County: that of McNeely and that of Willie McDaniel, a tenant farmer who was found dead on June 30, 1929.
The Remembrance Project launched its website this week, 111 years after McNeely’s death. Here, readers can learn more about McNeely and McDaniel and why sharing their stories is important today.
“We hope people will look (at the project) and say, ‘We believe,’ and ‘We need to tell the truth about this history,’” said Helen Schwab, a member of the Remembrance Committee and a former editor of the Charlotte Observer. “We also hope people will talk about it, because we don’t talk about it here.
“The stories of each of these men appeared in the newspapers for about two or three months and then they didn’t appear again until a hundred years later.”
What is the Remembrance Project?
In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative launched the Community Remembrance Project, which aimed to help local groups learn more about those killed in racist terrorist lynchings and ultimately create historical memorials so their stories could be shared.
The Justice Initiative is a human rights and legal services organization headquartered in Alabama. The organization has documented more than 4,400 racially motivated terrorist lynchings in 20 states between 1877 and 1950.
In 2019, several community groups in Charlotte visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where they learned about the community project, said Krista Terrell, communications coordinator for the project and former chair of the Arts and Sciences Council.
The museum, founded by the Justice Initiative, features more than 800 seven-foot-tall monuments listing the districts where lynchings occurred and the people who were killed.
The Mecklenburg County monument lists McNeely and McDaniel.
Share more extensive stories
McNeely and McDaniel’s stories are well-known, but they are told from a white perspective, Schwab said.
“If you Google these guys, you’ll find misinformation,” Schwab said. “If people just look at the headlines, which were all headlines from newspapers at the time that were white-run and written for a white audience, you’ll see that the police versions of these stories were considered fact and the headlines were rumors.”
With the help of the Justice Initiative and local historians, the Remembrance Project has pieced together old newspaper clippings, land registry records, and other documents to provide a more complete account of what happened to McNeely and McDaniel.
For both men, the project provides a short and extended version of events, starting from the days before their deaths to the days after.
Who was McNeely?
Contemporary newspapers, including The Charlotte Observer, referred to McNeely as a “cocaine-addicted Negro” who shot at several people and later at a police officer. The officer returned fire, hitting McNeely, who was later taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, Charlotte’s segregated black facility. The hospital was located where the Panthers’ stadium now stands.
That’s the surface story, according to the Remembrance Project. Their investigation couldn’t confirm details like McNeely using cocaine.
The project’s timeline of McNeely’s death adds that in the days that followed, newspapers continued to say the officer was likely to die. However, those same outlets would quote doctors who said otherwise.
News reports also said that McNeely would not be in danger of reprisals because Charlotte was different. The Observer wrote that Mecklenburg County “has never had a lynching in its history and never will have one.”
But on August 26, 1913, McNeely was dragged from his hospital room, stripped naked, and “riddled with bullets.” No one was arrested for his death. The officer made a full recovery.
Schwab said finding the details reveals how skewed the cases were and adding nuance to McNeely’s story paints a more complete picture.
Who was McDaniel?
The same goes for McDaniel.
About 16 years after McNeely’s death, McDaniel was working and living on the land of Mell Grier, a prominent white farmer. McDaniel was owed money and asked Grier for payment. Grier refused and McDaniel turned around and spoke softly. Grier became agitated, picked up a rock, threw it at McDaniel and the two began to fight. Grier went to get a gun and McDaniel ran away.
A day later, on June 30, 1929, McDaniel was found dead, face down, near his home.
In the days and months that followed, the details of McDaniel’s death became clearer and murkier at the same time. One officer told news outlets that he was certain “a group of men” had hanged McDaniel and disposed of his body. The coroner’s office also confirmed that McDaniel suffered a broken neck.
But newspapers only “suggested” that McDaniel had been lynched. No one was ever charged in McDaniel’s death.
The Remembrance Project notes that the Observer did not call McDaniel’s death a lynching until 2018.
Not only victims
Although the project describes their deaths, there are no notes about who McDaniel and McNeely actually were.
This is where Hasan comes into the picture.
Hasan is a poet and storyteller who co-founded Epoch Tribe, a production company, and “I Am Queen: Charlotte,” an annual event honoring black women and their stories. Schwab and Terrell agreed that the memorial project needed an arts component, something that could humanize both McDaniel and McNeely’s stories.
Hasan, who was unaware of McNeely or McDaniel’s existence, immediately agreed to the project, especially after discussing it with her brother.
“He said to me, ‘I wonder what their story is.’ I thought, yeah, they were lynched, and he said, ‘No, who were they?’ He said you never think about who these people were (as) before they were lynched,” Hasan said. “The pieces open up to share a story, a narrative, about them as people before they ever became lynched… These were two people who, I’m sure, did not want their legacy to be the worst thing that ever happened to them.”
Hasan wrote three spoken poems and two about McNeely and McDaniel.
She portrayed McNeely as a son and brother who were “probably annoying” and a “partner in mischief.” Hasan described McDaniel as a “partner in life” who likely came home after work and “loved his wife, hugged her (and) cherished her.”
Hasan also talks about the lynchings in each poem, but said it was important not to label McNeely and McDaniel as just victims. They were more than that.
“This project gave me the opportunity to shed light not only on lynchings, what they are and the fact that they happened, but also on the fact that these people had stories before they were victims,” Hasan said.
Hasan’s longer work was filmed by Loyd Visuals and was also released to coincide with the launch of the project’s website.
The future of the project
The launch of the website is just the beginning of the project, Schwab and Terrell said.
Part of the project involves collecting soil from the lynching sites. McNeely’s was collected in 2021, and plans are in the works for McDaniel’s collection.
There are also plans to place historical markers where McDaniel and McNeely passed. The city of Charlotte and Tepper Sports & Entertainment have already agreed to place a marker at Bank of America Stadium, as has the county for McDaniel’s marker at Reedy Creek.
The project could also begin looking for other people who may have been killed in lynchings, Schwab said. Again, McNeely and McDaniel are the only documented cases of racially motivated terror lynchings.
For now, Terrell said, project members want the community to delve into the information on the site. There are personal essays, information from the Justice Initiative, along with Hasan’s detailed timelines and poetry.
There’s no rush, Terrell said. It’s heavy information. Overall, the goal is to get people talking about McNeely, McDaniel and the lynchings in Charlotte’s history and to acknowledge that it did happen here.
“This is ongoing work,” Terrell said. “This resource will be here to continue to have conversations with the community.”
“We hope people will come out and share it so they learn the history,” Schwab said, “so it will mean that much more when we put up these markers and collect the soil.”
