Memorial march honors Mitchell Mozeley

Mitchell Mozeley isn’t a name that most Macon County residents will recognize. In fact, information about him is sparse enough that there’s some discrepancy as to whether that was really his name. But for those who are invested in the local history of Macon County, Claudia Aguilar and John deVille say Mozeley’s story needs to be told. That’s why last Saturday night, they organized a memorial march in Mozeley’s honor that led participants down the path that he followed to his death.

In 1898 during the first week of November, Mozeley was being held at the old jailhouse on Phillips Street when a mob of as many as 300 Macon County residents came for him. Police handed him over to the mob and they marched him down the hill to the Town Bridge, where they hung and killed him. Mozeley, a black man, was accused of breaking into two homes and the attempted rape of two white women, but Aguilar’s research suggests inconsistencies in the alleged victims’ stories and in reporting by local news sources. In any case, Mozeley’s trial was set for the next month, and he never got his day in court.

Mozeley’s murder was generally considered an appropriate response to the charges against him at the time. So little was thought of it that there was even a report in the newspaper a few weeks later of a group of children casually reenacting it by stuffing clothes with leaves and swinging a makeshift doll around by a string on its neck. Now, over a century later, Mozeley’s name has been mostly forgotten.

“I’m a lifelong Macon County resident and I’d never even heard of this,” said Aguilar. “This is a man who was erased from Macon County.”

Lynching was a practice on the rise in 1898, due largely to the political fallout of Reconstruction following the Civil War. deVille says that while the Republican Party and Populist Party of the time were “nominally progressive” on matters of race, the Democratic Party of the era was outwardly supportive of white supremacy and built their election strategy around spreading fear of black men as a threat to white women. This was the heyday of the Red Shirt movement, which deVille describes as “the Klan on steroids,” and they sewed immeasurable violence to deter minority voters in 1898. That Mozeley’s lynching happened a matter of hours before polls opened that year was likely no coincidence.

“There was a full-on voter suppression campaign in North Carolina in 1898,” deVille said. “We believe, though cannot prove, that Mozeley’s execution was an act of voter suppression, an act of political terrorism.”

While the lynch mobs of the 19th century have all but disappeared, advocates say that extrajudicial killings are still prevalent in America to this day and are often racially motivated, pointing to examples like the murders of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery by community watchers. The federal government still doesn’t recognize lynching as a crime, although some legislators are promoting the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, named for a 14-year-old boy who was murdered in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman. The bill was introduced in Congress in 2019 and passed the House of Representatives before being held up by the Senate, and the current congress hasn’t acted on it since spring.

“Whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, willfully, acting as part of any collection of people, assembled for the purpose and with the intention of committing an act of violence upon any person, causes death to any person, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life, fined under this title, or both,” reads the version of the bill that was most recently referred to the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security on March 1.

Voter suppression remains a hot button issue as well. Following former President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him, states around the country have enacted laws to reduce access to voting in hopes of preventing voter fraud. Even before 2020, North Carolina’s voting laws were often maligned by judges for racial bias, such as when the 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals struck down part of the state’s 2013 voter ID law that the majority felt would “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

“With everything we have going on right now with voter suppression, it’s interesting to see how everything is linked,” said Jake Jacobson, who attended the march on Saturday.

As dozens of Macon County residents took a long, slow walk from the former jailhouse to the Town Bridge, many were unsure how to appropriately respond to Mozeley’s story. Some liked the idea of reaching out to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which keeps record of lynchings and other crimes against African Americans, for a coffin so that he could be given a proper burial. Whatever the next steps are, the first step is recognizing that it happened, and Aguilar said remembering Mozeley is the least anyone can do now.

“This is part of our history, too. It’s something that our founding fathers did,” Aguilar said. “It’s time that we remember all of our history.”

For a more in-depth history on the lynching of Mitchell Mozeley and the connected events around North Carolina in the fall of 1898, Claudia Aguilar’s research is available to view online at www.ncgenweb.us/macon/strange-fruit.