Soil collection marks beginning of project honoring Volusia lynching victims
Lee Snell was a World War I vet, taxi service operator and respected member of his community in Daytona Beach when he accidentally struck and killed a 12-year-old white boy with his cab on April 29, 1939. Before even reaching the Volusia County Jail, he was killed by a white mob that beat him with shotgun and rifle stocks and shot him multiple times.
On Saturday, nearly 82 years later, members of the Volusia Remembers Coalition civil-rights group gathered to honor his life and collect soil from the intersection of Old DeLand Road and International Speedway Boulevard, where Snell was killed.
It’s part of a project in collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative, which aims to educate communities about the history and pervasiveness of racial terror throughout U.S. history.
The soil collected will fill two jars, one of which will be donated to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., created in honor of Black lynching victims. The other will be displayed throughout Volusia County, including at the African American Museum of the Arts in DeLand.
The ceremony for Snell is the first of five in honor of lynching victims killed in Volusia County, the group said, with jars containing soil from those sites also to be donated to the memorial.
“So often, we’ve worked in communities where the community didn’t know that a racial terror lynching took place,” said Gabrielle Daniels, project manager for EJI. “And very often the discovery of these stories gives people a new opportunity to look honestly and to say how is this legacy continuing in our community.”
Snell’s story is similar to other
lynching victims who were accused of crimes but denied a right to trial.
A white mob — led by the dead boy’s brothers, Earl and Everett Blackwelder — intercepted the car driven by Constable James Durden, who was taking Snell to the Volusia County Jail. Despite the very public and brutal death of Snell, the Blackwelders were later acquitted of the murder after witnesses and the constable, who was white, refused to testify against the brothers.
“This man ... dies without his day in court, is murdered before he could stand trial,” said Felicia Benzo, the Volusia Remembers Coalition education chair who told Snell’s story for a webinar of the event. “This is our effort to bring humanity to this man . ... It is our effort also to right a wrong. I hope that we have done that successfully.”
Snell’s murder and military service was highlighted on Memorial Day by the Volusia group last year at Mt. Ararat Cemetery, the group’s first remembrance ceremony.
On Saturday, members of the in-person audience took turns scooping soil into the jars that will be sent to the national memorial in Montgomery. They will bear Snell’s name and the date of his death.
“Law enforcement failed Mr. Snell that day. Law enforcement of the past failed the community,” said Volusia Sheriff Mike Chitwood, who shoveled the first clumps of the soil into a jar. “I have to apologize for what occurred in my profession back then, but more importantly, we have to look at one another as human beings and ask how could we allow another human being to be treated that way.”
A 2017 report by EJI found more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings between the periods of Reconstruction and World War II, including 317 in Florida. Researchers believe that’s a conservative estimate as lynchings, often resulting from accusations of crimes by Black people against whites, typically went unreported or were whitewashed by contemporary officials and media.
Along with Snell, EJI identified four other lynching cases in Volusia County:
Lee Bailey, hanged and shot in 1891 by a white mob that dragged him out of jail after he was arrested for allegedly raping a white woman
Anthony Johnson and Charles Harris, killed in or near DeLand before facing trail when they were accused of assaulting an 8-year-old white girl
Herbert Brooks, believed to be murdered in police custody while en route to Miami to face trial for assaulting a white woman after he allegedly fit a suspect description.
“It’s important to keep in mind that this is a practice that has more to do, early on, with frontier justice,” said Richard Buckelew, a Bethune-Cookman University history professor and the Volusia Remembers Coalition historian. “The earliest lynchings were primarily directed at white people. Then once African-Americans were freed from slavery, it quickly becomes a tool of racial oppression.”
Snell’s death sparked national outrage as civil rights groups, including the NAACP, decried the killing as city officials at the time looked to quell backlash, Buckelew said. Among those clamoring for justice was Mary McLeod Bethune, who wrote about Snell’s killing, including in a letter to then-Gov. Fred Cone.
“With such unjust handling of the case, there is no place safe for a Negro in the state,” she wrote.
At the ceremony, representatives from Daytona Beach and Volusia County governments issued proclamations in honor of the Volusia Remembers Coalition and Snell. Speakers, like group’s co-chair Shannon Stafford, said the ongoing work to document previously unknown cases is essential to reconciling with the history of racial relations and of lynching in the U.S.
“We are sure there are many, many more victims due to lynching throughout our country that have not been documented,” Stafford said. “However, with the help of each of our communities, we will be able to document many, many more.”