It’s June 14, 1915.
The night air is thick with the scent of blood and burning tobacco. The Courthouse steps in Winnsboro are still slick from the morning’s carnage.
Somewhere beyond the gaslight’s flicker, a man in a dark suit smirks, leans back in his chair, and exhales; satisfied. The mob has done what mobs do. Witnesses said they killed Fairfield County Sheriff A.D. Hood, a deputy, and Jules Smith, a Fairfield County Black man who the lawmen were trying to protect from being lynched.
Cole Blease, who had just finished his first term as Governor of South Carolina and had lost the election for a second term, would subsequently be the attorney defending the accused killers. As the mob dispersed and the dead and wounded were removed from the Courthouse steps, Blease was unbothered about the carnage. Because for men like him, chaos was a ladder. He did not just tolerate it, he fed it, nurtured it, and let it loose like hounds on a hunt.
Blease had been no ordinary governor. He favored complete white supremacy in all matters. According to newspaper articles at the time, he encouraged the practice of lynching, and strongly opposed the education of Black people.
He was a menace wrapped in the finery of political office, a man whose rhetoric dripped with venom, whose policies coddled murderers while branding justice as a privilege of the few. He didn’t govern, he unleashed. Law and order weren’t shields for the weak; they were cudgels for the powerful.
The Man Who Wielded the Mob
Blease’s South Carolina was a place where white rage was policy and Black existence was a provocation. He peddled fear like a carnival barker, convincing his audience that violence was not just necessary but noble. That to resist change, to keep the state frozen in the ice of its past, was their moral duty.
Under his watch, white men who murdered were freed. Black men who prospered were persecuted. The state was not a place of governance, it was a theater where injustice played to sold-out crowds.
On the day the accused killers were brought to trial, Blease stood in Winnsboro not as an observer but as an architect. The trial of Sheriff Hood’s accused murderers was never meant to be fair; it was a performance staged for a willing audience. The trials of Black men were swift and certain, while those accused of killing Jules Smith were given every legal loophole to slip through. Blease, the attorney defending the accused, made sure of it.
The Passive Hand of Richard Manning
Then there was Richard Manning the Governor at the time of the 1915 massacre on the Courthouse steps. A different kind of man, but a man bound by the same machinery. He was not a torchbearer of rage, but neither was he a wall against it. Manning’s South Carolina was one where the evils of men like Blease could still thrive, not because he agreed, but because he feared what it meant to resist.
He was a man of soft words and a softer spine. When petitions of Black prisoners landed on his desk for clemency, he hesitated. He pondered. And then he let the system do what it had always done. He let them die.
Manning’s sin was not hatred, but cowardice. He was the man who whispers that things take time, that progress moves in inches, that upheaval is dangerous. He would not fan the flames, but neither would he douse them. His hands were clean, but his inaction let the blood pool at his feet.
Then and Now: The Same Playbook
Blease’s spirit lingers. His methods were not buried with him, they simply changed clothes. Today’s mobs may not wield torches, but they wield laws twisted into weapons. Screaming of lost greatness, an era where their word was law and their sins were ignored. They march, not with ropes, but with the same hunger for power and the same contempt for justice.
Manning’s kind still walk among us, too. The ones who know better but choose silence. The ones who clutch their pearls at cruelty but never raise a fist to stop it. The ones who send thoughts and prayers while allowing the machine to keep turning.
The Unbreakable Line
But here’s the misunderstanding: We endure. We rise. We are the unbroken line of those who refuse to be erased. The men who stood on those courthouse steps and fired into the bodies of Jules Smith and Sheriff Hood thought they were writing the final chapter. They were wrong.
We are still here. We tell the stories they try to silence. We name the names they tried to bury. We stand on the land they stole and speak the truth they wanted forgotten.
But the story does not end here. The weight of history has bent this place into what it is today. A majority-minority county, yet one that, for too long, failed to see itself reflected in the seats of power. How did we get here? How did generations of oppression and resistance shape the political landscape of Fairfield County?
History does not belong to oppressors. It belongs to the ones who refuse to be forgotten.
Related: Black History Month – Recalling the 1915 shootout at Fairfield County Courthouse
