Additional information
by Susan Barringer Wells (Author)
Coverage of a southern tragedy reveals how Freedom of the Press obliterated the Freedoms of Black Americans during Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
A trio of North Carolina tenant farmers, accused of ax-murdering a white family, faces the impossibility of presumption of innocence during a time when the white supremacist press, dominated by news editor and propagandist Josephus Daniels, demonizes all people of color and predetermines guilt. This true story reveals the origins of widespread "fake news" and the roots of modern racism. Near midnight, on Friday, July 13, 1906, fourteen-year-old Addie Lyerly descended the stairs of her rural North Carolina home and found her parents and one younger sibling bludgeoned to death with an ax. By the next morning, it had been immediately and conveniently assumed that 5 Black or Mulatto tenant farmers and the wife of one had committed the crimes. Without ever going to trial, two men and one boy were convicted by a mob that had been stirred up by a racist press and lynched near the railroad tracks in Salisbury, North Carolina. In the words of Yale History Professor, Glenda E. Gilmore, A Game Called Salisbury "pushes into the white South's darkest secrets" and exposes "the limits of justice under white supremacy."
Author Biography
Susan Barringer Wells is an eighth-generation North Carolinian whose fifth great-grandfather, John Wells, is one of 50 signers of The Tryon Resolves, a proclamation of patriots protesting British atrocities in 1775. Wells earned a BA in English with a minor in History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and afterward studied Commercial Art and Ad Design. After teaching adults and children for a while and working as an editor of children's educational materials, she attended the graduate School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A Game Called Salisbury is the 2009 recipient of North Carolina Society of Historians' Willie Parker Peace History Book Award. It is cited in Equal Justice Initiative's report on "Lynching in America."
