A Game Called Salisbury: the spinning of a southern tragedy

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.” Read more