Racism, Lynching and How #Virginia Newspapers Disenfranchised Black People
🚩 The history of violent extrajudicial racist action against Black people, particularly Black men, is a part of American history that is rarely discussed in American classrooms. The implications of that history and the way we treat Black men and the value of their very existence lives with us present day.
Past is Prologue. The cases Philando Castile, George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott and Jordan Neely are contemporary examples of how our society regards the lives of Black men. History is an instructive guide when analyzing present day events.
Investigative journalist PAUL BIBEAU wrote a two part series for The Virginia Mercury on related events in Virginia regarding racism, lynching and the role of Virginia’s newspapers in Black political disenfranchisement. We at Black Virginia News share his work with you below.
New information in 138-year-old Virginia Beach lynching shatters state’s genteel veneer
Archives in Richmond and Va. Beach spur doubt about alleged axe murder that triggered the 1885 lynching of Noah Cherry. According to a news story, Medora Alice Powell was singing a Christian hymn, “The Sweet By-and-By,” as the 10-year-old girl left for school early in the morning on Friday the 13th of November in 1885. She took a solitary path through a portion of the rural area then known as Princess Anne County where Holland Road now snakes past a paint store, a tattoo shop and a Starbucks in southside Hampton Roads.
At the day’s end, following a violent thunderstorm, she didn’t return home.
A search party gathered and combed through the piney woods near the child’s home, retracing her steps. Late that night they came upon the scattered remains of her lunch before discovering Powell’s mutilated body in a gruesome crime scene within the dark scrub just a half-mile from her home.
When people found what had been done to Powell, it triggered deadly mob violence that escalated into the only publicly recorded lynching in what is now Virginia Beach.
Two Virginia newspapers, the Norfolk Virginian and the Richmond Dispatch, gave the first accounts of Powell’s death and were among the first to report the subsequent lynching of her alleged killer, a Black employee of the family named Noah Cherry.
The same weekend the Dispatch and Virginian’s accounts came out, Cherry was murdered by an angry crowd not far from the Princess Anne jail near the intersection of Princess Anne and North Landing roads.
The two deaths became a nationwide story, reported by newspapers from Maine to California. The account continues to surface in articles, in a book and on a true crime podcast. Alice Powell’s entry on the Findagrave.com database says, “This child was murdered by a young black man who had a grudge against her father.”
Reports of this case have made Noah Cherry the chief suspect in Powell’s murder for more than 135 years. They cast his lynching as an act of vigilante justice. But the reports of the timeline of when this crime occurred, and how authorities blamed Cherry for it, do not match a review by the Virginia Mercury of official records in the Library of Virginia in Richmond and files at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center.
All this comes to light at a time when Virginians are arguing over what to teach about the state’s history of systemic racism, as lawmakers in other states wonder if “hanging by a tree” could be added to official execution methods and amid shifting public sentiment about racism and racial history in America.
Lynching and its secrets
A 2017 report by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) shows more than 4,400 lynchings occurred between 1877 and 1950 nationwide. Virginia documented 84 of them within its borders.
The EJI makes a distinction between “frontier lynching” in the West and racial terror lynchings that occurred in the South. In frontier lynchings the subject was accused of a serious crime and given “some form of process and trial.” Southern lynchings were largely “extrajudicial” – without court proceedings – and racialized: The ratio of Black victims to white victims in Southern states was 4-to-1 from 1882 to 1889, increasing to more than 17-to-1 after 1900.
Lynching in Virginia was commonly triggered by allegations that Black people committed violence against white people, according to Gianluca De Fazio, an associate professor at James Madison University who directs a research project that has collected almost 600 historical news accounts of lynching across the state.
“It’s very helpful … to think of some kind of racial terrorism in which these lynchings are not just about punishing an alleged or perceived criminal,” De Fazio said, adding that the lynchings were often meant to send a message to the community not to violate laws or the racial hierarchy.
Cassandra Newby-Alexander, Endowed Professor of Virginia Black History and Culture at Norfolk State University, described how historically Virginia “managed the publicity” around racial violence to project a moderate, genteel image that wasn’t supported by facts.
“Virginia crafted a very specific narrative that they publicized internationally,” Newby-Alexander said. “They were keeping the more violent and extremist elements from impacting race relations and the state. But in fact the opposite was actually true.”
Two murders in 1885
According to the Norfolk Virginian, Alice Powell left her house near what is now the corner of Holland Road and Rosemont Road at 7:40 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 13, 1885. She walked west through a wild country landscape dotted with pine trees toward her school in Kempsville, then just a village of about 20 wooden houses.
The story said that when Alice didn’t come back after school, her parents assumed she’d taken shelter from a storm that had blown through the area that afternoon. But one of her brothers went looking for her and discovered she’d never made it to school.
“Alarm turned to fear,” according to the Virginian’s account. A crowd of people searched for the little girl and found her body about a half-mile away from her home. The Virginian’s description of her corpse was graphic:
“On the right side of her neck was a terrible gash, large enough to insert a man’s hand. … [H]er underclothing was torn, showing that the murderer had also attempted an outrage before the murder.”
The wound on her neck was allegedly so deep that when searchers picked up her body, Alice’s head nearly dropped off.
The Virginian said someone in the crowd remembered Noah Cherry had had an argument with one of Alice’s brothers and had sworn to get even. A constable arrested Cherry Saturday morning, and authorities gathered evidence against him through the weekend, finding Cherry’s blood-spotted clothing and Powell’s school books in a bundle near Cherry’s home.
The Virginian and the Dispatch both said a coroner’s inquest found Noah Cherry killed Alice Powell with an ax or hatchet.
After Alice Powell’s funeral that Sunday, newspapers reported that the clues found near Cherry’s house were “noised about the county,” and talk of lynching intensified. But both the Virginian and the Dispatch had already mentioned the possibility of lynching in their very first accounts of Powell’s death. The Virginian’s story came out before the funeral and publicized it as well as the possibility of a lynching.
A 2021 report by the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found news accounts after Reconstruction often fueled racial hate and drove lynchings with their coverage.
According to an account from the Virginian, on Sunday night a crowd of masked people assembled near the jail. They marched to the jail at 11 p.m., forced the jailer to flee and seized Noah Cherry.
They marched him down the road to a nearby pine tree. According to the newspaper, moments before his death, surrounded by that angry mob, Cherry confessed to killing Alice Powell. The crowd then hung him and shot him more than a dozen times.
The day after the lynching, a Princess Anne County judge ordered Cherry’s body to be taken down, according to the Virginian, that said a second coroner’s inquest found that he’d been killed by unknown people. The Dispatch had fewer details, but also mentioned this second inquest. Cherry was buried near the Princess Anne jail, somewhere around the Virginia Beach Municipal Center.
What really happened?
The Virginian and the Dispatch published the first stories about Powell’s death in the Sunday, Nov. 15, 1885 editions of their papers. This was the day of her funeral and Noah Cherry’s lynching. Other Virginia publications followed with stories that Monday, and then coverage exploded across the country in hundreds of papers later in the week, according to a news archive search.
However, the Virginian and the Dispatch disagree with each other, and the county record, on the timeline of Alice Powell’s death.
The Dispatch said Alice Powell disappeared Thursday, Nov. 12 and was murdered that afternoon or evening. The Virginian reported she was murdered Friday morning, Nov. 13. The Virginian’s account is more precise, anchoring the timeline to a storm witnesses remembered. But the Virginian’s timeline doesn’t agree with Alice Powell’s gravestone, which says she was murdered Nov. 12.
What’s more, neither paper agrees with the Princess Anne death registry, a document in the archives of the Virginia Beach Municipal Center (and republished online), which says Alice Powell died Nov. 1. Her immediate family reported the death, according to the registry.
That registry said Alice Powell died more than 10 days before the story of her murder appeared in newspapers, just as authorities arrested Noah Cherry.
Furthermore, while the newspapers that led coverage of Alice Powell’s death and Noah Cherry’s lynching describe authorities gathering the evidence that made Cherry the suspect, there’s no indication in the court record that authorities did any of that. The two coroner’s inquests mentioned in news accounts – which were supposed to sift through evidence in the deaths – are not in the collection of coroner’s records for Princess Anne at the Library of Virginia. The Minute Book of Princess Anne County during the time period, which recorded jury proceedings and payments for jurors and coroners, also has no record of the investigations.
According to Newby-Alexander, it’s common for criminal charges against lynching victims to be thinly sourced.
“There is no ‘there’ there when you dig deeper into the story,” she said. “It’s almost as if all the racists in the nation got the same memo: ‘Blame Black men regardless of whether or not an actual crime existed. … You don’t even need to conduct a supposed investigation. All you need is the allegation.’”dsd
Historically, Southern newspapers often stoked racial and political divides that sometimes preceded violence
When 10-year-old Alice Powell was mysteriously killed in 1885, the Norfolk Virginian and the Richmond Dispatch put together a timeline of her murder, which they blamed on Noah Cherry, a Black man who was lynched soon after the newspapers published the story. But the timelines didn’t agree with each other, or with the county’s death registry. The newspapers said coroners held two separate inquests to sift through evidence in the deaths. There is no record that those inquests ever happened.
Why would these newspapers distort the facts of the case?
The year of the deaths, 1885, might provide a clue. The mid-1880s was a liminal space between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, when Black and white political leaders struggled for power, sometimes violently.
The publishers and editors of newspapers including the Norfolk Virginian and the Richmond Dispatch were actively involved in these struggles and used their platforms to sway public opinion and disseminate misinformation in an effort to bolster their political ideologies, which were often racist and designed to limit the rights and privileges of non-white people.
A push for power
The media sources that told the story that fueled Noah Cherry’s 1885 killing were connected to a white supremacist political movement that had revived the Democratic Party in Virginia and taken control of both the governor’s mansion and the General Assembly the same year the lynching occurred after more than a decade of struggle. A 2020 report by the Equal Justice Initiative said this movement was intent on using violence and political suppression to restore white-led rule in the South after the Civil War. But it had not completely consolidated its hold in the mid-1880s.
“There was this transitional period to eliminating … the political voice of African Americans,” said Cassandra Newby-Alexander, Endowed Professor of Virginia Black History and Culture at Norfolk State University. As they grasped for power, she said, the leaders of this movement needed to project a moderate, law-abiding image to be considered socially acceptable during that time. In the case of Cherry’s lynching, which does not appear to have been fully investigated, the newspapers helped craft a narrative that authorities abided by the law.
“What was done was illegal. [Authorities were] bound by law to investigate,” said Newby-Alexander. When that didn’t happen properly, the media worked to “simply create a paper trail … to cover the fact that [authorities] didn’t investigate it.”
During the time of Cherry’s lynching, Michael Glennan edited the Norfolk Virginian. A Confederate veteran, he owned the paper and was active in Democratic politics, serving for several years as chair of the party’s congressional committee for the district and as an elector for President Grover Cleveland.
According to “Richmond Times-Dispatch: The Story of a Newspaper” by longtime city editor Earle Dunford, the Dispatch’s stated position during the time was “no Negro is fit to make laws for white people.” It criticized one Black politician in stark racial terms, saying he was “still a Negro, with all of a Negro’s conceit, pomposity, credulity and stupidity.'” A September 19, 1889, article in the paper encouraged Black people to vacate the South and migrate west.
Both newspapers only identified by name one person in the search party that found Powell’s disfigured body: Dr. L. R. Chiles of Kempsville. A former state senator, Chiles was a political activist in the Democratic Party in Princess Anne during the mid-1880s, when Glennan was in the party’s leadership. Norfolk Virginian articles show Chiles was responsible for canvassing on behalf of the party in that county in 1883, two years before the deaths of Powell and Cherry.
Race reporting
Gianluca De Fazio, an associate professor at James Madison University who researches lynching, said white newspapers in Virginia during the era were often sympathetic to lynchings and even helped organize them.
“White newspapers were part and parcel of … the lynching as a spectacle,” he said. “They were providing not just the reporting, but also the justification for it.”
By the time the 1885 lynching took place, the Dispatch and the Virginian had already developed a clear record of covering racial violence in a way that aimed to disenfranchise Black people.
One striking example of this is found in a report by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland detailing how the Dispatch covered deadly white supremacist violence on the eve of the 1883 state election in Danville.
The Howard Center found that an armed mob took to the streets that year, killing six Black men and threatening Black people who tried to vote. The Dispatch painted the deadly, racist violence as a learning opportunity for the town’s Black citizens: “These negroes had evidently come to regard themselves as in some sort the rightful rulers of the town. They have been taught a lesson — a dear lesson, it is true … but nevertheless a lesson which will not be lost upon them, nor upon their race elsewhere in Virginia.”
White newspapers were part and parcel of … the lynching as a spectacle. They were providing not just the reporting, but also the justification for it.
– Gianluca De Fazio, associate professor at James Madison University
In 1878 in Kempsville, seven years before Alice Powell’s death, the Virginian covered an election riot in which dozens of white and Black political leaders traded gunfire outside a polling place amid accusations that the white politicians were engaged in election fraud.
Several eyewitnesses said a white man rode into the crowd on horseback and shot a Black preacher named Thomas Elliott in the back, killing him. A grand jury brought charges against the Black political leaders for rioting, and a coroner’s inquest indicated Elliott’s killer may have been the father of one of the white election judges. Authorities dropped the case against the Black leaders on the condition they leave the state.
“If I am guilty of a crime try me and punish me,” Noah Lamb, one of the accused Black activists, told his attorney, according to a news article in a Northern paper. “If not, I want to be protected in my home. I don’t want to leave the State.”
Reporting on these events, the Virginian misidentified the victim, did not report the claims of election fraud or the inquest identifying the killer and blamed the violence on Black agitators and a personal argument between two people over a hunting rifle.
Meanwhile, Black-owned newspapers nationwide, though few, continually used their editorial power to expose lynchings and other racial terrors. John Mitchell Jr., born enslaved in 1863, wrote scathing rebukes of Virginia lynchings as editor of the Richmond Planet. Armed with just two pistols and facing a possible mob, Mitchell traveled to Charlotte County to confront death threats he had received for writing about a lynching that occurred there in the 1880s.
A new century and an old story
By the beginning of the 20th century, the state would have a new constitution that disenfranchised large numbers of Black people, effectively cutting the electorate in half. News coverage of race issues also changed.
The Norfolk Virginian joined with another paper, the Daily Pilot, in 1898 to create the Virginian-Pilot. The Pilot’s editor, Louis Jaffé, won the first Pulitzer Prize garnered by a Virginia journalist in May 1929 for editorial writing against lynching.
A few weeks later, in June of that year, on the same corner of Holland Road where Alice Powell had vanished, an intruder entered the home of her 73-year-old brother, A.W. Powell, and shot him to death.
“Negro Suspected In Princess Anne Murder-Robbery” the front-page headline of the June 21, 1929 issue of the Pilot read, reflecting the longstanding pattern of negative media portrayals of Black people when violent crimes occurred.
Police told reporters the suspect in A.W. Powell’s murder was a Black employee of the white family, like Noah Cherry had been before his lynching. They suspected this employee, eventually identified as Lewis Lawson, because he had a key to the house, and a key was found in the door. The paper continued its front-page coverage about the hunt for Lawson for several days.
Within the week, the Pilot reported police had interviewed others in connection with the crime, including a boy named Claude Moss and a man named Linwood Land, but the paper said they were released after convincing police they weren’t involved.
The paper also mentioned that police questioned Powell’s nephew, Charles D. Powell, who was listed as the informant on the death certificate. The paper failed to mention Charles Powell had been convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting death of a local man about nine years before (a conviction that was later overturned by the state Supreme Court after reviewing evidence the killing had been done in defense of Charles Powell’s father).
In July 1929, a month after A.W. Powell’s murder, his heirs offered $500 for the arrest and conviction of his murderer in announcements that ran several times in the Pilot, which reported that the hunt for Lawson, the Black employee, still continued.
In September authorities arrested Land and Moss, the two men who had been questioned previously and released, along with another man named Lloyd Moritica; there was no mention of Lewis Lawson. The case against the three defendants collapsed in December when a key witness refused to testify.
In 1940, a decade after A.W. Powell’s murder, his relative Charles D. Powell died in a violent quarrel with a neighbor in which he reportedly fired a gun into the man’s home, and the man killed him with a shotgun.
The Pilot reported the death in a single-column story on the lower half of the second page, granting it significantly less coverage than it had provided of the Black suspect in A.W. Powell’s murder.
The aftermath
The Virginia Mercury made multiple attempts over several weeks to find and convince descendants of the Powell and Cherry families to comment on this report, without success. Norfolk resident William Cherry, 82, said it was possible he was related to Noah Cherry, but he wasn’t sure. He was born on London Bridge Road, the area newspapers reported as the homeplace of Noah Cherry.
William Cherry said he had not heard the story of the lynching until recently. He had fond memories of growing up in Princess Anne and said he wasn’t threatened or harassed.
“The only thing that kept us separated from whites was the law,” he said. “All of us got along.”
Historical records of lynchings show 84 reported lynchings occurred in Virginia between 1877 and 1950. The data doesn’t include other acts of violence that may not have been widely reported. The Princess Anne Coroner’s Files in the Library of Virginia in Richmond contain records of unidentified people of color killed by unknown assailants with minimal investigation.
In recent years, the Virginian Pilot and the Richmond Times-Dispatch have won awards for coverage of civil rights and systemic racism in Virginia. A 2021 article in Poynter detailed how journalists of color at the Pilot and other newspapers faced abuse when covering issues like the protests against Confederate monuments in the state.
Molly Work, one of the authors of the Howard Center report on the Danville violence, said she was stunned by coverage in the era after Reconstruction, saying “it almost read like propaganda to me.” She added that the experience of writing this story highlighted the continuing need for reporters to question and examine what they’re told.
“Accuracy is king, of course, in journalism,” she said. “And I think we’ve learned that you can’t rely necessarily on, quote unquote, expert sources.”
The murders of the two Powells were never solved. A.W. Powell is buried next to Alice Powell and their parents in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Norfolk.
No one has located Noah Cherry’s grave.
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