The Trauma and Courage of Survivors
Because she testified, we can now remember: Eliza Chalk
Written by: Al Hester, UCCRP History & Research Committee, South Carolina State Park Service Historian
Historian Kidada E. Williams has noted that the simple but dangerous act of testifying about Reconstruction-era violence was an important form of resistance that laid the foundation for future efforts to protect civil rights.[i][ii] In Union County, South Carolina, the courageous testimony of Eliza Chalk helps us to reconstruct the important details about the jail lynchings of 1871.
In December of 1870, a black state militia unit clashed with a white distiller named Mat Stevens, who was killed during the ensuing struggle. The next day Union County whites rounded up a number of militiamen and jailed them to await trail. But on the night of January 4th, about 40-50 disguised Klansmen broke into the jail, murdered two of the militiamen, and wounded several others. Joseph Vanlue, one of the militiamen, survived his wounds and escaped, but local whites quickly found and returned him jail. Then on the 12th of February, the Ku Klux Klan returned, breaking into the jail again and then lynching another group of prisoners, along with Joseph Vanlue, at the nearby “hanging grounds.”[iii]
Months later, the U. S. Circuit Court grand jury indicted David Gist and numerous others for the murders. Only one of the 13 witnesses, Eliza Chalk, was willing to testify publicly to a Congressional committee.[iv] Her experience reveals the cruelty of Union County’s racial terrorism and its impact on the survivors. Every person that was killed had relatives that they left behind. These survivors quietly suffered the loss of their loved ones and attempted to carry on life in a place where they may have encountered known perpetrators on a daily basis. Eliza Chalk is a poignant example. She was a 41 year old biracial woman supporting a family as a seamstress and washerwoman.[v] After her son Joseph Vanlue was brought back to the jail, Chalk visited him every morning to bring his breakfast and dress his wounds.”[vi] Vanlue had been wounded in six places, in his shoulder, arm and side. His brother described numerous injuries that “were as large as my finger,” and that were probably made by more than one gun.[vii] His mother arrived each morning and stayed locked up with him until mid-day, except on days when she had to do washing. They spoke very little about the crime, for the reason that Chalk explained to the committee:
. . . when I went up to the jail my feelings would be so much hurt when he would say anything I would commence crying and I never said anything to him nor asked him anything [about the shooting].[viii]
Eventually however, Vanlue told her that he knew every one of his attackers, and was waiting to reveal all of them until he was taken to Columbia where it was safer to talk. She claimed to have heard the name of only one man who shot her son. Following Joseph Vanlue’s murder in February, Eliza Chalk fled to Columbia, most likely in fear for her own life. It was there that she summoned the extraordinary courage to tell what she knew to investigators, including the grand jury. She was only willing to identify one of the attackers, a man named Thomas Hughes, publically. Hughes was the Union County jailer, and she would have had to face him every day during her jail visits for a period of almost seven weeks. It is possible that she gave the names of the rest of the men during a private deposition.[ix]
Chalk stayed in Columbia even after violence had died down in Union. As late as 1880 she was still living there with her surviving children, continuing her work as a washerwoman. She may have passed away or remarried sometime after that, since she disappears from city records. Because Eliza Chalk testified, we can now remember.
Testimony of Chalk at Congressional hearings in Columbia.
Source: U. S. Congress, Testimony Taken by the by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: South Carolina, Vol. II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872).
[i] Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African America Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012), p. 13.
[iii] Numerous sources give detailed descriptions of the two jail raids. One of the best secondary sources on the raids is Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 246-256; others include Allan D. Charles, The Narrative History of Union County, South Carolina (Spartanburg: The Reprint Company, 1987), pp. 224-25; Richard Zuzek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 90-91; for primary source descriptions, see the testimony of Alfred and Thomas Vanlue, U. S. Congress, Testimony Taken by the by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: South Carolina, Vol. II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), p. 1011 (hereafter referred to as KK Testimony), pp. 1135-42, 1155-58.
[iv] Indictments, United States vs. David Gist et al, Criminal Case File #70; Indictments, United States vs. David Gist et al, Criminal Case File #329; Indictments, United States vs. David Gist et al, Criminal Case File #330, all in Records of US Circuit Courts, RG 21, District of South Carolina, Criminal Case Files, 1867-1911, Boxes 2 and 5, National Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. Eliza Chalk is listed as a witness along with 12 others in these cases.
[v] Enumeration for Liza Chalk, Population Schedule for Union County, 1870, Federal Census; Testimony of Thomas Vanlue, KK Testimony, p. 1158.
[vi] Testimony of Eliza Chalk, KK Testimony, p. 1129.
[vii] Testimony of Alfred Vanlue, KK Testimony, p. 1142.
[viii] Testimony of Eliza Chalk, KK Testimony, p. 1134.
[ix] Ibid, pp. 1128-35.
