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Monday, August 16, 2021

Kinston Mob Lynches Jerome Whitfield, Accused of Criminal Assault, Aug. 14, 1921

Crime Leads to Hanging by Mob. . . Kinston Negro Pays Penalty of Death by Mob After Awful Crime

Kinston, Aug. 14—A mob, variously estimated at from 1,500 to 2,000 armed men, captured Jerome Whitfield, negro accused of criminal assault, at 11 o’clock today in the woods in Jones county six miles from the scene of his crime at sunset yesterday, and after swinging him to an oak tree by the roadside, riddled his body with bullets. The victim of the assault, Mrs. Elizabeth Irving, 19 years old, wife of a prominent Jones county farmer, positively identified Whitfield as the perpetrator of the crime and no further questions were asked.

(Lines obscured) miles wide and long. One wing of the searching party, headed by the sheriff of Jones county, it is said, was combing the underbrush a couple of miles away when members of the first mob saw the negro suddenly emerge from a thicket making it was thought a desperate effort to gain entrance into a still larger forest, extending for many miles toward New Bern. He was commanded to halt, which he did. Placing Whitfield in an automobile, the crowd rushed him to the home of the Irvings, six miles away, where Mrs. Irving identified him. ‘Please don’t kill him here in the yard,” she cried, it is said.

“We won’t,” shouted the mob, and they proceeded with the trembling negro to a point about one mile below the home, where a noose was slipped about his neck and he was drawn up.

Fully 1,000 bullets of various kinds penetrated the negro’s body, it is said, and the mob dispersed, leaving him swinging to the tree.

From the front page of The Dunn Dispatch, Tuesday, August 16, 1921

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