Editing Marianna, Florida (section)

====Lynchings in Marianna====

In 1934 [[Lynching of Claude Neal|Claude Neal]], a local African-American man, was accused of the rape and murder of a young white woman. He was moved between jails, but a [[lynch mob]] found him in [[Brewton, Alabama]]. The mob abducted him and brought him back to Florida, killing him near the Chattahoochee River and [[Greenwood, Florida|Greenwood]]. The men brought his body to the Cannady farm, where a larger mob of an estimated 2,000 persons was waiting; people shot and mutilated the body. Neal's body was [[Hanging|hanged]] from a tree at the Marianna courthouse square.
     As recounted in "Behold, America" by Sarah Churchwell (Basic Books, copyright 2018, page 177): "The torture and mutilation that the papers at the time would not name were itemised by a white undercover investigator for the NAACP, to whom an eyewitness boasted ten days later:
'They cut off his penis. He was made to eat it. Then they sliced off his testicles and made him eat them and say he liked it. Then they sliced his sides and stomach with knives and every now and then somebody cut off a finger or toe. Red hot irons were used on the n----- to burn him from top to bottom '...From time to time during the torture [the investigator continued] a rope would be tied around Neal's neck and he was pulled up over a limb and held there until he almost choked to death, when he would be let down and the torture begun all over again.'" 
 The next day, whites rioted in town, attacking blacks and destroying some of their houses. The governor ordered more than 100 troops of the [[National Guard of the United States|National Guard]] to Marianna to suppress the violence. About 200 blacks and two police were injured. The six white [[vigilante]]s who led the lynching remain unidentified.

[[File:Marianna FL Chipola Hotel01.JPG|thumb|left|Historic Chipola Hotel, Downtown Marianna]]
In 1943 [[Cellos Harrison]] was taken from the county jail at Marianna by a white mob and hanged (lynched) near [[Greenwood, Florida|Greenwood]]. His case had been in the courts for two years in appeals after the African-American man was arrested and twice convicted by [[all-white jury|all-white juries]] and sentenced to death for the 1940 murder of a white man. He had confessed without benefit of counsel, and his convictions were overturned by the [[Florida Supreme Court]] as a result. But whites were tired of waiting for the case to be resolved, and lynched him. President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] directed the Department of Justice to investigate Harrison's lynching; he felt it was unjust that blacks were getting lynched at home while the U.S. was ostensibly fighting for freedom in Europe. No one was ever prosecuted for Harrison's death.<ref>Tameka Bradley Hobbs, ''Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida'', Oxford University Press, 2015</ref>{{page needed|date=October 2018}}