Midwest Lynchings Aren’t Included in New Report, but a 94-Year-Old Woman Remembers One in St. Joseph
Korea Strowder pushed her wide eyes against the window glass in the crowded bus, but she never exactly saw the mob hang Lloyd Warner on the courthouse lawn.
Still, she can describe in fine detail the rest of the spectacle that day 82 years ago in St. Joseph. First off, she was 13 and terrified, the only African-American on a bus that got caught in lynching traffic. Cars and buggies filled the streets. Horns honked.
The crowd swelled into the thousands to see Warner, a 19-year-old African-American accused of assaulting a white girl, swing from a tree and his body set afire.
“Parents brought their children like they were coming to a picnic,” said Strowder, now 94 and living in Washington, D.C. “It was a big to-do, all right.”
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