Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 25, 1993 TAG: 9304230246
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-8 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE LENGTH: Medium
And Paul Beers, a Christiansburg resident who has spent months researching the case, has found that nobody wants to talk much about it even today.
Beers, who commutes to work at a Roanoke law firm, spoke on the lynching at the annual New River Symposium held recently in Wytheville. He drew most of his material from published sources like newspaper articles because, he said, hardly anyone would provide information about it on the record.
Even an advertisement seeking information in a Wytheville newspaper brought no response. "I ran into a lot of brick walls in trying to do this," he said.
"In some ways, this lynching was an anachronism, a disturbing reminder of the racial violence that took place in the New River Valley and other parts of Virginia in the 1880s and 1890s," Beers said.
"There's a lot of dispute about what happened, but I'll tell you what I think happened," he said.
Bird, who was 31 and married with three children when he was killed, grew up in Wythe County near Rural Retreat and worked as a farm hand on the 60-acre Grover Grubb farm. The farm owner worked at a sawmill. Bird apparently had a consensual affair with Grubb's 19-year-old daughter, Minnie, who had a baby July 23, 1926, in the back seat of a car on the way to an Abingdon hospital.
She and Bird gave the baby to an elderly black woman in an effort to conceal what had happened. Minnie Grubb's family apparently had been unaware of her pregnancy. But word got out and a neighbor of Grubb's, not Grubb himself, took out a warrant charging Bird with rape.
Bird was arrested Aug. 7, 1926. In the days that followed, there was talk that Grubb's 22-year-old daughter also was pregnant by Bird and that Bird had tried to undress Grubb's 12-year-old daughter.
Exactly a week after the arrest, at 12:45 a.m., Deputy Claude Richardson answered a knock at the jail door by someone that he later said he believed to be the sheriff. When he opened it, a mob of masked and oddly-dressed men - including some in women's clothing - rushed in and overpowered him.
Bird's cell was opened and he was shot with a 38-caliber pistol. The mob then battered his head with the butts of shotguns. He was tied to a car running board and dragged out of town, hanged from an oak tree near the Grubb farm, and shot repeatedly as he hung there.
Beers said it is not known at what point Bird died.
Reaction to the atrocity was muted in the New River Valley, where newspapers said it was not helpful to publicize what happened while trying to bring people to the region and develop it.
"It would not be true to say that all whites in Wytheville reacted that way," Beers said. Some wrote to Gov. Harry F. Byrd calling for a state investigation.
But papers in Richmond, Lynchburg and Roanoke published highly charged articles criticizing the failure of local authorities to identify and prosecute the lynchers. The result was a battle between the local press and newspapers from outside the county, Beers said.
He said a more prevalent discussion topic among Wytheville residents in the weeks that followed was a campaign to raise money to build a luxury motel, to attract tourists and entrepreneurs to the New River Valley.
The governor offered a $1,000 reward for information on the lynchers, but got none. Wythe County's prosecutor refused to call a special grand jury until Byrd appointed special prosecutors from Richmond and Roanoke to assist.
Only one person was ever arrested, apparently only because his initials, "H.H.," were carved on the tree where Bird was hanged along with Bird's. The man was released and it was concluded that the letters simply stood for "Raymond Bird Hanged Here."
Beers said the lynching, although later than most, had common elements with many of the 4,700 lynchings that happened in the South since 1882, most between 1890 and 1900.
"They were almost celebrations," he said, unlike a murder committed by a single person. "It was very, very rare for lynch mobs to be prosecuted . . . which certainly implied community approval."
The causes often involved sex between a black man and white woman, consensual or not. And the victim usually was left somewhere near where the "offense" was supposed to have happened.
All these were also true in the Bird case, Beers said.
The very word "lynch" has been traced to Virginia, during the Revolutionary War when a man by that name exceeded his authority to order British sympathizers hanged. Several areas of Virginia are given by different sources as the place where it happened, one of which is the Lead Mines area of Wythe County.
by CNB