Soil Collection Ceremony honors 1921 lynching victims
May 13—WARRENTON — The Equal Justice Initiative — in partnership with the NAACP and the Community Remembrance Coalition — presented a moving and meaningful Soil Collection Ceremony at the old Warren County Jail on May 11 in honor of the late Alfred Williams and Plummer Bullock, cousins and victims of a 1921 lynching at the hands of angry mob.
Direct descendants of both men along with community leaders and area residents attended the solemn ceremony held on sacred soil. Warren County Commissioner Jennifer Pierce, Dr. Cosmos George, Jereann King Johnson, Representative-Elect Rodney Pierce, UNC Chapel Hill Professor Glenn Hinson, Rev. Mary J. Somerville, Beth and Rev. Mark Wethington all mightily contributed to this important educational program.
In January 1921, the two men went into a grocery store in Norlina — next to where Peanut & Zelb's is now located — to buy a bag of apples. One bin sold a bag of bruised apples for 5 cents and those in better condition for 10 cents. They paid 10 cents. But the 16-year-old clerk gave them the bag of bruised ones instead.
Plummer, 19, whose father was a minister and had grown up with his family in Batavia, New York — where Black and white people tended to mingle and get along better than in Norlina at the time — asked the clerk to either return his 10 cents or give him the bag of apples he chose. The clerk refused and soon alerted others. Following an armed conflict at the train depot between Black and white groups, 18 Black men were arrested and held at the Warren County Jail.
A mob later entered the jail where they pulled Plummer and Williams out of their cell and drove them to a nearby location where they were shot and killed. The 16 other men arrested were transferred to the state penitentiary.
More than 100 years later, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill into law. The Dyer Bill — as it was called when it was first introduced to Congress in 1918 — failed to pass.
Keynote speaker Dr. Arnett Coleman, a descendant of the Bullock and Williams family, spoke eloquently on the need for greater "love, peace and empathy" not "blindly following the crowd" or getting on a "bad bandwagon."
Among the many good reasons to conduct this program now is that human beings tend to do the same things over and over again, Coleman said. "It's easy to be dismissive and deny what happened," he said.
But that would allow the incident to lose significance and forget what people went through.
"You will not make a change until realize what you're doing does to yourself and others," he said. Distinguishing between good and bad bandwagons, he said, "We need to talk with people different than ourselves. People who tend to do the same thing with the same crowd can come to be considered normal.
"We all need to look at how we judge one another," Coleman continued, as everyone tends to be "way too judgmental," he said. "Be careful when you start throwing stones as you might break your own house."
Coleman went on to invoke the words of Albert Einstein, who observed soon after arriving from Germany during WWII that the "worst disease in America is the treatment of the negro. Being Jewish I can understand how they feel," Einstein said.
Speaking of empathy, Coleman rhetorically asked, what would have happened if the clerk had stopped for a second and considered how he would feel if his mother had been in the store?
"What would have happened if he had been taught something different? It doesn't have to be this way. What would happen if we all had more empathy and love and could bring more harmony and peace to our communities?"
