A Game Called Salisbury

Book excerpt: On Friday, July 13, 1906, fourteen-year-old Addie Lyerly descended the stairs of her Barber Junction, N.C. home and found her parents and one younger sibling bludgeoned to death with the butt of an axe. Her little sister, also injured, was barely alive, and the house had been recently set on fire. It was immediately and conveniently assumed that 5 black or mulatto tenant farmers and the wife of one had committed the crimes. Without ever going to trial, two men and one boy were convicted by a mob, stirred up by a racist press, and lynched near the railroad tracks in Salisbury, North Carolina. It was less than a month after the original murders. Although the mystery of who killed the Lyerlys remained unsolved at the time the first edition of A Game Called Salisbury was printed, Bill and Rachel James' new book, The Man From the Train, has shed new light on this case, perhaps providing the evidence that will fully exonerate Nease Gillespie, John Gillespie and Jack Dillingham, the three who were lynched on August 6, 1906. In the words of Yale History Professor, Glenda E. Gilmore, A Game Called Salisbury "pushes into the white South's darkest secrets" and exposes "the limits of justice under white supremacy."