Last week we looked at the February 22, 1889, fire at the Williamsburg County Courthouse. Eight years later, on February 22, 1897, Kingstree residents awoke to the news that Frazier Baker, the African American postmaster at Lake City, had been assassinated by a white mob, along with his baby daughter, Julia. Four other members of the Baker family had been wounded in the assault, and the post office and their home had been burned.
Frazier B. Baker
Later that day, Williamsburg County Coroner Henry M. Burrows convened a coroner's jury of both white and black men at the scene of the crime. They then went to the house where the surviving Baker family members were staying, as the family members were the only eyewitnesses available. A reporter for The County Record, who likely was the owner Louis Bristow, was also present at the inquest and was allowed to talk to family members, as well.
The reporter noted that speaking with the survivors was "heartrending." Lavinia Baker, widow of the postmaster, testified to the coroner's jury, and later in court, that the family was awakened at 1 a.m. by a fire in their home. As her husband and oldest daughter attempted to put out the blaze, she aroused the younger children. They could hear the mob outside the house and shortly after the fire started, shots were fired into the house. Lavinia Baker said her husband decided they should make an attempt to escape. She quoted him as saying "We might as well die running as standing." Mrs. Baker picked up the baby, and as she turned to flee, the child was shot, dying instantly in her arms. Mr. Baker opened the door and he, too, was gunned down. He fell back against his wife, also dying almost instantly. Her other children then began to scream that they, too, had been shot, although their wounds were to their extremities and not life-threatening. The family fled the house, and to their surprise, the mob disbursed once the men realized the family had left the building. The family hid in a field across the railroad tracks until they were certain it was safe to go to a neighbor's house where they spent the rest of the night. The next morning, they moved to a friend's home, where the inquest was later conducted. Later, they went to Charleston, where Mrs. Baker and three of her remaining children were treated for their gunshot wounds. Only two children were unhurt.
Lavinia Baker and her surviving children.
Newspapers across the state generally condemned the action of the mob, but no one was more vocal in calling for justice for the Bakers than 22-year-old Louis Bristow, owner and editor of The County Record. The initial story in The County Record began, "One of the most brutal and horrible deeds that had ever occurred in this state..." It went on to note that the assassination was "without parallel in the history of this county."
He noted, as well, that Baker had faced much tribulation at the hands of the citizens of Lake City since his appointment in August 1897. Shortly after his appointment, he was shot, although his wound was not serious. In December 1897, the assistant postmaster, who was also black, had been ambushed and shot, as well. He, too, was not seriously injured. The month before the assassination, the post office building had been set on fire and burned to the ground. That had stopped mail delivery to Lake City, but two weeks before the assassination, Baker had moved the post office into an old, abandoned two-room school building. He operated the post office from the front room, while his family lived in the other. The Wednesday night before the assassination, someone had fired shots into the building.
Louis J. Bristow
Like editorials in many other papers, Bristow acknowledged that the patrons of the Lake City post office might have had reason to complain about the service they were getting, but "that fact was no excuse for so wanton a crime as was committed. The deed was that of fiends in human form, and the perpetrators of it should be brought to justice and made to suffer for their crime."
The next week, Bristow interviewed a postal inspector who had been sent to investigate on behalf of the U.S. Post Office. The inspector argued that while Baker had not had prior experience in public service, he was certainly not incompetent as Lake City's white residents claimed for he had been certified to teach by the State of South Carolina. The inspector noted that Baker's letters to the department were just as well-written as those from white postmasters. He also noted that the department had been investigating the complaints that had been filed, although he verified that no formal opposition had been raised at Baker's initial appointment.
Bristow was also quick to squelch another rumor that had taken hold in Lake City. It was widely rumored there that the black men of Kingstree had met and were planning to converge on Lake City and burn the town. Bristow noted that while he, too, had heard rumors of a meeting, he could say with certainty that no one had left Kingstree for Lake City on the night in question. He also printed a letter to the editor from James Tharpe, one of the leading African-American residents of Kingstree. Bristow noted that Tharpe was a leader in political affairs, had once served as Probate Judge for Williamsburg County, and had been elected to several terms on the Kingstree Town Council. In his letter Tharpe deplored the violence and concluded, "Concerning the meeting of indignation said to have been held by the colored people of this community, I know nothing and I do not believe that any prominent or respectable colored men had anything to do with it."
An illustration of the event as printed in a Boston newspaper.
In the same issue of The County Record as Tharpe's letter, Bristow offered a searing editorial, aimed at the perpetrators of the violence on the Baker family. "How can a married man pillow his head by the side of that of a pure, confiding, innocent wife without feeling that he is no longer her protector but one from whom she would recoil in horror did she only know that he was a red-handed murderer?" he asked. "How can he ever sit in the church of God, joining in with Christians in His worship, with the full knowledge of his guilt?" He concluded with these words, "Think of all this and see how you would feel if you were a member of that grief-stricken family?"
But Bristow wasn't finished. He also took the Williamsburg County Grand Jury to task for not mentioning the assassination in its final report, which had been completed after the incident. He noted that while he believed it was an oversight on the part of the grand jury, it was one that could not be forgiven because there should have been some mention of "one of the bloodiest, blackest, most heinous crimes ever committed in a Christian land. By their silence has the Grand Jury of Williamsburg County condoned the most horrible crime ever committed in South Carolina."
Later in 1898, The Charleston News & Courier printed a detailed story about Kingstree. In its profile of Louis Bristow, it noted that after Bristow's strong stand for justice against the white lynch mob that had killed the black postmaster, Bristow was boycotted by a number of his subscribers and advertisers for having the courage to speak out. He was personally attacked in an editorial in the Lake City newspaper for his call for justice for the family and the punishment of the perpetrators.
Historic marker commemorating the death of Postmaster Frazier B. Baker.
Months passed before 13 white men were charged with the crime. By that time, the Spanish-American War had broken out in Cuba, and Bristow had enlisted, leaving The County Record in the hands of C.W.Wolfe, to whom he would later that year sell the paper.
Two of the 13 men accused pleaded guilty and provided evidence against their co-defendants in exchange for having the charges against them dropped. The remaining 11 men were tried in federal district court in Charleston in April 1899. The jury deliberated 22 hours without reaching a verdict. The case was never retried. Lavinia Baker and her children moved to Boston where they lived for a number of years. Sadly, four of the remaining children died of tuberculosis. Mrs. Baker then returned to Florence County where she lived until her death in 1947.
Damon L. Fordham devotes a chapter to the Frazier Baker lynching in his
book True Stories of Black South Carolina.
In 2013, a historic marker was erected commemorating the horrible events which transpired on February 22, 1898. Last year, on the anniversary, the post office in Lake City was renamed the Frazier Baker post office.
One other spine-chilling piece of information concerning this tragedy is that in May 1898, a number of Charleston's concerned African-Americans met at Emmanuel AME Church, where they took up a collection for the Baker family. One hundred and seventeen years later on a June evening in 2015, Emmanuel AME itself would become the scene of another brutal and horrible deed in South Carolina when Dylan Roof shot and killed nine members at a Bible study.
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