Hey all you To Kill A Mockingbird fans (and there are a lot of you): pour one out this weekend to the memory of hospital orderly Thomas Finch.An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 12/22/2024
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Hey all you To Kill A Mockingbird fans (and there are a lot of you): pour one out this weekend to the memory of hospital orderly Thomas Finch.
In September of 1936, Finch, 29, had been steadily working at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia as an orderly for nearly eight years, having gotten the job largely thanks to his father, a well-known haberdasher. On the evening of September 11 at 9:00pm, a 22 year-old white woman patient, Ozella Smith, made an accusation of rape which swiftly came to the attention of the local police department. Five officers showed up at Finch's parents' home at 3:00am. But rather than arrest Finch or even bring him to the downtown police station, they brutalized him on the spot --beating him into near-unrecognizability and shooting him at least five times at close range. The officers then dumped Finch in front of the hospital entrance; forcing his own co-workers to rush him into emergency surgery --unfortunately Finch fell into a coma and never again regained consciousness. While Finch's siblings publicly vowed to investigate the full circumstances, heartbreakingly none of his assailants would ever face charges, much less a trial. Instead they maintained a version of events where Finch (here come the usual clichés) "resisted arrest," "tried to escape," and also "reached for an officers' gun" --details which were uncritically accepted by the press. In fact Samuel Roper, one of the officers, would himself later become a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, and to this day the City of Atlanta does not formally recognize its own police department's role in this lynching. Finch's home and indeed the entire neighborhood has long since been bulldozed and redeveloped over the years, forever defying any kind of honest reckoning.
Perhaps even more upsetting is the reality that this case was in no way an outlier; that, for its time, it was almost stereotypical in its composition. White people's fear of interracial sex was a powerful motivator for mob violence, and such accusations were the genesis of a full 25% of all recorded lynchings in Fulton County, Georgia, between 1906 and 1936. Such was the frequency of this kind of extrajudicial murder that it begs a deeper analysis; an understanding of just what stoked such intense emotions in the Jim Crow South.
The still-relatively-new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama (opened in 2019) lists more than 4,000 names of lynching victims, spread across 20 states. Conspicuously among those names it does list Thomas Finch's murder but --equally conspicuously-- provides relatively few details, likely because of the police involvement. Which brings us to the efforts of an early civil rights group called the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which at the very least tried to establish some facts about the case; pointing out the inconsistencies in the timing of the accusation, and the relatively public location it was said to have happened. The commission appears to have corresponded with area church leaders in the immediate aftermath of Finch's death and even went as far as to call for a grand jury, but ultimately nothing came of it. The all-white power structures that ran Atlanta in those days went unchallenged (little wonder, with people like Roper at the top), and even the NAACP was leery of making formal accusations against police officers when the official narrative embraced the "but he was resisting arrest" excuse. To this day no steps have been taken towards exoneration; and the family descendants of Finch, his accuser, and his killers, have rationalized --in wildly differing ways-- their own understandings of this painful moment in history.
Most disappointing of all is the fact that history itself can now only view Finch through the lens of the horror that befell him, and the essential core of the man himself --his upbringing, his education, his aspirations and his achievements-- are lost.
https://www.wabe.org/a-forgotten-lynching-in-atlanta/
https://www.fultonremembrance.org/
Next lesson - Lesson 169: Charles Deslondes