The Last Lynching in Northern Virginia: An interview with author Jim Hall

Ben 00:01-00:02

Jim, welcome to Crime Capsule.

Jim 00:03-00:03

Thank you.

Ben 00:05-00:45

It is so good to have you, and I have to just say right up front, we here at the show, we love when you have a serendipity, a meeting of two points in time, and our longtime listeners will be delighted to hear there's a name that shows up in your book that they will recognize. Our good friend, Jack Bales, who wrote the book Chicago Cub Shot for Love, who we spoke to a couple years ago. Let me ask you just real quick, Jim, was your book about a doomed romance? Did it draw any kind of inspiration from Jack's book about a doomed romance? Or is that just pure coincidence here?

Jim 00:46-01:14

I think it's pure coincidence. I was trying to remember which one came first. I think mine came first. I worked on mine a number of years and as did Jack. He's the retired librarian at the University of Mary Washington and a neighbor and a friend. And I don't think either one of us was inspired by the other. I think we arrived at our stories independently.

Ben 01:15-01:28

Well, they are both incredible accounts, and we were just so delighted to see his name crop up within your pages. Now, this is your second book with the History Press. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Jim 01:30-02:55

I'm a native of Virginia, educated at Virginia schools, Virginia Tech, and I got my master's from VCU. I was a newspaper reporter for most of my working career, about 10 years at a weekly, and about more than 20 years at the local daily here in Fredericksburg, Virginia. And retired in 2013, immediately started, I thought perhaps I would do anything but what I had been doing for the last 30 years. I even dreamed of maybe opening a bakery. But I ended up not doing that at all because I got an invitation from a man I did not know. to talk to him about a lynching that had occurred in Falkirk County, about 40 miles from here, in 1932. He was a filmmaker, Tom Davenport, and we did met, and we agreed to work together. We worked together about three years. Tom would film over my shoulders. We would do joint interviews, and I finished first. He produced a documentary film about the Shudrick Thompson case, and I produced the last lynching in Northern Virginia, and that was published by History Press, Arcadia Press, in 2016.

Ben 02:57-03:01

And this one came out just about a year or two ago in 2023.

Jim 03:01-03:04

In the fall of 2023, yes.

Ben 03:05-03:37

Now, it is often said that journalism, as you know, is the first draft of history, so you have been writing history in some form for many, many years. Being an expert in the history and the culture of of your home state. You wrote in this title, it was very interesting, that this particular story had eluded you, that it had escaped many people's notice, including your own. How was that the case? How had this story managed to just escape everybody's attention, to fly under the radar, so to speak?

Jim 03:58-05:42

I've grown discouraged, you might say, cynical. The victor tells the history. And in this case, the victor was the white male establishment. And in these two books that I wrote about Virginia lynchings, They just didn't want it told. It was not talked about. Families didn't talk about it. Black families certainly did, but white families didn't talk about it. It was certainly never mentioned in schools. It was a silent, almost secret part of Virginia history. Cover up, they concocted, in my opinion, they concocted a harebrained description and reason for Chedrick Thompson's death. the protagonist in the first book, The Last Lynching in Northern Virginia, they called it a suicide. And I hope that I contributed enough evidence to show that it was not. I like to, I've gone out in support of the book to many local nonprofits and community groups, and perhaps have given more than 60 talks in Northern and Central Virginia, and the thing that I hear most frequently from audience members, I can't count the times I've heard it, is I had no idea. I've lived here all my life, and I had no idea that this happened. It was overlooked by choice.

Ben 05:43-07:05

Yep, you know it is so often the case and we have delved over the years just on on these airwaves into similar accounts whether they are in alabama or in mississippi or louisiana the the number of times that folks decide to whitewash the record or Turn, you know, what is an unflattering account into a very partial and selective account or even destroy the fabric of history is It happens more often than not, unfortunately. Now, I want to ask you about that because you have a very real declaration up front in this book, and I think that it is such an honest take on the realities of writing Southern history, which is that the first thing that we have to contend with is the silence, or the gaps, as you describe them. And the tension between what we do know and what we don't know is, in this particular account of the murder of Arthur Jordan and the doomed romance with Elvira Corder, That is at an all-time high, isn't it? I mean, you describe this as just one of the hardest challenges that you had to undertake, given how little there was actually known and left recorded for us.

Jim 07:06-10:34

I agree. It has the potential to stop you from proceeding, because you want to be able to tell the whole story. You want to be able to take the characters, identify the main characters, and identify the sequence of action, identify the setting, and then march them from beginning to middle to end. Well, and you want it to make sense. You want it to sort of stand up, stand the test of time and be a logical presentation of what happened. Boy, it's hard. It's hard when something like this occurs, when you tackle a topic such as this. A topic that, at least on the first book, the last lynching book, I encountered actual opposition from living people because they were descendants of those responsible for the death of Shedrick Thompson. And one lady, I remember one lady saying, why do you want to go and tell this story again? And my answer was, ma'am, I'm not telling this story again. I'm telling this story for the first time. I encountered so many gaps in history, gaps in the sequence, in the motivation, in the description. I wish there had been a letter from Elvira that I could have gained some insight into her personality. I had to, there were, After she became pregnant and the two of them ran away, chose to run away, it was just an incredible scandal. And the newspapers far and wide covered it. they provided some description of both Arthur and Elvira. And that was how I learned at least some sense of who they were, what they looked like, what their education was, what their background was. I was encouraged by two members of a writing group that I belong to, we would provide each other with a new chapter or new piece of writing each month. And the two of them, two of the four of us, two of them, when I get discouraged and say, I think I'm going to stop, I just don't have enough material for this story. They would say, they would say, no, no, no. Right the gap, right what you know and inform the reader, what you don't know. The reader, I think, will be forgiving and understanding, and in some way will appreciate a mystery. If you admit to them that this is, we don't really know what happened here, but I've done a lot of reading and studying, I wouldn't phrase it in so many words, but by your writing authoritatively, you could convey to the reader, look, I spent a lot of time on this project, and this is my best guess. Take it or leave it, but this is my story, my best guess, that's what happened. And the readers almost, I think, kind of enjoy trying to mentally figure out what's missing.

Ben 10:35-11:38

You know, it's funny, you should mention that, because we just spoke to Clay Bryant not too long ago about his new book on a cold case murder in South Georgia. And, you know, one of the things that he describes is exactly the process that you're speaking to now, which is the shoe leather, right? I mean, it's actually going out and doing the work on the street of trying to track these things down, that nothing else can serve as a substitute. And I think that what you say is exactly right. We build trust with our readership by owning the gaps and saying, here's what I've found, here's what I haven't found, and here is what I'm having to surmise or to speculate, but never passing speculation off as anything but speculation, right? And that's the kind of thing that I think can doom a project, which is to kind of confuse speculation and assertion, you know, at any point, you're just in a lot of trouble there. But if we don't know, there's a beauty and a mystery in saying, we don't know.

Jim 11:39-12:35

I'm a heavy user of the internet and the computer, but in a way it hurts stories if you rely solely on it. My training as a newspaper reporter, more than 30 years as a newspaper reporter, served me so well in the production of these two books. I'm reminded of a sign that is said to be on the wall of the Los Angeles Times. It was an acronym, Y-C-D-B-S-O-A. You can't do business sitting on your ass. Or there's another one, Goya K-O-D. G-O-Y-A K-O-D. get off your ass and knock on doors.

Ben 12:35-12:36

Oh, that's good.

Jim 12:37-12:55

We were motivated by those two principles. You can't write a story, you can't gather a story. The gathering comes before the writing. You can't gather a story sitting in here. You gotta go talk to people. Love it. And I believed in it and practiced it.

Ben 12:57-13:11

and to go knock on doors. I'm gonna carry that one with me for a while. That's fantastic. Goya Coyote. We'll put it up on the wall of the studio here and carry it forward. Thank you for that, Jim.

Jim 13:11-13:14

You might have to censor yourself at one point there.

Ben 13:15-14:23

We speak a tiny bit of French here in this studio. I won't say we speak full flowery French in that respect. We speak a word or two every now and then. Okay, so let's go, let's do a little time traveling here. Let's go back to Northern Virginia in the year 1879-1880. And I would like for you, before we meet our Romeo and Juliet of this particular story, I would love for you just to give us a little sense of what northern Virginia looked like in 15 years into Reconstruction, because we are dealing with a unique area. You write that Fauquier County is predominantly black at this time. It's also right on the border with the former Union, you know, now that that there's a sort of tension between what is happening across the Potomac, on the southern side, on the northern side, and so forth. People are moving around more freely now, but there are still codes in place, of course, racial codes, class codes, and so forth. Can you just give us a little sense of what northern Virginia in particular looks like at this time?

Jim 14:25-17:35

The county, Fauquier, is enormous, geographically. but not very populous. And it is today a bedroom community of Washington, D.C. with many of its residents traveling into the city or Northern Virginia for their work. At the time, there was certainly none of that. It was mostly a Southern, the county and the state voted to join the Confederacy. There was mostly a Southern, sympathy, almost exclusively of Southern sympathy. Mosby, Colonel John Mosby, a famous Confederate cavalry officer, had one of his bases here in Fauquier County. I'm sitting in Fredericksburg. It's about 40 miles north of me to the north and the west. It's maybe that same distance to the west of Washington, D.C. It was, if I could correct you on the one point, Ben, it was mostly a majority white county, a small 20, I forget the exact percentage of black residents, but they were in a minority. And they had limited opportunity, limited freedoms. They were no longer slaves. The protagonist in both of these books, Shedrick Thompson and Arthur Jordan were born into slave families, but were in that period, I'm sorry, Arthur Jordan was born into a slave family. His parents were enslaved. He was born in 65, 1865, so he would have been just at the period of emancipation. He grew up as a free man, free boy, free teenager, free man. But it was a… You could imagine a time of limited opportunity for black residents. They had certain jobs that were devoted, designed for them, in a sense. Farm labor, child care, cook cleaning, those kinds of things. It was rare to find a black resident that was in one of the professions, say. It was a period of great prejudice and I think of the story as a love story at a time of hate. It was just not to be for a white female, especially, and a black male to get together. Both Elvira and Arthur understood that and went to great lengths to hide their relationship. And both, they suffered greatly for it.

Ben 17:36-18:37

Yeah. No, and this is a time in which it just remains unimaginable to the wider society that, you know, a black man and a black, excuse me, a black man and a white woman could enjoy one another's company or even vice versa. That, you know, you might find affinity of any kind, much less the romantic kind. Utterly unimaginable. And of course they paid the consequences for that. Will you just tell us a little bit about Arthur and Elvira themselves. I mean you have this kind of interesting interplay in their personalities. I think of Elvira as someone who, you know, she grows up on this particular farm. very independent, self-sufficient in many ways as well, knew everything that one needed to know about the management of a farm. And Arthur, an extremely strong worker, very capable, very skilled as well. What do we know about them and how did we learn about them historically?

Jim 18:43-23:07

I was able to cobble together pieces from multiple sources. And then I took, and I hope I was able to convey it in a sort of a pleasing or informative narrative form. They were both 25 years old. They were both natives of Fauquier County. Elvira was the oldest of four children, the only female. She had three younger brothers. Arthur was from a bigger family. He was, I believe, about five or six siblings. He was in the middle. He had older sisters and younger brothers. His father and mother were slaves. His father did farm work, farm labor, and as he did as well. He worked for a number of local farmers, had worked for the Corder family. Nathan Corder was the patriarch. And he had worked for them for about three years when this incident happened. He was, by all accounts, it was amazing to read the old accounts. They almost can't not compliment him. His personality must have been extremely strong. His work ethic must have been extremely strong because it is often mentioned. And I sometimes, I actually was able to conject to offer some, I sort of think about who was this lady Elvira Corder and who was this man Arthur Jordan. And given all of the pressures not to get together, They did anyway. So what was it? He was not only, he was married. He had been married a year. He had a brand new infant daughter. And yet the two of them got together. And I think of, in Othello, Desdemona, Othello tells Desdemona's father that, I think she was swayed or impressed by my past. And Arthur was, of a slave family. He was on his own at age 15. He was, we find him in the census, living in a, what appears to be a boarding house with maybe 10 other black single people. So his mother is a servant. and has her two small sons with her living in the home of a white family. It's obvious, at least I state, that the father has died and that splintered the family. The two older girls are in a neighboring county. They've married. So Arthur I think carried himself and had an air about him that Elvira enjoyed, that she admired. And eventually, I think, I'm convinced that the two of them fell in love. And it was not a traditional romance by any mean. There were no Sunday dinners with the family. There were no long walks in the summertime. This was secret, and it was voluntary, and it was the stolen kiss in the barn. And Martha Hood, as a historian who has written about the black male, white female relationships in this reconstruction period, says that there were many more of these relationships than we realize, and that they were secret. And it was in the interest of both parties to keep it secret. It was certainly in the interest of the female She didn't want to be known, have to acquire that reputation. And it was certainly in the interest of the black male because it was a death sentence if he became known that he was dating, was intimate with a white woman. So Hodes points out that the only way these relationships ever became known in the community was pregnancy. And that's what happened here, that Elvira became pregnant and all hell broke loose.

Ben 23:08-24:05

know, it's funny you should mention the barn because it actually occupies a fairly prominent place in your early narrative of their romance. I mean, you write that it was one of the few locations on the property where they could actually meet without one or another of the farmhands or the, you know, the patriarch or anybody sort of stumbling across them, you know, exposing, you know, their affair in secret. And this got a great passage where you describe, you know, she went to go milk the cows, but curiously, milking the cows, you know, started to take longer and longer each time, you know, and then curiously, Arthur insisted on helping her carry, you know, some of the pails along, you know, and nobody thought anything of it until it was far, far too late. So, the barns, the barns.

Jim 24:09-24:46

Those little things, they were perfect examples of the things that nobody notices and it makes no sense, it has no importance until it does. until they flee and they look back and they say, of course, he carried her milk pails. Her job was to milk the cows, but he ended up, in recent weeks, he was carrying the milk pails for her. And how come she was so much later getting back to the house for supper? Those, of course, made sense to them afterwards, but not at the time.

Ben 24:47-25:15

Yeah. Well, we absolutely celebrate their resourcefulness. We are recording this, of course, the day before Valentine's Day. So, you know, good on them for doing what they had to do in order to make it happen. But the stakes do change. And you write that very quickly when her pregnancy became a reality, suddenly that turned both of their worlds upside down, irrevocably.

Jim 25:16-27:07

It was in a way a death sentence. I picture a scene where, here's an example of where you write the gap. It wasn't hard to conjure this and I believe that it was convincing to the reader because it makes sense. She realizes that her periods have stopped and she's pregnant. And at some point she's got to go to Arthur and say, Arthur, I'm pregnant. What are we going to do? And that conversation is, we have no historical evidence of that conversation, but it seemed to me that it was a logical conclusion given all the facts that had preceded it. And the decisions they made were so fateful. They, I think of Arthur at that point. He's 25 years old. He's got a wife, a young wife, a new wife, and he's got a new baby. So he has, I counted three options that he had when Elvira presented him with the evidence that she was pregnant. He could flee. He could just one night be gone, go north, go west, go somewhere, just to save his life and get the hell out of there. He could grab his family and go. He could take his wife and his child and do the same thing, go somewhere else, Philadelphia. Or he could run away with Elvira. And that's what he did. And to me, that speaks of an attachment, an attraction a love between the two of them that neither one was willing to give up.