THE STORY OF CORDIE CHEEK

 Cordie Cheek (1916 – 1933) was a 17-year-old African American youth who was lynched by a white mob in Maury County, Tennessee near the county seat of Columbia. After being falsely accused of raping a young white girl, Cheek was released from jail when the Grand Jury did not indict him, due to lack of evidence. The County Magistrate and two other men from Murray County abducted Cheek from Nashville where he was staying with relatives near Fisk University, took him back to the county, and turned him over to a lynch mob. The mob mutilated the youth and murdered him by hanging.

Cordie Cheek lived with his parents in Glendale, a small community just south of the county seat of Columbia and Maury County. Cordie’s mother Tenny worked for many years as a cook, maid, Midwife, and nurse for the Moores, a white family who lived nearby. Tenny arranged for her son to help doing chores around the Moore household. Henry Carl Moore, 19 years old in the winter of 1933, was two years older than Cordie. Friction began to develop between the two young men, and on one occasion, they had come to blows after a dispute over payment due to Cordie and his mother.

On November 16th, 1933, Cheek was chopping wood for the Moores. As he brought a load into the house, he accidentally collided with Henry’s twelve-year-old sister, tearing her dress. Incensed, Henry paid his younger sister $1 to claim that Cordie tried to rape her.

Following the allegations, Cheek was arrested and placed in jail first in nearby Pulaski and eventually in Nashville, where he was taken out of concern for his safety. A Maury County Grand Jury eventually declined to indict him on the charge of rape or for any other lesser crime, due to lack of evidence, and he was released. Once freed, Cheek went to stay in the home of his uncle and aunt who lived at the edge of the campus of Fisk University in Nashville. A mob formed in Maury County, traveled to Nashville, and abducted Cheek, taking him back to Maury County. Among them were C. Hayes Denton, County Magistrate, whose car transported Cheek, Earl Allen, and Bob Hancock.

After they returned to Maury County, a white lynch mob formed. The white community was told of the impending lynching and assembled to watch. Cheek was forced to climb a ladder; white men put a blindfold over his face and a rope around his neck, strung from a cedar tree. The men exposed his genitals and castrated him. One man, allegedly Allen, used a pole to push the ladder away from Cordie’s feet, causing him to be hanged to death. The onlookers, including women and children, cheered and passed around pistols, firing them into the air in celebration.

Witness:

James Garrett, a 17-year-old black man who was forced to watch the lynching, and who was interviewed by Jones, Draper, and/or Barnett, January 1934. There were also several hundred people in the community who gathered to (watch estimated number varies).

Other Involved Persons:

Henry Carl Moore, accuser and brother of Lady Ann Moore; C Hayes Denton, uncle of the Moors, magistrate, and organizer of the mob on the first attempt to lynch Cheek on November 16th, 1933; Bert Erwin was identified by Garrett as the one who hanged Cheek. Others who had a role in the kidnapping, castration, and lynching on December 15th, 1933 were Dawes and Bob Hancock, James and William Douglass, Walter D. “Red” Miller, Pillow Due, “Dad” Gilliam, Zach Cathey, Austin Harlan, and Jim Mayberry. Most of these and some others were identified as being in the first mob on November 16th, 1933.

Aftermath

Noted historian John Hope Franklin, then a student at Fisk, recalled: 

“Those of us who had remained in Nashville over the Christmas holidays were obsessed with discussing the Cordie Cheek lynching. Indeed, the entire remainder of our junior year was overshadowed by this tragic event. There were investigations, interviews, and other actions. The conclusion that many of us reached was that if it could happen to Cordy Cheek, who had been seized within three blocks of the Fisk Chapel, it could happen to any of us.”

In his 1934 essay, “Cowards from the Colleges”, Langston Hughes commented that Cheek was abducted almost at the gates of the University. 

In spite of various protests and calls in Nashville for justice, Gail Williams O’Brien writes that Maury County officials, along with a number of leading citizens in the community, closed ranks to block indictments against the alleged lynchers, and neither State nor Federal forces overcame their resistance.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America, Gilbert King theorized that the outrage from the lynching of Cheek was one of the factors that catalyzed the resistance of blacks in the Columbia, Tennessee race riot of 1946, noted nationally as the first major racial confrontation of the post-war era.

Remembering Cordie Cheek