The whole world saw how BootJack and Red died. Now we’re hearing how they lived

Her grandmother heard the screams. Ninety years later, she’s making sure the world hears them too.

JACKSON — In 1937, a nine-year-old Black girl named Jimmie Lee heard the terrifying, life-altering sound of two men screaming as they were tortured to death in the woods near Duck Hill.

She carried that sound for the rest of her life. She spoke of it, as far as her granddaughter knows, exactly once.

Decades later, on a porch in Duck Hill, Jimmie Lee told the story to a five-year-old who responded the way five-year-olds do.

“Why couldn’t you let them go? I would have let them go,” the child said.

That little girl was Talamieka Brice. On Sunday night, she stood in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Jackson, across the street from the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion, and spoke the names her grandmother couldn’t.

“In 1937, two Black men, Roosevelt ‘Red’ Townes and Robert ‘BootJack’ McDaniels, were lynched,” Brice told the crowd gathered for From Douglass to Duck Hill, an evening of history, art and remembrance hosted by her nonprofit, Mississippi2. “They were tortured. They were murdered before a white crowd. Photographs were taken. And those photographs traveled around the world.”

“But the story traveled another dimension,” she said. “It traveled through memory, through whispers, through warnings, through the bodies of Black people who understood that what happened to BootJack and Red was not simply something they had heard about. It was something they had to survive.”

The lynching that photographed a nation

On April 13, 1937, Townes and McDaniels were taken by a white mob in Duck Hill, a small Montgomery County town between Grenada and Winona. The two men, in their mid-20s, had been accused of killing a white storekeeper, George Windham, at the end of 1936.

Minutes after being accused of the crime, the men were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees and tortured with a blowtorch. McDaniels was then shot to death, and Townes was burned alive.

They were the fourth people accused of Windham’s killing, Brice said on the Investigation: Homicide podcast on July 2, and the only ones who ever paid for it. Much of the evidence against them, she said, amounted to little more than rumor: somebody saw one of them with money, somebody saw one of them in the area.

What set the Duck Hill lynching apart from the thousands of others across the American South was a camera. Photographs taken before Townes was set on fire became the first lynching images published by the national press, reprinted in Time and Life magazines and then in newspapers across the country. Internationally, German newspapers publicized the murders as Nazi propaganda, contrasting the violence of the lynching with the “humane” Nuremberg racial laws the Reich had passed against Jewish citizens.

Brice found the men’s death certificates in her research, and noted the chilling accuracy as recorded by the medical examiners at the time. Townes’s said he was “burned to a crisp.” The other lists McDaniels’ cause of death as “homicide by mob.”

After the men were killed, a storm came through, and their bodies sat out in the weather. No one claimed them, because everyone was afraid to.

Eventually, Brice said, a local preacher stepped in and persuaded a parishioner who owned a funeral home to take the bodies. The two men were buried together in a single casket in a pauper’s grave in Montgomery County, one Brice is still trying to locate. So little remained of Townes after his burning death that both men fit inside.

At the funeral, both a white pastor and a black pastor were present. The Black pastor’s recorded words, Brice said, were, “May the conscience of the community be seared for justice, just as much as the flesh of these men.”

A story finds its teller

Jimmie Lee never told the story again. Brice said she has found that even now, nearly 90 years later, people in the Duck Hill area still won’t go on record about the lynching. They’re still afraid.

The story stayed buried in Brice until college. Born in Grenada and raised in Montgomery County, she earned a full ride to Jackson State University, where she studied art. There, she came across an image an artist had made of a man tied to a tree, surrounded by handwritten questions.

“…Why couldn’t you let them go?…”

At the bottom, it said “Duck Hill, Mississippi.”

“This must be the lynching my grandmother was talking about,” she remembered thinking.

Brice went on to build a career as a graphic designer, muralist and ad agency owner. When the COVID-19 pandemic dried up her work, she turned to film, making “Five: A Mother’s Journey,” an examination of her own upbringing and her fears for her son. The film toured festivals worldwide and won nearly 30 awards.

It also opened the door to the story she’s carried since she was five.

“I felt like a calling, a duty,” she said on the podcast, comparing it to the words of the old spiritual: I love the Lord, he heard my cry, and pitied every groan.

“I just felt like I needed to let them know, in a sense, that they were heard and that their groans were heard.”

The work has come in pieces. Little was recorded about who Townes and McDaniels were as people, and searching their names online mostly surfaces the horrific photographs. Brice found one book in which a reporter wrote that names of participants were known at the time, but they never made it into the official record.

FBI files on the incident that were once housed in Jackson, Brice found, were apparently intentionally destroyed.

But she kept peeling back the layers. Brice discovered that Townes was married and had a daughter whose existence was hidden. She has been in contact with his granddaughter, who never knew how her grandfather died until Brice’s work surfaced it. All the family had until then was a newspaper clipping.

On the morning of the podcast taping, Townes’s granddaughter sent Brice a text she said she holds dear: a thank-you from the family of Roosevelt “Red” Townes for keeping his memory alive, with a promise that the family was praying for her work.

She has not yet been able to find McDaniels’ relatives.

After a screening of a portion of her film work at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, conversations began about a historical marker. On April 13, 2023, 86 years to the day after the lynching, the marker was unveiled in Duck Hill, sponsored by New York Times bestselling author and MacArthur fellow Kiese Laymon and accompanied by bottle tree flowers created by metal artist Stephanie Dwyer. A soil collection ceremony was held in conjunction with the Equal Justice Initiative.

Brice’s children were there when the marker was unveiled. Afterward, she took them to her grandmother’s grave to give her the message.

“We did it, in a sense,” she said. “We let people know what happened.”

The work hasn’t been without cost. Brice said she has received backlash and death threats. Her son, just nine years old at the time of the marker unveiling, told her to be careful, because not everybody wants to hear this story.

From Douglass to Duck Hill

Sunday night’s event at St. Andrew’s, subtitled “Bridging Two Americas: One Buried, One Born,” traced a line from the words of Frederick Douglass to the violence at Duck Hill, held the day after the Fourth of July, the holiday Douglass famously interrogated.

Ramel Cotton opened and later returned to the lectern with readings from Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” The Rev. Christopher McAbee offered prayer, and the evening featured solos by Laurie Walker Hall and Azia Cimone, a memorial ceremony with the audience, and a screening of “Bootjack & Red: The Introduction,” an excerpt of Brice’s documentary in progress, which will tell the full story of the two men, the events leading up to the lynching and its aftermath. The film has been funded in part by acclaimed actress and Mississippian Aunjanue Ellis.

Acclaimed author and scholar Imani Perry, author of “South to America,” delivered a special message in a recorded conversation with Brice, speaking about what descendants owe the dead.

“You can’t intervene. You can’t save their lives,” Perry said. “But you can save legacies, and you can tend to people’s memory, and you can love them in a better way. I think it’s really important for us as descendants to do that loving work.”

Jackson State University professor Dr. Byron D’Andra Orey placed the lynching in the context of America’s approaching 250th anniversary, noting that slavery in America spanned 251 years. “Same numbers, two histories, one nation,” he said.

Orey reminded the crowd that behind every photograph, headline and statistic was a human being with family, dignity and dreams, and he challenged them not to let the evening end as remembrance alone.

“Don’t let this simply be another memorial,” he said. “Let it be a mission.”

The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, Orey said, echoing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but the arc doesn’t bend by itself. People bend it.

Speaking their names

For Brice, the evening was one more layer in a work that is still unfolding. The 90th anniversary of the lynching arrives in April 2027, and she is in the final phase of fundraising to complete the film, including a 53-page reenactment sequence she has written. Information is available at bootjackred.com and mississippi2.com or by calling 601-790-0259.

Standing in the cathedral Sunday, she returned the audience to where it all started: a grandmother, a story on a porch, and a memory that refused to die over decades.

“She did not know that her granddaughter would become a filmmaker,” Brice said. “That I would spend years searching archives, conducting interviews, asking questions and gathering fragments. That we would place a historical marker in their memory. Or that one day, all of you would gather inside this cathedral to speak the names of those men.”

“But here we are. And that is the power of memory. Sometimes a story survives long enough to find a person who can carry it forward.”