Elbert Williams was the first known NAACP official in the nation killed for his civil rights work. Elbert Williams was a charter member of the Brownsville, Tennessee, NAACP Branch, formed in 1939 for the purpose of regaining the right to vote. On June 20, 1940, Williams was overheard planning an NAACP meeting and was reported to  police. That night police kidnapped Elbert Williams from his home, locked him up, interrogated him about the NAACP, and he was never again seen alive. Later his body was exhumed from the Hatchie River and buried immediately in an unmarked grave.

Under NAACP pressure the United States Department of Justice opened an investigation, ordered the US Attorney to seek an indictment,  then mysteriously reversed its decision and closed the case for “lack of sufficient evidence”. Thurgood Marshall, Special Counsel for the NAACP was very critical of the DOJ’s failure to prosecute but was unable to get the investigation reopened. 

In 1963, at the funeral of Medgar Evers, Roy Wilkins recognized Elbert Williams as a “pioneer fighter” for civil rights.

In early 2012, when I first came across the story of Elbert Williams’s murder I was startled because I had lived most of my life within twenty miles of Brownsville but had never heard of Elbert Williams. I called two friends active in civil rights and neither of them had heard the story. An important piece of civil rights history, right here in my backyard, had been virtually forgotten. I decided that Elbert William’s story must be told, and this important history preserved.

Yes. in several critical areas.  I believe I am the first to obtain un-redacted copies of the FBI and the United States Department of Justice case files, which name names, and contain the full text of documents, including the FBI’s reports of witness interviews. 

When Williams’s body was dredged from the Hatchie River, the local Coroner ordered an immediate burial, with neither autopsy nor visual medical examination, although Williams’s widow said she saw in his chest two holes that to her looked like bullet holes. No agency of law enforcement, State or Federal attempted to determine the cause of Elbert Williams’s death, and his body and the evidence of murder it contained were buried in an unmarked grave the same day the body was hauled from the river.

For the first time, a team of experts with whom I am working is attempting to locate Elbert Williams’s unmarked grave, and to determine the cause of his death. A DNA match will enable Elbert Wiliams’s remains to be identified with certainty. By applying state of the art scientific analysis it is hoped to locate Elbert Williams’s grave, determine the cause of his death, and subject any bullets to ballistics analysis to identify the firearm that fired the fatal round.

The story of Elbert Williams’s murder and the Brownsville terror of the summer of 1940 is as American as the Fourth of July, and as Southern as Jim Crow. The head-on collision of African American aspiration to regain the right to vote with white supremacist determination to preserve white political and economic hegemony by any means necessary produced a summer of threats, kidnapping, terror, and murder.

Before the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman & Mickey Schwerner, Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and even Harry T. and Harriett Moore in 1951, Elbert Williams became the first known NAACP member killed for his civil rights activity.   

Murder on the Hatchie begins in Brownsville, Haywood County, Tennessee, and tells with tell the story of the formation of the Brownsville NAACP Branch in 1939 and its effort to regain the right to vote.

The story of the Brownsville terror of the summer of 1940 culminating in Elbert William’s murder, is told, and the characters at its heart revealed.

For the first time, the FBI’s shameful “investigation” is dissected using its own un-redacted records, and the Justice Department’s mysterious about face and closure of the case without a prosecution is critically examined using, for the first time, the Department’s own un-redacted case file.

The NAACP’s role, particularly the efforts of Walter White and Thurgood Marshall, is placed front and center, and the contemporary effort to obtain justice for Elbert Williams is chronicled.

Murder on the Hatchie will for the first time examine in-depth, a historically important civil rights murder, that ominously portended the carnage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and the failure of government at every level to stand fast for justice.

If Elbert Williams’s murderers had been prosecuted might the slaughter to come twenty years later have been avoided?