Say His Name:Tom Keith

Greenville, Greenville County, South Carolina, August 16, 1899

On the night of August 16, 1899, a white mob tied an elderly African American man named Tom Keith to a tree and lynched him by riddling his body with bullets for falling asleep in the same room as white children. Earlier that morning, Mr. Keith’s white employer had told him to leave town and never come back because he found Mr. Keith asleep in the same room as his two children. When news of what happened traveled to neighbors, the white community became enraged, and a mob of white men quickly organized to find and lynch Mr. Keith.

The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened black people with a presumption of guilt that often put them in danger of lethal violence for the mere appearance of impropriety, whether or not there was evidence to support any suspicion of wrongdoing. Mr. Keith was a longtime employee of a white farmer in Greenville County, and lived with the farmer and his family in their home. He was described in contemporary reports as an “old and trusted farm hand.”

At 4:00 a.m. on August 16, when the employer found Mr. Keith asleep in the room with his son and daughter, he struck Mr. Keith in the head with a gun, waking him violently. Mr. Keith explained that he had been drunk the night before and must have wandered into the room accidentally. The employer told him to pack his things and leave town, threatening that “if [Mr. Keith] ever showed his face in that neighborhood again [the employer] would kill him.” During this era, black people were frequently run out of town, brutalized, and lynched for non-criminal behavior that violated white social customs and racial expectations. Such “violations” could be something as trivial as arguing with or insulting a white person.

After brutally murdering Mr. Keith, the white lynch mob weighed his body down with stones and threw him into the Saluda River. As was the case for most perpetrators of racial terror lynching, Mr. Keith’s murderers never faced legal prosecution, and no one was ever held accountable for the lynching.

Tom Keith is one of at least four African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Greenville County between 1877 and 1950. During this same time period, there were at least 185 documented racial terror lynchings in the state of South Carolina

Sources:The Pittsburgh Press, (Pittsburgh, PA), August 18, 1899The Semi-Weekly Messenger, (Wilmington, NC), August 22, 1899 Republican News Item, (Laport, PA), August 24, 1899The Morning News, (Wilmington, DE), August 18, 1899Lincoln Journal Star, (Lincoln, NE), August 18, 1899Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (3d Ed., 2017).

Tom Keith’s Historical Marker can be found HERE

It is located off of Poinsett Highway near Mt Sinai Baptist Church (1101 Roe Ford Rd, Greenville, SC 29617)

Watch Tom Keith’s Soil Collection Ceremony HERE