Most stories start at the beginning. A few are better told starting at the end.  The Lowman story almost defies such timelines and is perhaps best told starting somewhere in the middle, during the dark morning hours of Friday, October 8th, 1926.

It was between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. on October 8, 1926, when Damon Lowman — who had received, only hours earlier, a verdict of not guilty in the murder of the Aiken County sheriff —  was forcibly removed from the Aiken Jail on Chesterfield Street, along with his sister, Bertha, and his cousin, Clarence, both of whom were expected to be cleared the next day of the same charge. The three were then driven to a pine thicket several miles down the road, where they were shot and killed by a mob of men numbering from 17 to 2,000, depending upon which account you believe.

This horrific crime would undergo investigations by grand juries and by the governor’s office, as well as the NAACP and the New York World newspaper, whose findings were published in newspapers across the country, drawing the national spotlight and condemnation onto the town of Aiken. For a few months in 1926, it seemed rare justice might be served but, ultimately, it came to nothing. The questions stopped being asked, and the articles trickled to none. The expectations for justice disappeared entirely. In their place emerged a particular silence that persists to this day.

I didn’t learn about the story until 2004. I heard about it from my father during one of our many long conversations during that last year of his life. He had first learned about it during the 1980s through his work with Aiken’s NAACP, in which he was a long-time member.

In the course of his research into the story, my father had interviewed Lowman family acquaintances, through whom he learned the Lowman story, which began some 18 months before the lynchings. He put the story to paper, starting with these words:

On a sunny Saturday morning on April 25, 1925, there were several women and children in the extended Lowman family working about the yard and house of their Monetta home, variously involved in their daily chores — cooking the noonday meal, bathing the baby, making soap and sweeping the yard.  Within minutes, this pastoral scene would be violently disrupted.

My father did fine justice to the story but was limited by the information available to him. Five years after his death, I found myself returning to the story, taking his draft and building on it. I wish he’d lived long enough to read the scholarly account by historian Elizabeth Robeson, who is, today, the consummate authority on this history. Or the stories written by Pam Durban. I know he would have been gratified.

Elizabeth Robeson’s work can be found in the chapter titled, “An Ominous Defiance,” in the 2008 book, “Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century,” available for purchase at USC Press. “An Ominous Defiance,” can be read here in Google Books.

A 2014 Bernice Bennet interview at Blog Talk Radio with Elizabeth Robeson and Patricia Lowman Pryor, granddaughter to Bertha Lowman, gives further detail to the background of the story including the histories leading up to and following the triple lynchings.

Aiken native Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, brought perspective to other characters in the Lowman story through her novel, “The Tree of Forgetfulness,” a compelling read that can be purchased at any major bookseller, including Barnes and Noble. Pam Durban also has a short piece titled, “A Southern Story” on this history that is worthy of finding.

Today, some ninety-seven years later, the Lowman family is remembered with the ongoing hope of establishing support for placing a historic marker at the site of the former jail on the grounds of the Aiken County Courthouse: a physical piece of evidence to say that, yes, this history was important and, yes, these three human souls remain worthy of our honor and remembrance.

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