“Confronted with Choate this afternoon, the girl said he resembled her assailant but she was unable to identify him positively,” the newspaper reported.
Before Choate was taken to jail, the girl’s mother pleaded with the mob that was eager to lynch him to spare his life after her daughter was unable to positively say that it was him who attacked her. The mother “asked them to spare the Negro for trial,” the Tennessean reported. Yet the mob attempted to grab Choate, but he had already been taken to the county jail.
At the jail, Wiley gave the key to Choate’s cell to his (Wiley’s) wife. The wife — who is not named in media reports from the period — told Ella Gant, the jail’s Black cook, about what was unfolding.
“Ella, I hate this,” she said, according to Robert Minor’s 1946 book, “Lynching and Frame-Up in Tennessee.” “They are going to mob this boy they brought in. … Go and tell the boy to pray, because they’re going to kill him.”
Gant went to Choate’s cell and passed along the message: “Boy, Mrs. Wiley says you better pray, because the mob is coming to lynch you.”
Choate wasn’t in the mood for praying but understood what was about to happen.
“I know they are,” he said, according to Minor.
It was about 8 p.m. when the mob came to the jail looking for blood. The sheriff had told the crowd that there would be a trial for Choate on the following Monday, but the mob had decided that the 18-year-old must die. Wiley’s wife hid the key and pleaded with the mob not to kill Choate.
“You all go away,” she said, according to the 1946 book. “I am not going to see an innocent boy hung.”
When one of the mob members threatened to use dynamite on the jail, Wiley’s wife became terrified and handed over the key she had hidden behind a laundry bag. When a deputy sheriff opened the jail cell and mob members yelled out, “Come out, Choate,” the teen was struck on the head with a sledgehammer. Choate, dead, was dragged out to a car, tied with a rope to the bumper and dragged by his neck about 300 yards to the courthouse, Minor wrote.
The lynching was about to happen as several ministers and James Finney, the editor of the Tennessean, were attending an American Legion Armistice Day banquet in Columbia. They tried to intervene, but their efforts failed.