Rev. Edward Green

Case summary

Some records included in this file pertain to Private Edward Green, as they were originally misfiled but it is policy of the National Archives and Records Administration to preserve records as they were kept by the originating agency.

Incident

In March 1941, Rev. Edward Green enlisted in the U.S. Army in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By 1943, he was on a break from military service and living with his mother, Georgia Jackson, in the farming town of Millbrook in Elmore County, Alabama. On September 13, 1943, a group of three to five white men arrived looking for Green. According to a 1943 letter from T.T. Allen, president of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to NAACP Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall, the men asked to see Green’s military papers proving his deferment status. They asked Green to come with them, and he did.

Later that day, Allen wrote, the men returned to the home of Green’s mother and asked where her son was. When she replied that she did not know Green’s whereabouts, the men told her that he was in the Alabama River. According to Allen’s letter, one witness noticed that the group of men drove a Ford automobile with plates registered to Elmore County.

Three days later, several women fishing in the Alabama River discovered Green’s body near the Tyler Goodwin Bridge. As they were pulling Green’s body to shore, a group of white men arrived in a motorboat, told the women they had been looking for the body, and proceeded to tow Green’s body by boat to Loveless Undertaking Co. in Montgomery.

Green’s friend, Harold H. Carr, told the NAACP that a Black woman had witnessed a group of white men torturing and shooting Green before throwing his body into the Alabama River on September 13th. The coroner, however, reported no bruises or bullet holes on Green’s body and ruled the cause of death as drowning.

Aftermath

In a 1943 letter to the Department of Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleged that a lynch mob targeted Green for his refusal to pick cotton. Green’s friend Carr told the NAACP that it was his understanding that Green was killed for allegedly writing a letter to a white woman in Montgomery.

Though both the NAACP and the Department of Justice (DOJ) expressed interest in Green’s case, lack of information prevented either organization from pursuing the incident further. As Thurgood Marshall explained in response to Carr in late November 1943, “I doubt if much can be done from this end in view of the fact that the body did not show any signs of violence.” Marshall indicated that the NAACP would try to do “whatever can be done,” but no new information about Green’s murder appeared to surface after November 1943.

According to Green’s death certificate, he was laid to rest at McKeithen Cemetery in Elmore County.

Case summaries are compiled from information contained in different sources, including, but not limited to, investigative records, arrest reports, court filings, census records, birth and death certificates, transcripts, and press releases. In many cases, the records contain contradictory assertions.

In addition to the incident files associated with this case, this summary relied on the following:

Sources

Papers of the NAACP: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955

World War II Draft Registration Card, 1943

World War II Army Enlistment Record, 1941

U.S. Federal Census, 1940 and 1950

“Obituary for Rev. Vetter Green,” The Montgomery Advertiser, February 25, 1976