Dark Texas History: Last Legal U.S. Public Execution Was In Waco

A massive mob of people witnessed the last legal public execution in the United States, which took place in Waco, Texas on July 30, 1923.

It was almost certainly a blazingly hot day. The crowd had to be sweating, stinking, and full of dark hate for the accused.

There were probably little children, playing with each other as their parents waited to see a man depart this world.

Four to Five thousand people gathered to see the hanging of Roy Mitchell, according to the wiki about his execution.

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He had been convicted of six murders based on a coerced confession and a hat that could have been his that someone said they saw near a crime scene—extremely flimsy evidence from a modern perspective.

His defense was that his wife and children testified that he had been home at the time of the murders. It fell on deaf ears.

Let's be honest with ourselves, and with our history- Roy Mitchell was convicted because he was black.

In the 1920s, there were 170,000 Ku Klux Klan members in Texas, and I'm sure quite a few in Waco.

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Roy Mitchell wasn't executed so much as he was sacrificed.

"At least," we can say, with a lump in the throat and a weight in the heart, "he wasn't lynched."

His last words were, "Goodbye, everyone," before he was hanged outside McLennan County Jail.

Other people were hanged in public, and other people were lynched after Roy Mitchell. But he was the last to be done so legally, if not fairly, justly, ethically, or morally.