Cordie Cheek

Cordie Cheek (1916 – 1933) was a 17-year-oldAfrican-American youth who was lynched by a white mob in Maury County, Tennessee near the county seat of Columbia. After being falsely accused of raping a young white girl, Cheek was released due to lack of evidence. In response, the county magistrate and two other men from Maury County abducted Cheek from Nashville, where he was staying with relatives near Fisk University, took him back to the county, and turned him over to a lynch mob. The mob mutilated the youth and murdered him by hanging.

Cordie Cheek lived with his parents in Glendale, a small community just south of the county seat of Columbia, Tennessee in Maury County. Cordie's mother Tenny "worked for many years as a cook, maid, midwife, and nurse" for the Moores, a white family who lived nearby. Tenny arranged for her son to help doing chores around the Moore household. Henry Carl Moore, nineteen years old in the winter of 1933, was two years older than Cordie. Friction began to develop between the two young men and, on one occasion, they had come to blows after a dispute over payment due to Cordie and his mother.

On November 16, 1933, Cheek was chopping wood for the Moores. As he brought a load into the house he accidentally collided with Henry's twelve-year-old sister, tearing her dress. Incensed, Henry paid his younger sister one dollar to claim that Cordie had tried to rape her.

Following the allegations, Cheek was arrested and placed in jail first in nearby Pulaski, Tennessee and eventually in Nashville, where he was transported out of concern for his safety. A Maury County grand jury eventually declined to indict him on the charge of rape, or for any other lesser crime, and he was released. Once out of jail, Cheek went to stay in the home of his uncle and aunt, who lived at the edge of the campus of Fisk University in Nashville. A mob formed in Maury County, traveled to Nashville, and abducted Cheek, taking him back to Maury County. Among them were C. Hayes Denton, county magistrate, whose car transported Cheek; Earl Allen, and Bob Hancock.

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