Why the Absence of Documentation Doesn’t Settle the Question

The absence of contemporaneous documentation — the lack of any 1915 newspaper account, any medical record, any church record — is the strongest single argument against accepting the story at face value.

But it is important to understand why this absence is not definitively exculpatory.

The Black community of Blackville, South Carolina, in 1915 was not a community whose internal events were systematically documented by the surrounding white-controlled institutions.

The newspapers that covered the region served a white readership and covered events of interest to that readership.