On June 12, 1939, Elbert Williams and four other people in Brownsville, Tenn., formed a local NAACP chapter, the fifth to be established in the state. He was a charter member with his wife, Annie. On June 20, 1940, he was abducted from his home by local authorities for his efforts to help Black residents of Brownsville register to vote.
The racist local political establishment was adamantly against the majority-Black population of Haywood County voting, so Williams was supposedly questioned about NAACP organizing. After he was taken, he was never seen alive again. His body was found on June 23, 1940, in the Hatchie River, making Williams the first known NAACP member to be slain for civil rights organizing.
In a new book set for release in October from Broadleaf Books, titled “Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr,” retired Tennessee trial lawyer Jim Emison argues that the murder of Williams was part of a campaign to terrorize and destroy any chances of local Black political power.
“This man was killed because he was trying to register Black people to vote,” Emison told the AmNews.
Growing up in Alamo, Tenn., about 20 miles from Brownsville, in a family of lawyers with courthouse ties, Emison only learned about Williams’s story as he neared retirement. “I had never heard of this, ever. Not one word.”
For the past few years, Emison has been digging through courthouse records, FBI files, and Department of Justice correspondence, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and using survivor testimony to gather information about Williams’s lynching. Emison’s book details the 1939 creation of the Brownsville branch of the NAACP, its 1940 effort to register Black voters, and the white backlash that followed. Blacks were the majority in Haywood County, and white officials knew that Black votes could put them out of power.
Tennessee state historical marker commemorating white terror campaign responsible for Elbert Williams’s murder. (Courtesy of Jim Emison) 
In 1940, children of Elisha and Nann Davis escaped deadly violence in Brownsville by hiding under the tarp of a pickup truck. Targeted solely because parents joined NAACP and supported Black voter registration. (Courtesy of the late Evelyn Davis Fleming) 
Archival coverage of investigation. In June 1940, the Amsterdam News’ Marvel Cooke interviewed Annie Williams, Elbert Williams’s widow. Annie described seeing husband’s swollen, bullet-riddled body, and efforts to stop voter registration by threatening NAACP leaders. (AmNews archives) 
Archival coverage of investigation. In June 1940, the Amsterdam News’ Marvel Cooke interviewed Annie Williams, Elbert Williams’s widow. Annie described seeing husband’s swollen, bullet-riddled body, and efforts to stop voter registration by threatening NAACP leaders. (AmNews archives)
“The white people simply weren’t going to give up that political power without a war,” Emison said, “and they waged a war against Black people to keep it.”
The book shows how local whites initiated a steady campaign of threats and violence to keep Blacks from voting. Elisha Davis, another NAACP organizer, was kidnapped, threatened with death, and forced to leave the county. Several Black leaders fled. Williams stayed. When he was taken, his wife, Annie Mitchell Williams, insisted on a search that led to the dredging of his body from the Hatchie River.
In June 1940, not long after Williams was killed, Amsterdam News reporter Marvel Cooke interviewed Annie Williams after she fled Brownsville and ended up in Farmingdale, Long Island. Annie explained that officials had tried to keep her from seeing her husband’s body.
“It was a terrible sight,” she said in the article. “But I recognized him. His head was swollen twice its normal size. There were two holes in his chest that looked like bullet holes.” She said it was clear why her husband had been targeted: “They had tried to scare us out of carrying out our plan to register and vote this year by threatening a few they considered the leaders in the NAACP branch.”
Emison’s book cites a 1947 internal FBI review that determined that key witnesses in the Elbert Williams case had not been interviewed, “and they took that information,” Emison said, “and instead of reopening the case, they just deep-sixed it.” The Department of Justice later opened a file to investigate Williams’s murder under the Emmett Till Act, the federal effort to investigate cold case hate crimes, but Emison said efforts to secure a full, renewed federal investigation failed.
The case, he says, is now “dead in the water.” Elbert Williams’s grave has never been found, and no one has been charged with his murder.
For Nuri Ansari, the story told in “Murder on the Hatchie” is part of his family’s history. Ansari is the son of Elisha Davis, the Brownsville organizer who survived being abducted. Now a Harlem resident who has spent decades working in human services, Ansari said he didn’t even know the full story of what his father went through until 1987, after he was already an adult, living in New York, and had his own teenage children. That was when his siblings told him about how white neighbors in Brownsville threatened his family, and how they hid under a tarp in a pickup truck to escape the area.
Elisha Davis had moved out of Tennessee years ago, but as his mother aged, he felt he needed to return to care for her. “He felt compelled to go back,” Ansari said. “He uprooted his children and his wife, and went back to Brownsville.” Once there, Davis started a business and inherited properties from his mother. “He had a small service station business, but he also had property, which was a result of our grandmother.”
When he was abducted, threatened, and forced to leave Brownsville, Davis’s assets were lost. To this day, there has been no accounting for who took possession of his properties.
Ansari said that although he was, in essence, an internal exile in the U.S., his father refused to be silenced. The family ended up living in Niles, Mich., where their home became a place where neighbors came to seek advice from Davis. Ansari noted that Davis also remained connected to the NAACP. “To the day he died,” Ansari said, “he was always politically active. My father was a very politically active person, and people saw him as someone to have a conversation with and to get insight into how they should approach certain problems.” The family’s service tradition, he added, flowed from both parents: “That’s who he was, that’s who my mother was.”
Emison noted that with “Murder on the Hatchie,” a direct link can be drawn between Brownsville’s 1940 terror and modern efforts to suppress the vote. “In 1940, the scale was a single Tennessee county, where besieged minority whites held a monopoly on political power and were not about to relinquish it,” said the author, who was part of the successful effort to place a state historical marker in Brownsville that commemorates the white terror campaign that led to Williams’s murder. “When faced with the possibility of Black voter registration, they responded with threats, kidnappings, murder, and terror to achieve their goal: the preservation of their political power. It worked. They won another generation of white political monopoly.
“Today, the scale is national; the threat is not to a single county, but to our republic itself. Today, MAGA is the regime in power, the besieged minority, and MAGA has shown its willingness (in Minneapolis, Maine, and elsewhere) to use the full resources of the federal government for violence, murder, and terror to achieve its goal: suppression of their opponents’ vote, and preservation of their minority rule.”
As Emison said, “We don’t yet know whether violence, murder, and terror will be as successful in 2026 America as it was in 1940 Brownsville, but I want this to be as widely known as I can make it.”
