Historic marker depicts the Allen Green murder

The Allen Green marker was unveiled in a Saturday afternoon ceremony in Walhalla.  The marker, depicting an unsavory episode in long-ago Oconee County race relations, takes up a corner position on the grounds of the Oconee Courthouse.  The spot is maybe 50 yards from where a mob of white people overpowered the sheriff and his one deputy in 1930 and forcefully seized Green, an African American, from the jail and transported him through Walhalla to the West Union area where Green was tied to a tree and shot dead.  Seneca’s Shelby Henderson, among many historians at today’s ceremony, quoted a Greenville newspaper account of what happened.  Green was accused by a white woman of assault and went to prison upon conviction.  Later, however, the woman recounted and explained she had been coerced by her husband to make a false accusation.  But, for Green, it was too late.  In an earlier life, Green worked for the Oconee Telephone Company and the Walhalla Street Department, and, as Henderson told the marker unveiling crowd, Green twice saved Walhalla from fires.  Drawing a close to her remarks, Henderson said this:  “History is not and should never be used as a tool to instill blame or misplace guilt.  History serves to educate.  And although we face obstacles across our nation because miseducated and misinformed people choose to not understand the importance of knowing our past with all of its complexities so that we may develop an understanding of some of the pains of our present and create from that a better and brighter future for all our fellow human beings.”