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Note: She was a Sunday school teacher for years at New Hope Baptist Church in Burlington. She could pray better than anyone I ever knew. Better than any of those articulate TV preachers. She ran and lived in a large rooming house, downtown; and would sometimes drag a few of her roomers to church. She always said she hoped she would not die in that house, and she got her wish. One Sun, after a lengthy sermon, Rev. Gribble was about to close out his Sun morning sermon in his usual way. He would call on someone at random to pray the benediction, after which we all broke for the door, and lunch. This particular Sunday, Oct 24, 1976, he felt led to call on Sister Ruth, who always sat on the front row and led the amen corner. After a lengthy and eloquent benediction and a long amen, everyone was heading for the door, when Sister Ruth collapsed right on the alter in front of her pew. She had a massive heart attack, and was probably dead before she hit the floor.
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It has been rumored that she was assaulted by a black man when she was a teen and that he was lynched. This was the last lynching known to have occurred in Person Co. The following newspaper article is about this incident:
Durham, North Carolina, July 8, 1920: Lynching: Edward Roach, Negro prisoner, age 24, held on a charge of attacking a 13-year-old white girl, was taken from the county jail at Roxboro by a mob of more than 200 masked men and hanged yesterday from the limb of a tree in a rural Negro churchyard.
July 12, 1920
Ed Roach, the Negro who was lynched by a Person County mob last Wednesday morning was innocent of the crime for which he died, according to a signed statement made by Nello Taylor, widely known contractor and employer of the mob victim. The infuriated mob, in the opinion of the contractor, made a ghastly mistake when they dragged Roach from the Person County jail, hanged him to the churchyard tree and riddled his body with bullets, while the brute who committed the crime was allowed to escape. The Raleigh Independent
SOURCE: http://books.google.com/books?id=-fvYyyRQVxAC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=mary+ruth+allen+person+county+nc&source=bl&ots=3MpYaHREfN&sig=E9X0jaGMVNVahPXcxKboFalanRU&hl=en&ei=fyBITYSxIYOdlgeF5PCuBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CCQQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=true
Following exerpt taken from: "Lynching in North Carolina - A History, 1865-1941" by Vann R. Newkirk (pg 40-41)
One year later another case of mob violence erupted in Person County, which lay less than forty miles from Norlina. The case stemmed from an attempted sexual assault upon a fourteen-year-old white girl named Mary Ruth Allen. According to published reports, on July 7, 1920, as the girl walked through an isolated area a black man jumped from some bushes and knocked her to the ground. Before he could accomplish his purpose the girl screamed and the assailant fled.
Determined that the man not get away, neighbors formed a posse and tracked the assailant to some nearby railroad tracks. There they concluded that the attacker had boarded a freight train and headed for Roxboro. For that reason, members of the posse jumped into their cars and rushed to Roxboro. Arriving at the train depot, the posse arrested Edward Roach, a twenty-four-year-old African American as he got off the train. To ensure that they had arrested the right man, the posse brought Allen to the jail where she identified Roach as her assailant.
However, Roach denied his guilt. According to Roach he was at work when the assault took place. After leaving work, he walked to the Mount Tersa station to catch the train to Roxboro. Along the way he passed several white men working on a bridge and, most notably, two men who were searching for the girl's assailant. Yet, despite a host of witnesses who could confirm his alibi, officials made no effort to check his story. Instead, they charged him with rape and threw him in the Roxboro jail.
Roach's arrest however could not have come at a more unfriendly location. Following the Civil War members of the Ku Klux Klan routinely beat blacks for even the slightest offenses. Even more violent events occurred in the town during the election of 1896. As a crowd of blacks attended a Republican rally, a mob of whites attacked the blacks with an assortment of weapons. In the ensuring ruckus "blood flowed freely," and hundreds of blacks were wounded. Thus, it was little wonder that on the morning following Roach's arrest a mob numbering more than 200 men surrounded the Roxboro jail. When the sheriff asked the mob to disperse, the vigilantes pelted him with stones and fired shots into the air to show that they meant business. Instead of returning to the jail where he could have mounted some sort of defense, the sheriff and his deputies retreated, leaving the jail unprotected. With the sheriff out of the way, the mob broke the locks off of Roach's cell. Several miles away in the graveyard of an African American church, they hung him in a tree. Then they riddled his lifeless body with bullets.
The next day the solicter held a cursory hearing during which the sheriff and his deputies testified that they were unable to identify members of the mob. Yet, this seems unlikely since the sheriff passed many of the vigilantes in the street when he evacuated the jail. At any rate, the case did not end at this juncture. The day after Roach's death, his boss, Nello Teer, released a signed statement in which he maintained that Roach was innocent. According to Teer, Roach was at work at 2:30 PM, the time the alleged crime took place. Moreover, he claimed that Roach worked all day and did not leave work until 5:30 PM.
NOTE: The employer's name has been corrected. It is NELLO L. TEER. It was misspelled TAYLOR in the Raleigh Independant.
The same paper (Raleigh Indepedent) also wronly printed the name of the girl as Annie Lou Chambers. Even goes into detail about her family. This name change is a mystery. It also names the sheriff as N. S. Thompson.
http://books.google.com/books?id=0km_frJZALIC&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=sheriff+of+person+county+nc+1920&source=bl&ots=If0etX2LDU&sig=hUOidxCm2o5KIhyKNufwiO2cWHw&hl=en&ei=W6BITcfAIcOBlAfR2YnEBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CCwQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=true
The above excerpt from "Lynching in North Carolina" gives her age as 14. She was just shy of 18 when it happened.
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