COLUMBIA, S.C., Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Two black brothers executed in 1915 in South Carolina for the murder of a Confederate Civil War veteran received a pardon Wednesday.
Tom Joyner, host of the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show, requested the pardon for Thomas and Meeks Griffin from the Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services, The (Columbia) State reported. The brothers were his great-uncles, and Joyner said he learned last year from Henry Louis Gates's PBS show "African American Lives" that they had gone to the electric chair for a crime they might not have committed.
"Black people back in the day didn't always talk about the struggles from which they came. They always looked forward," Joyner said. "I hope this will bring closure and that the secrets of my family will be closed."
Two other men were also executed for killing John Q. Lewis.
Joyner said even in 1915 his great-uncles, farmers with no criminal records, got support from whites with a magistrate and a sheriff submitting petitions seeking clemency. He said another black man who fingered his great-uncles for the killing may have been the real guilty one.
