Rembert wrested the gun away, locked the deputy in the cell and fled. A deputy sheriff entered the cell, the two scuffled and the deputy pulled his gun. Still in jail more than a year later, with no charges filed against him, he rebelled by stuffing the toilet in his cell with toilet paper so that it would overflow. It was exhibited in galleries and museums and helped support his family, though they lived in poverty.Īs he was being pursued, by his account, he saw a parked car with the keys in it, jumped in and drove off. His art told the story of the Jim Crow South.

And in a turn of events that no one had expected, he became an artist of some renown: Carving figures into leather, a craft he had learned in prison, he recreated vivid scenes from his life, of picking cotton, being lynched and busting rocks in his prison stripes. He married, moved north and the couple had eight children. Rembert, like throwing him back in jail from which he had just escaped.Īfter seven years of incarceration and hard labor for stealing a car, taking a gun from a deputy sheriff and escaping from prison, Mr. The only reason he wasn’t killed was that another white man stepped in, saying there were better things that could be done with Mr. One man came at him with a knife and nearly castrated him, sending blood gushing down his body. Just 21, he had been stripped of his clothes by a mob of white men and hoisted upside down from a tree, a noose around his ankles. Winfred Rembert survived a near-lynching in rural Georgia in 1967.

Chasing me to my grave book