The sharecroppers’ day-to-day lives remain relatively unknown, aside from a few individuals about whom Call My Name has gleaned more information about from the archive. The story of one of these individuals, Cato Sherman, is remarkable due to an extraordinary event that occurred later in his life after he stopped sharecropping at Fort Hill. Sherman’s name appears on two sharecropping contracts, 1867 and 1868. Sherman then became a well digger in nearby Central, SC. In 1887—just two years before Clemson College was founded and about 20 years after Sherman’s signed his last labor agreement with Thomas Green Clemson—Cato Sherman’s daughter, Lula Sherman, was raped by a local white resident named Manse Waldrop. Only fourteen years old at the time, Lula died from her injuries. In response to this horrifying crime, Cato Sherman, several other Black residents, and a white resident in the community, “forcibly removed Waldrop from police custody, shot Waldrop in the head, and hung him from a tree.”¹ The local and state response to this retaliatory murder was somewhat surprising, given the social and political realities of post-Reconstruction South Carolina. Cato Sherman and three others were charged with murder but later acquitted, but two Black men were found guilty and sentenced to death. In response to the death penalty, many Southerners, both Black and white, petitioned South Carolina’s Governor John P. Richardson to pardon the men, arguing that all men who were guilty of rape, regardless of race, were subject to lynching, and that no one could blame Cato Sherman and his compatriots for acting in the same manner as a white man whose daughter had been similarly murdered. These arguments won out, and the governor eventually pardoned the defendants who had been sentenced to death. Cato Sherman’s story illustrates the complicated relationship between Black people and the criminal justice system, a complex and often unfair relationship that still exists today.