So, nearly two weeks after Karmelo Anthony was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison, a new team of appellate and civil rights lawyers announced that they were stepping into the case.
What does this mean?
Karmelo Anthony’s case is not over, and the arrival of a new legal team means there is still a chance to force the record to speak before the system buries another Black teenager under procedure and calls it justice. These experienced lawyers are now gonna go back through the record to ask some serious questions that should haunt everybody who watched this case unfold. Questions like: Was the trial fair? Was the jury selection fair? Were legal errors made? Were issues preserved for appeal? Did his attorney truly build a self-defense case or was he merely processed through the racist machinery toward conviction and punishment?
Now, sit with that last question for a little bit because it is the one America never wants to answer. But Black folks have seen this before.
So I want to take you back to 1925, to Aiken County, South Carolina, where another Black teenager named Clarence Lowman stood inside a legal system that had already decided what his life was worth. The Lowman case began after a violent encounter between a poor Black farming family and white law enforcement. The state turned the surviving Lowmans into criminals. Their first lawyers barely defended them. Then, when real lawyers stepped in and exposed the sham, the prosecution’s case began to collapse. That should have been justice, but instead, the mob stepped in.
Karmelo Anthony’s case and the Lowman case are not identical, but I want to show Y’all how history echoes. And here, the echo is hard to miss: in the Lowman case, the NAACP helped investigate and expose the legal lynching after the fact. In Karmelo Anthony’s case, Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe is now part of the new legal team trying to examine the record before the system gets the last word.
Nearly a century apart, the question remains painfully familiar: when a Black teenager enters a courtroom already thick with white fear, white grief, and white vengeance, who is actually standing between that young person and the mob? Because this country has a long history of dressing racial vengeance in legal procedure and then calling the result justice.
Let’s go back to 1925 . . .
Aiken County Sheriff Henry H. Howard and his deputies showed up at the Lowman home, supposedly looking for illegal liquor. Annie Lowman, the family matriarch, was outside making soap. Her daughter Bertha was nearby. The white men arrived in plain clothes. The women, already living under the terror of recent Ku Klux Klan violence, tried to retreat into the house. The sheriff struck Bertha in the mouth. Annie moved toward her daughter and Deputy Nollie Robinson shot Annie Lowman dead.
Demon and Clarence Lowman heard Bertha scream. They ran toward the house. They saw white men with guns and their mother and sister under attack. Shots were fired. Sheriff Howard died. Bertha was shot. Clarence, a teenager, was gravely wounded. Demon was wounded too.
And then the state did what the state has always done when Black people survive white violence. It reversed victim and aggressor and turned the Lowmans into the criminals.
Five members of the family were arrested. Rumors spread that the Klan intended to lynch the “Lowman children.” Clarence and Bertha were near death from their wounds, but they were hauled off into custody anyway. A few days later, the dead sheriff was mourned in public spectacle. Hundreds of Klansmen marched. The courthouse, the funeral, the Klan, the press, the state, and the crowd began speaking the same language.
The first trial was a legal farce.
Judge H. F. Rice assigned attorneys to defend the Lowmans, but Walter White of the NAACP later wrote that those lawyers merely “went through the motions.” The courtroom was packed with white rage. The judge eulogized the dead sheriff before the jury. Then he essentially apologized to the white jurors for the defense attorneys, telling them not to hold it against the lawyers because they had been ordered to defend Black people.
There it is. Y’all see that defense table as apology? The courtroom was basically theater and the Black defendants were already condemned bodies waiting for the paperwork to catch up. Demon and Clarence were sentenced to die and Bertha was sentenced to life.
But then something unexpected happened.
A Black lawyer in Columbia named N. J. Frederick read about the case and saw the sham for what it was and so he appealed. The South Carolina Supreme Court reversed the convictions and ordered new trials. When the case came back, Frederick was joined by L. G. Southard, a white lawyer from Spartanburg. Unlike the first court-appointed lawyers, these men actually defended the Lowmans.
They attacked the state’s conspiracy theory and blocked prosecutors from smuggling discredited arguments back into the case. They argued that the sheriff and deputies were the trespassers. They argued that the Lowmans had a right to defend their home and they argued that the state’s case was collapsing. And then, the machinery panicked.
On October 7, 1926, the judge directed a verdict of not guilty for Demon Lowman. The cases against Bertha and Clarence were also weakening. That should have been a moment of justice. But it wasn’t. Instead, it became the signal for the mob.
Men left the courthouse and went to the office of a lawyer who had just been elected to the South Carolina legislature. Walter White wrote that every man who met in that office was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In that lawyer’s office, the lynching was planned. Telephone calls went out across the state. The mob gathered. The jail was left with one guard and the Lowmans were taken from their cells.
Pause there, Y’all.
This all went down in a lawyer’s office. Not some barn, a back road, or some drunken clearing in the woods. A lawyer’s office.
That matters because it tells us something essential about lynching that this country still refuses to admit. Lynching was not merely the work of lawless men who rejected the courthouse. Lynching was often the work of men who understood the courthouse intimately. Men who knew procedure, timing, where the jail keys were kept, which sheriff would look away, which judge would remain silent, which newspaper would soften the crime, and which grand jury would refuse to indict.
We already know that judges were crooked and juries were stacked, sometimes with members who had criminal records themselves. We know sheriffs surrendered prisoners and prosecutors manufactured guilt. We know “respectable” white citizens attended lynchings, posed for photographs, took souvenirs, and went home to supper.
But lawyers planning a lynching tells us something even more chilling: the mob did not stand outside the legal system waiting for law to fail. The mob was inside the legal system, wearing its credentials.
These were not men who misunderstood the law. They understood it well enough to bend it, pause it, route around it, and weaponize it. And when the courtroom began moving toward an outcome they did not want, they used their legal networks, political power, and professional respectability to summon the older verdict: death.
Bertha Lowman, Demon Lowman, and teenage Clarence Lowman were driven out near a pine thicket, where hundreds of cars and perhaps a thousand people waited. Clarence’s body was dragged behind an automobile. The three were ordered to run. They were shot in the back. Bertha did not die immediately. She begged for her life while white men laughed and kept firing.
This is the history people want us to forget when they tell us to “trust the process.” Because lynching was never just the rope. It was never just the redneck mob howling outside the courthouse. Lynching was coordinated, administrative, and clerical. Lynching had paperwork, judges, sheriffs, deputies, jailers, prosecutors, and jurors. And sometimes lynching had lawyers.
Not simply lawyers who failed to object. Not simply lawyers who were overmatched. Not simply lawyers who did not believe in their Black clients. Lawyers whose offices became planning rooms where professional respectability was lent to the mob. Lawyers who understood that when the courtroom failed to produce the desired white outcome, the mob could be summoned to finish the job.
Now come forward with me to 2026. Come to Texas. Come to Karmelo Anthony. A Black teenager enters a legal system after a deadly confrontation with a white teenager at a high school track meet. From the beginning, the case is saturated with race, grief, rage, propaganda, and the old American hunger to turn Black self-defense into Black criminality. Anthony was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison earlier this month.
And then folks watched his first attorney, Mike Howard, and many saw not a wall between Karmelo and the state, but a screen door. People complained that the defense was weak. They complained that it was too passive. That it lacked urgency, racial literacy, and moral imagination. It lacked the ability to make a jury feel the terror of being a Black teenager surrounded, touched, ordered, challenged, and then judged by people who may have already decided that your fear is aggression.
They also complained about jury selection. A Black teenager on trial in a racially explosive case involving the death of a white teenager, and not one Black juror sat in judgment. The system may call that procedure and “race-neutral” but Black folks hear an old racist song.
People questioned why Karmelo did not testify. Now, that is always a complicated decision. But this was a self-defense case. The central question was fear. What did Karmelo perceive? What did he think was happening to him? What did it feel like in that moment? What did he believe was about to happen?
The jury never heard that story from him directly. And so the state got to narrate him. That is how Black youth disappear in court. Not always by chains but sometimes by narrative.
People complained that the defense did not humanize him enough. Did not make the jury sit with his youth. Did not make the jury sit with his vulnerability. Did not make the jury sit with the racial script that teaches America to see a Black teenager’s panic as predation and a white teenager’s aggression as boyish misjudgment.
People complained that the defense rested too thinly, that it did not meet the scale of the state’s narrative, that it did not match the danger of the moment. And so the result was a murder conviction and a 35-year sentence.
So the question is ugly, but necessary: Did Karmelo Anthony’s first defense attorney deliver him to the legal mob?
Not the same way the Lowmans were delivered. I am not saying Mike Howard plotted a lynching in this case. And I am not saying he called the mob. Nor am I saying he intentionally sacrificed his client. I am saying something more historically grounded and more terrifying: in America, Black children do not need a lawyer to consciously conspire with white supremacy for the system to consume them.
Sometimes all the system requires is weakness, incompetence, or a lawyer who does not understand the racial weather. Sometimes all it requires is a defense that treats a lynching-era structure like a neutral courtroom. That is the echo of the Lowman story.
In Aiken County, when the legal system briefly failed to deliver the desired result, the mob took over. In Texas, the mob does not need to drag anybody from a jail cell when the legal system itself can deliver the body through verdict, sentence, procedure, jury selection, prosecutorial narrative, and respectable silence.
This is what people refuse to understand about lynching. It was never only extrajudicial. It was also judicial.
The rope and the sentence have always known each other. The mob outside the courthouse and the jury inside the courthouse have always been kin. One wore overalls. One wore a suit. One carried a gun. One carried a summons. One shouted the slur. One said “guilty.” But the outcome was often the same. White supremacy has always loved a division of labor.
That is why Karmelo Anthony’s new legal team matters. Not because their arrival proves he is innocent or because an appeal guarantees a new trial. Not because the presence of civil rights lawyers magically undoes a conviction.
It matters because a new set of lawyers is now asking whether the first trial was as clean as the system wants us to believe. It matters because they are going back through the record. It matters because they are looking for what was missed, what was mishandled, what was waived, what was preserved, what was ignored, and what may have been legally wrong.
And it matters because Black history teaches us to ask a question deeper than “What did the prosecutor do?” We must also ask: What did the defense fail to do? Because the defense table is supposed to be sanctuary. It is supposed to be the place where the state meets resistance and where a teenager is not abandoned to the machinery. It is supposed to be the place where someone stands between the accused and the full appetite of the state.
But history tells us to be suspicious.
History tells us that Black defendants have often been surrounded by people who called themselves officers of the court while behaving like functionaries of racial order. History tells us that a Black youth can be processed, represented, judged, sentenced, and destroyed while everyone insists the system worked. And history tells us that due process can be the velvet glove on the same old fist.
The Lowman case ended in a pine thicket. It ended with Bertha, Demon, and teenage Clarence Lowman dragged from their cells and murdered because the courtroom had begun to fail white power. It ended with the mob getting the last word. That cannot be the ending we accept for Karmelo Anthony.
If the Lowman case teaches us anything, it is that Black people have to be suspicious of every room where the state claims neutrality while racial vengeance is breathing through the walls. The courtroom. The jury room. The jailhouse. The prosecutor’s office. The newspaper office. And yes, sometimes even the defense table.
But the Lowman case also teaches us something else: real lawyering matters. The hope is that this new legal team will find what was missed, name what was mishandled, preserve what can still be argued, and force the appellate courts to confront the record. The hope is that Karmelo Anthony will not be processed into silence. The hope is that he will not become another Black youth swallowed by a system that calls itself fair because it followed its own rituals.
The hope is that this time, the mob does not get the last word.
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THIS CONTENT IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
