After being falsely accused of attempting to rape a young white girl, Cheek was released from jail when the grand jury did not indict him, due to lack of evidence.
[5] Cordie's mother Tenny "worked for many years as a cook, maid, midwife, and nurse" for the Moores, a white family who lived nearby.
A Maury County grand jury eventually declined to indict him on the charge of attempted rape, or for any other lesser crime, due to lack of evidence, and he was released.
Cheek was forced to climb a ladder; white men put a blindfold over his face and a rope around his neck, strung from a cedar tree.
Noted historian John Hope Franklin, then a student at Fisk, recalled: Those of us who had remained in Nashville over the Christmas holidays were obsessed with discussing the Cordie Cheek lynching.
"[8] In spite of various protests and calls in Nashville for justice, Gail Williams O'Brien writes that, "Maury County officials, along with a number of leading citizens in the community, closed ranks to block indictments against the alleged lynchers, and neither state nor federal forces overcame their resistance.
"[9] In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, Gilbert King theorized that the outrage from the lynching of Cheek was one of the factors that catalyzed the resistance of blacks in the Columbia, Tennessee race riot of 1946, noted nationally as the "first major racial confrontation" of the postwar era.