Lynching in America / Lynching in Selma

Marker Text: The jail in Selma, Alabama, was a repeated site of racial terror lynching and violence that devastated the African American community. In February 1895, police arrested Willy Webb in Waynesville and moved him to the jail in Selma under threat that local whites planned to lynch him. Hours after Mr. Webb arrived in Selma, before he could stand trial, a “well-armed” lynch mob kidnapped him from jail and killed him. The next year, in June 1893, a lynch mob seized another black man named Daniel Edwards from the Selma jail, hanged him from a tree, and riddled his body with bullets. Mr. Edwards’s corpse was left hanging with a note pinned to his back: “Warning to all black men that are too intimate with white girls. This is the work of one hundred best citizens of the South Side.” Racial terror lynchings continued in Selma well into the 20th century. On July 11, 1938, Joe Spinner Johnson was called from his work as a sharecropper and delivered directly into the hands of a white mob that bound him and beat him mercilessly. The mob then took Mr. Johnson to the jail in Selma, where witnesses heard him beaten while screaming. Several days later, Mr. Johnson’s mutilated body was found in a field near Greensboro. A leader of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union that operated from 1931 to 1936 to help sharecroppers receive better wages and treatment and to reduce inequality in Alabama’s Black Belt, Mr. Johnson challenged the exploitative and racially discriminatory practices of wealthy white planters and landowners, and for that he was targeted and lynched. These lynchings were terrorist acts committed with the involvement and complicity of law enforcement officers, and they commonly went unpunished. Racial terror lynching in Selma created trauma and misery while reinforcing white supremacy and denying black people in this community the basic rights of citizenship.