On July 8, 1860, the temperature in Dallas reached 115 degrees. A combustible fire beginning outside of W.W. Peak and Brothers drugstore destroyed most of downtown. At the time, national tensions ran high over the right to enslave human beings. Many were driven by suspicion of Northern abolitionists and a…
Milwaukee’s only recorded lynching occurred on this block on September 8, 1861. African-American residents George Marshall Clark and James Shelton were imprisoned on September 7 after a fight the previous evening during which Shelton fatally stabbed Darby Carney, owner of a popular Third Ward saloon. After Carney died, a mob…
Joseph R. Holmes, formerly enslaved in Charlotte County, campaigned for civil rights and education after emancipation. He served as a delegate to the Virginia Republican Party conventions in 1867 and 1869 and was elected to represent Charlotte and Halifax Counties in Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1867-68, held as a precondition…
Near this spot on the night of January 15, 1869, a group of masked horsemen lynched Wash Henley, a black Union army veteran, for running away with his white employer’s teenage daughter. Henley, born about 1841 in Mississippi, had served as blacksmith for Company B, 59th Ù.S. Colored Infantry with…
The formation of a vigilante group in 1863-1864 was not new to the frontier of America West, Over forty vigilante movements occurred between 1850 and 1879 during the period of Civil War violence and the uneasy settlement of the western frontier. Present day Montana, however, was the most significant vigilante…
John Taylor was born into slavery in Kentucky and was liberated by Union troops during the Civil War. In August 1864, he enlisted in the 1st Michigan Colored Infantry. After the war, Taylor worked for farmer John Buck in Delhi Township. When Taylor left to seek employment elsewhere, Buck refused…