William Keemer (born ca. 1852) of Carthage was a Black carpenter with ties to the nearby free Black community of Beech Settlement (begun ca. 1828). In 1875, white Hancock County farmer William Vaughn accused Keemer of raping his wife. Keemer was arrested and jailed at Greenfield. He maintained his innocence,…
In March 1871, York Co. Ku Klux Klan members, led by Dr. J. Rufus Bratton, lynched black militia Capt. James Williams, hanging him from a tree near his home 1.5 miles away. His body was carried to the Brick House the next day where a coroner’s inquest was held. The…
About a dozen disguised people took Charlotte Harris from the custody of jailers in eastern Rockingham County on the night of 6 March 1878 and hanged her from a tree approximately 13 miles southeast of here. This is the only documented lynching of an African American woman in Virginia, and…
The Davidson County Jail stood near here, on what was called Water Street or Front Street, throughout most of the 19th century. Despite the duty of law enforcement to provide custodial protection, the jail was a repeated site of lynchings and violence that devastated the African American community. On March…
The devastating Union County Jail Raid massacre was one example of how racial violence was designed to terrorize the Black community during Reconstruction. In early 1871, white mobs abducted 12 Black men from the county jail on January 4 and February 12. These men, Captain J. Alexander Walker, Charner Gorden,…
Custer County, named in memory of General George Armstrong Custer, was organized July 27, 1877. Frontiersmen and pioneer ranchers had been living in the area since 1872. Earlier, soldiers from Fort McPherson and settlers from the Platte River counties had regularly made hunting expeditions here, for its river valleys were…