From November 9-14, 1898, white mobs in Phoenix lynched at least eight Black men and one Black woman and terrorized Black residents. The November 8 general election was the first since the enactment of the 1895 state constitution, which effectively barred Black people from voting. That morning at the local…
White mobs lynched at least five Black people, including three teenagers, in Anderson County over the course of 17 years. On December 12, 1894, a mob of nearly 500 white men abducted a Black boy named Edward Sullivan from law enforcement and hanged him near Williamston after a white boy…
In 1898 a building here was the scene of a lynching that sparked outrage across the nation. Frazier Baker, an African American who had recently been postmaster of Effingham, was appointed postmaster of Lake City in 1897. Whites who resented Baker harassed him, even burning the post office in an…
Mr. Sidney Randolph, a Black Georgia native in his mid-twenties, was lynched in Rockville on July 4, 1896, allegedly by a group of white men from Montgomery County. Randolph was suspected of attacking the Buxton family of Gaithersburg and killing one family member in May 1896. Detectives were brought in…
A “Public Prison” for the Enslaved. Long before a lynch mob abducted Benjamin Thomas from the Alexandria jail, this site was one of racial oppression, particularly due to its connection to slavery. Within a decade of Congress authorizing $10,000 to build this jail, the American Anti-Slavery Society featured it in…
Close to midnight on Tuesday, August 8, 1899, Benjamin Thomas, a 16-year-old Black Alexandrian, was lynched from a lamppost on this corner. Earlier, white rioters attacked the City Jail on N. St. Asaph Street, where they seized and dragged Thomas for a half-mile on a cobblestone street, hitting him with…