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…
In 1898, a black man named John Henry James lived and worked in Charlottesville as an ice cream vendor. He had only been a resident of the area for five or six years before July 11th, 1898, when he was falsely accused of assaulting a white woman and arrested. The…
A mob of about 75 masked men dragged Brandon from a cell in the old Charles City County jail and hanged him from a tree on this hillside on the night of 6 April 1892. Brandon, a 43-year-old black man, had been held in jail on a charge of assaulting…
On September 21, 1893, a white mob lynched a young Black man named Thomas Smith in Roanoke, Virginia. The day before, Mr. Smith was accused of assaulting a white woman near the Roanoke City Market. During this era, Black people were burdened with a presumption of guilt that often led…