On April 13, 1937. Robert “Bootjack” McDaniels and Roosevelt “Red” Townes were lynched by a White mob after being accused of killing a White storekeeper in Duck Hill. Kidnapped from the Courthouse and chained to trees, the two men were tortured with a blow torch, after which McDaniels was shot…
On the evening of September 17, 1935, Elwood Higginbottom, a 28-year old African-American tenant farmer, husband, and father to three children, was in custody in the Oxford jail. Four months earlier, landholder Glen Roberts led a posse to Higginbottom’s house over a property dispute. Higginbottom defended himself and fled after…
For decades, African American men were lynched by white mobs in Lafayette County. Most of these men were lynched because of interactions with white women which were characterized as “inappropriate” or “assaults.” These allegations against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny. Instead, mobs frequently pulled lynching victims from…
Between 1898 and 1931, at least three Black men were victims of racial terror lynchings near this courthouse. On May 26, 1898, a mob of over 100 white people lynched Garfield King, a Black teenager who lived near present-day Allen, MD. Garfield was being held in the Salisbury Jail after…
On December 23, 1936, the body of a 40-year-old Black man who had been lynched named Mack Henry Brown was found floating at the confluence of Roswell’s Vickery Creek and the Chattahoochee River. Mr. Brown, who lived and worked at an apartment house in Atlanta, had been missing for over…
On January 30, 1934, Robert Johnson, a 40-year-old Black man, was lynched in Tampa. Two days earlier, Mr. Johnson had been wrongly arrested by the Hillsborough County constable after a white woman reported an assault. The next day, Tampa law enforcement officers confirmed Mr. Johnson’s innocence and cleared him of…