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…
Between 1885 and 1921, white mobs terrorized and lynched at least six Black people in Chatham County, creating a legacy of violence, intimidation, and injustice. On September 28, 1885, a white mob in Pittsboro lynched four Black people—Jerry Finch and his wife, Harriet, John Pattishall, and Lee Tyson—following the unsolved…
On September 7, 1889, a white mob abducted a Black teenager named George Bush from the county jail in Columbia and lynched him. He was only 17 or 18 years old when he was killed. On September 5, Mr. Bush was arressted and held in the county jail for having…
In the predawn hours of July 10, 1897, an armed mob of white men brutally lynched Erastus Brown, a Black husband and father of two, near the Bourbeuse River Bridge in Union, Missouri. Mr. Brown was no more than 20 years old at the time of his death. On July…
On Good Friday, April 13, 1906, Springfield and Greene County had a thriving population of African American professionals, business owners, and community leaders. By the early hours of Easter Sunday, the city had been overwhelmed by hate and violence because of a false allegation that two black men, Horace B….
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…