200 yards north of here, a granite boulder bears this inscription “John and William Driscoll executed here June 29, 1841,” These two men, father and son, were tried by 500 aroused citizens and then executed by a firing squad of one hundred eleven men. “Doctors and scholars, ministers and deacons…
On August 15, 1908, at about 2:00 a.m., the mob reached the home of Scott Burton. The fifty-six-year-old black barber tried to escape out a side door of his home but was overtaken and pummeled unconscious by the mob. He was then dragged to Twelfth and Madison Streets and hanged…
On August 15, 1908, William Donnegan, a seventy-six-year-old retired black shoemaker, was taken from his nearby home by the mob and across the street to Edwards School. His throat was slashed after which the mob attempted to hang him. Upon the approach of the militia, the mob fled. The militia…
On April 5, 1918, German immigrant Robert Prager was hanged by a mob at this site. Prager’s lynching was the high-water mark of the anti-immigrant and anti-German hysteria that gripped the nation during World War I. Persecution in the guise of patriotism was especially severe in the southern Illinois coal…
On June 3, 1893, a mob of 1,500 white people lynched a 30-year-old Black man named Samuel J. Bush across from the courthouse lawn in Decatur, Illinois. Mr. Bush was accused of assaulting two white women — one from Mt. Zion, a “sundown town”. He was charged and held at…