On October 10, 1908, a mob of white people brutally shot, tortured, and lynched Frank Johnson, Dee Dawkins, and William Fielder near Hickory, Mississippi. On October 8, a Black sharecropper named Shep Jones had a disagreement about his work schedule with his white employer. The white planter assaulted Mr. Jones,…
On June 26, 1919, John Hartfield, an African American, was lynched in Ellisville allegedly for raping his White girlfriend. After being apprehended by the county sheriff, he was turned over to a mob. The lynching was announced in advance by newspapers, and thousands of spectators watched as Hartfield was hanged…
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…
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…
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…
On July 20, 1899, Giuseppe Di Fatta, Pasquale Di Fatta, Francesco Di Fatta, Giovanni Cerami and Rosario Fiduccia, all natives of Sicily, were murdered by a lynch mob in Tallulah, Louisiana. The murders triggered an international incident between the United States and Italy and President William McKinley, in his December…