On September 12, 1884, a mob of at least 400 young white men lynched a 25-year-old Black man named William Allen Taylor near this location beside the Trinity River. Weeks before the lynching, Mr. Taylor was arrested after being accused of robbing and assaulting a white woman. During this era…
Racial terror lynching plagued Texas and devastated African American communities for decades. On August 14, 1894, Travis County was the site of a triple lynching when a white mob seized a black woman and two black men from a small jail about thirty miles from Austin. According to news reports,…
Near this spot on the night of January 15, 1869, a group of masked horsemen lynched Wash Henley, a black Union army veteran, for running away with his white employer’s teenage daughter. Henley, born about 1841 in Mississippi, had served as blacksmith for Company B, 59th Ù.S. Colored Infantry with…
The Davidson County Jail stood near here, on what was called Water Street or Front Street, throughout most of the 19th century. Despite the duty of law enforcement to provide custodial protection, the jail was a repeated site of lynchings and violence that devastated the African American community. On March…
Between 1877 and 1950, there were at least 237 lynchings in the state of Tennessee. These were acts of terrorism against the African American community. In Madison County on August 16, 1886, Eliza Woods, a black domestic worker, was accused of poisoning her white employer. That night, a mob stormed…
In March of 1892, business partners Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and William Henry Stewart were arrested for defending an attack on their store, The People’s Grocery. The white competitor and the deputy sheriffs he hired were met with gunfire. Several deputies were wounded but survived. Nevertheless, Moss, McDowell, and Stewart…