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…
The formation of a vigilante group in 1863-1864 was not new to the frontier of America West, Over forty vigilante movements occurred between 1850 and 1879 during the period of Civil War violence and the uneasy settlement of the western frontier. Present day Montana, however, was the most significant vigilante…
In June of 1917 a strike broke out in the aftermath the deadly Speculator Mine disaster where 164 lives were lost. Frank Little, on of the “toughest, most courageous and impulsive” leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World came to Butte to support the strike and draw miners into…