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…
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…