On November 8, 1889, between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., a 14-year-old African-American boy named Orion Anderson (1875-1889) was lynched at this site where the Leesburg freight depot was located along the Washington and Old Dominion (W&OD) Railroad. A week earlier, Orion had been arrested and taken to jail in…
A mob of about 75 masked men dragged Brandon from a cell in the old Charles City County jail and hanged him from a tree on this hillside on the night of 6 April 1892. Brandon, a 43-year-old black man, had been held in jail on a charge of assaulting…
On September 21, 1893, a white mob lynched a young Black man named Thomas Smith in Roanoke, Virginia. The day before, Mr. Smith was accused of assaulting a white woman near the Roanoke City Market. During this era, Black people were burdened with a presumption of guilt that often led…
Thomas Washington, an African American man, was lynched on 23 March 1896 for allegedly attempting to assault the young daughter of a prominent white citizen. A boy found Washington’s body hanging from a tree about 1/8 mile southwest of here. A coroner’s jury did not identify the killers. The body,…
On a lamppost at this corner on April 23, 1897, Black Alexandria teenager Joseph H. McCoy was lynched. McCoy’s white employer, Richard Lacy, alleged that McCoy had sexually assaulted his daughter. Similar accusations were routinely used against Black males to ensure domination and provoke racial terror within the African American…
In 1898, a black man named John Henry James lived and worked in Charlottesville as an ice cream vendor. He had only been a resident of the area for five or six years before July 11th, 1898, when he was falsely accused of assaulting a white woman and arrested. The…