In March 1871, York Co. Ku Klux Klan members, led by Dr. J. Rufus Bratton, lynched black militia Capt. James Williams, hanging him from a tree near his home 1.5 miles away. His body was carried to the Brick House the next day where a coroner’s inquest was held. The…
From November 9-14, 1898, white mobs in Phoenix lynched at least eight Black men and one Black woman and terrorized Black residents. The November 8 general election was the first since the enactment of the 1895 state constitution, which effectively barred Black people from voting. That morning at the local…
On November 16, 1933, a white mob lynched an African American man named George Green in his home near this site off North Adams Street in Taylors for challenging a wrongful eviction. A farm laborer in his sixties, Mr. Green lived with his wife, Mary Green, in a sharecropper’s dwelling…
White mobs lynched at least five Black people, including three teenagers, in Anderson County over the course of 17 years. On December 12, 1894, a mob of nearly 500 white men abducted a Black boy named Edward Sullivan from law enforcement and hanged him near Williamston after a white boy…
In 1898 a building here was the scene of a lynching that sparked outrage across the nation. Frazier Baker, an African American who had recently been postmaster of Effingham, was appointed postmaster of Lake City in 1897. Whites who resented Baker harassed him, even burning the post office in an…
The devastating Union County Jail Raid massacre was one example of how racial violence was designed to terrorize the Black community during Reconstruction. In early 1871, white mobs abducted 12 Black men from the county jail on January 4 and February 12. These men, Captain J. Alexander Walker, Charner Gorden,…