A “Public Prison” for the Enslaved. Long before a lynch mob abducted Benjamin Thomas from the Alexandria jail, this site was one of racial oppression, particularly due to its connection to slavery. Within a decade of Congress authorizing $10,000 to build this jail, the American Anti-Slavery Society featured it in…
Near this spot, on June 5, 1902, a white mob lynched a Black man named Wiley Gynn. Mr. Gynn, whose surname was also reported as “Guynn” or Gwynn”, was a 28-year-old Black husband, father, and boarding house proprietor in Bondtown. Earlier that day, a white girl claimed that she had…
On November 14, 1920, a large white mob lynched a 25-year-old Black coal miner named Dave Hurst. Authorities had arrested Mr. Hurst two days earlier after a white woman reported that she had been assaulted by a Black man. During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society…
James Horace Carter, a 45-year-old African American husband and father, was lynched on 12 Oct. 1923 a mile southeast of here. Two weeks before the lynching, a white woman had admitted that Carter was the father of one of her children. He was charged with rape and arrested. While being…
On the night of August 15, 1926, a mob of rowdy Wythe County citizens forced their way into the Wythe County jail that stood on this site until 1928. Overpowering the county jailer, the mob breached the cell in which a black man, Raymond Arthur Byrd, was incarcerated. The mob…
Leonard Woods, a black coal miner from Jenkins, KY, was lynched near here on the night of 29-30 Nov. 1927. Officers had arrested Woods for allegedly killing Herschel Deaton, a white man from Coeburn, VA, and had taken him to the Whitesburg, KY jail. On the day of Deaton’s funeral,…