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,…
About a dozen disguised people took Charlotte Harris from the custody of jailers in eastern Rockingham County on the night of 6 March 1878 and hanged her from a tree approximately 13 miles southeast of here. This is the only documented lynching of an African American woman in Virginia, and…
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,…