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…
Close to midnight on Tuesday, August 8, 1899, Benjamin Thomas, a 16-year-old Black Alexandrian, was lynched from a lamppost on this corner. Earlier, white rioters attacked the City Jail on N. St. Asaph Street, where they seized and dragged Thomas for a half-mile on a cobblestone street, hitting him with…
Joseph R. Holmes, formerly enslaved in Charlotte County, campaigned for civil rights and education after emancipation. He served as a delegate to the Virginia Republican Party conventions in 1867 and 1869 and was elected to represent Charlotte and Halifax Counties in Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1867-68, held as a precondition…