Racial Terror Lynchings / The Lynching of Lige Daniels

Marker Text: On August 2, 1920, Lige Daniels, an African American man, was confined inside the county jail in Center, Texas awaiting trial. News of his arrest spread quickly through Shelby County and the state. Mr. Daniels was accused of killing a white woman during a time when deep racial hostility burdened black people with presumptions of guilt and focused suspicion on black residents anytime crimes were discovered. Although no evidence of guilt had been reviewed in court regarding the allegations against Lige Daniels, the accusation sparked immediate mob violence. From twenty miles south, a message was sent to Center’s authorities, warning that if Mr. Daniels was not killed that day, a delegation from San Augustine would arrive later that night “to attend to the matter.” Despite an order from the Governor to secure Mr. Daniels’s safety, a mob of white men, swelling to an estimated one thousand participants, beat down the jail’s doors and stormed inside. The mob seized Mr. Daniels from his cell and hanged him from an oak tree on the courthouse yard. Like many victims of racial terror lynching, no proof of Lige Daniels’s guilt was required. Despite the fact that perpetrators of the lynching posed for photographs under his brutalized body, no one who participated in the mob was held accountable for his lynching.