Victim ID: VA1889042201
Victim Name: Scott Bailey
Race: Black
Sex: Male
Age: Unknown
Job: Unknown
Method of Death: Hanged
Accusation: Assaulted upon a young white woman
Date: 1889-04-22
City: Halifax
Mob Composition: Unknown
Summary: The lynching of Scott Bailey occurred on April 22nd, 1889, at around midnight in Halifax. Bailey, an African American man, was accused of assaulting a white woman.
On April 22nd, 1889, Scott Bailey allegedly attempted “to commit an outrage on the person of one of the most prominent young ladies in the village” (Shenandoah Herald) on the premises of the lady’s home. Bailey was quickly caught, confessed his crime, and was lynched at about midnight. According to the Shenandoah Herald, Bailey “was hanged from the same place from which Bruce Younger was hanged less than a year ago for a similar offense.” In a virulent editorial, the Richmond Dispatch justified the lynching: “if the crime was proven to have been committed or attempted, not by what lawyers call the law of evidence in criminal cases-not by that, but by such evidence as convinced men of plain sense and good character, that then, […] I would have hung the negro in half an hour.” Referring to the lynching of James (Jim) Rhodes almost a decade earlier in Albemarle, the editorial then asked: “This [lynching] may not be law, but was it not justice? […] when the honor of our women or the security of our homes in involved, then do not wait to ‘let the law’ […] ‘take its course,’ but let punishment, swift and sure, overtake the offender, for such punishment is justice and good policy.” Finally, after criticizing the Richmond Planet, a black newspaper, for asking to the let the law taking its course in these cases, the Richmond Dispatch retorted that “in defence of our women let us see that Justice [i.e. lynching] takes its course.”
News Coverage: Abingdon Standard, Free Lance-Star, Richmond Dispatch, Shenandoah Herald
Article Link (from Richmond Dispatch published on 1889-04-28)
Article Link (from Shenandoah Herald published on 1889-04-26)