By KATHY LISTON Following the defeat of the Confederacy, the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) saw the power structure across the South upended. With growing resentment, whites saw Black men being elected or appointed to positions of authority. In his memoir, Mississippi journalist-legislator H. C....
By Steven Schlanger Under the cover of darkness, a mob approached the Palmyra jailhouse on the evening of October 11, 1892, at approximately 11 p.m. Roughly twenty men had gathered for the sole purpose of committing murder; a justifiable murder in their minds, and one that they knew they would be...
By Zoe Crihfield, Tom Costa, Dylan Mabe, Thomas Noble On June 5, 1902, Wiley Guynn, a 28-year-old boarding house proprietor and miner, was arrested for assaulting the twelve-year-old daughter of Franklin Green, a white farmer living in the Tom's Creek area, just outside Coeburn in Wise County,...
By Dolores Flamiano On Saturday, October 17, 1891, a group of young black miners traveled by train to Clifton Forge, a booming railroad town in western Virginia. Three of the men (Charles Miller, John Scott, and Robert Burton) visited S.S. Griffith photography studio and posed for Wild West-style...
By James William Hagy Some people have expressed surprise at the number of lynchings in Southwest Virginia, defined here as the seventeen counties and three cities west of Roanoke, because that mountainous area had few slaves or free persons of color prior to the Civil War when compared with the...
By Tom Blair On February 28, 1878, a barn burned in Rockingham County, Virginia. The event was reported by both of the newspapers operating at that time in the county seat of Harrisonburg. For the most part, these accounts read like insurance reports, giving dry details about the barn’s contents,...
By Dale M. Brumfield Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees … -Strange Fruit, recorded by Billie Holiday, 1939 lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc At 6:30 a.m. on...
Richard Sanderson watched from his hotel window in August 1888 as twin columns of armed men, nearly 40 in all, galloped below on Main Street in Farmville, Va. Soon the men were out of sight, and all was quiet until shots broke the stillness. Sunrise brought an explanation for the strange sights and sounds of the night before: a black man was hanging from a tree at the edge of town.
By JIM HALL Charlotte Harris was lynched near Harrisonburg, Va., in 1878. A news story described how a group of disguised men stormed the place where she was confined, took her from a guard, and carried her away. The men dragged Harris about 400 yards to the Gilmore place. They bent a blackjack...