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Harris County is a county located in the west-central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia; its western border with the state of Alabama is formed by the Chattahoochee River. As of the 2020 census, the population was 34,668. The county seat is Hamilton. The largest city in the county is Pine Mountain, a resort town that is home to the Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park. Harris County was created on December 14, 1827, and named for Charles Harris, a Georgia judge and attorney. Harris County is part of the Columbus, GA-AL metropolitan area and has become a popular suburban and exurban destination of residence for families relocating from Columbus. Because of this, Harris has become the sixth-wealthiest county in Georgia in terms of per capita income and the wealthiest in the state outside of Metro Atlanta.
Red Summer was a period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas. The term "Red Summer" was coined by civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson, who had been employed as a field secretary by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1916. In 1919, he organized peaceful protests against the racial violence.
Mack Charles Parker was a Black American victim of lynching in the United States. He had been accused of raping a pregnant white woman in northern Pearl River County, Mississippi. Three days before he was to stand trial, Parker was kidnapped from his jail cell in the Pearl River County Courthouse by a mob, beaten and shot. His body was found in the Pearl River, 20 miles west of Poplarville, 10 days later. Following an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the men who killed him were released. Despite confessions, no one was ever indicted for the killing. Historian Howard Smead called the killing the "last classic lynching in America."
The Springfield race riot of 1908 consisted of events of mass racial violence committed against African Americans by a mob of about 5,000 white Americans and European immigrants in Springfield, Illinois, between August 14 and 16, 1908. Two black men had been arrested as suspects in a rape, and attempted rape and murder. The alleged victims were two young white women and the father of one of them. When a mob seeking to lynch the men discovered the sheriff had transferred them out of the city, the whites furiously spread out to attack black neighborhoods, murdered black citizens on the streets, and destroyed black businesses and homes. The state militia was called out to quell the rioting.
The People's Grocery lynchings of 1892 occurred on March 9, 1892, in Memphis, Tennessee, when black grocery owner Thomas Moss and two of his workers, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell, were lynched by a white mob while in police custody. The lynchings occurred in the aftermath of a fight between whites and blacks and two subsequent shooting altercations in which two white police officers were wounded.
Charles Spalding Thomas was a Confederate soldier and later United States senator from Colorado. Born in Darien, Georgia, he attended private schools in Georgia and Connecticut, and served briefly in the Confederate Army.
Roy Belton was a 19-year-old white man arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma with a female accomplice for the August 21, 1920 hijacking and shooting of a white man, local taxi driver Homer Nida. He was taken from the county jail by a group of armed men, after a confrontation with the sheriff, and taken to an isolated area where he was lynched.
On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among those killed were Hazel "Hayes" Turner and his wife, Mary Turner. Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day, his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil then set on fire. Mary's unborn child was cut from her abdomen and stomped to death. Her body was then repeatedly shot. No one was ever convicted of her lynching.
Laura and L. D. Nelson were an African-American mother and son who were lynched on May 25, 1911, near Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. They had been seized from their cells in the Okemah county jail the night before by a group of up to 40 white men, reportedly including Charley Guthrie, father of the folk singer Woody Guthrie. The Associated Press reported that Laura was raped. She and L. D. were then hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River. According to one source, Laura had a baby with her who survived the attack.
On Tuesday, November 12, 1914, John Evans, a black man, was lynched in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States, by a mob of 1,500 white men, women and children. Evans was accused of the murder of Edward Sherman, a white real estate developer, and the attack of Sherman's wife, Mary. After word of the attack spread, and Mary Sherman claimed her attackers were "two negroes," a citywide search ensued. Suspicions immediately led to John Evans. Two days after the murder, a posse consisting of some of the city's most prominent and well-respected members stormed the St. Petersburg jail, threw a noose around Evans' neck and marched him to his death. He was never given a fair trial. Evans was hanged from a light post on the corner of Ninth Street South and Second Avenue. At first, he kept himself alive by wrapping his legs around the light pole. An unidentified white woman in a nearby automobile ended his struggle with a single bullet. Though the shot was fatal, the rest of the crowd began shooting at Evans' dangling body until their ammunition was depleted.
William "Froggie" James, an African-American man, was lynched and his dead body mutilated on November 11, 1909 by a mob in Cairo, Illinois, after he was charged with the rape and murder of 23-year-old shop clerk Anna Pelley.
On April 13, 1937, Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels, two black men, were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi by a white mob after being labeled as the murderers of a white storekeeper. They had only been legally accused of the crime a few minutes before they were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees, and tortured with a blow torch. Following the torture, McDaniels was shot to death and Townes was burned alive.
Ephraim Grizzard and Henry Grizzard were African-American brothers who were lynched in Middle Tennessee in April 1892 as suspects in the assaults on two white sisters. Henry Grizzard was hanged by a white mob on April 24 near the house of the young women in Goodlettsville, Tennessee.
David Jones was an African-American man who was lynched in Nashville, Tennessee on March 25, 1872 after being arrested as a suspect in a killing. He was mortally wounded while in jail, shot twice in the back while resisting white mob members who came to take him out; the whites pulled him into the Public Square and hanged him from a post outside the police station, with a crowd of an estimated 2,000 in attendance. The sheriff interrupted the hanging and took Jones down. Taken back to the jail, Jones died of his injuries on April 9, 1872.
Albert Easley was an African-American boy of 13–14 years who was lynched in Jacksonville, Calhoun County, Alabama, on January 20, 1879 after being arrested as a suspect in the assault and rape of Mrs. Moses Ables of nearby Cove Creek, Etowah County, Alabama. Mrs. Ables, a widowed mother of three, was found unconscious but alive three days earlier with severe head injuries and indications that she had been raped. No eyewitnesses were reported and it is not clear why suspicion rested immediately upon Easley. Accounts emphasize that he confessed, though one account claims he admitted only the beating and denied the rape. He was arrested and taken to the jail in Jacksonville about 14 miles from where the crime occurred. At 1 pm a mob of between one hundred and fifty and three hundred persons took Easley from the jail by force and lynched him within the city limits during the daytime. Mrs. Ables died five weeks after the lynching took place.
The lynching of Henry Lowry, on January 26, 1921, was the murder of an African-American man, Henry Lowry, by a mob of white vigilantes in Arkansas. Lowry, a tenant farmer, had been on the run after a deadly shootout at the house of planter O. T. Craig on Christmas Day of 1920. Lowry went into hiding in El Paso, Texas; when he was discovered and extradited by train, a group of armed white men boarded the train in Sardis, Mississippi, and took Lowry to Nodena, near Wilson, Arkansas. He was doused in gasoline and burned alive before a mob of 500. A reporter from the Memphis Press witnessed the event, and word of the lynching soon spread around the country, aided by an article William Pickens wrote for The Nation, in which he described eastern Arkansas as "the American Congo".
Horace Maples was an African-American man who was lynched by a mob of approximately 2,000 people in Huntsville, Alabama, on September 7, 1904. Maples had been accused of murder and was being held in the county jail when it was set on fire by the crowd. He jumped from a second story window in the jail, but was seized by the crowd and hanged on a tree on the courthouse lawn. Maples' body was then shot full of bullets by people in the crowd.
A mob of white Vigo County, Indiana, residents lynched George Ward, a black man, on February 26, 1901 in Terre Haute, Indiana, for the suspected murder of a white woman. An example of a spectacle lynching, the event was public in nature and drew a crowd of over 1,000 white participants. Ward was dragged from a jail cell in broad daylight, struck in the back of the head with a sledgehammer, hanged from a bridge, and burned. His toes and the hobnails from his boots were collected as souvenirs. A grand jury was convened but no one was ever charged with the murder of Ward. It is the only known lynching in Vigo County. The lynching was memorialized 120 years later with a historical marker and ceremony.
Jesse Thornton was a 26 years old African-American man who was lynched in the town of Luverne, Alabama, on June 22, 1940. Thornton was lynched for allegedly refusing to address a white man as "Mister". He was shot to death, and his body was thrown into the Patsaliga River. The Equal Justice Initiative documented that the white man Thornton had apparently offended by his Jim Crow infraction was a police officer.
References
- ↑ Segrave, Kerry (2014). Lynchings of Women in the United States: The Recorded Cases, 1851-1946. McFarland. p. 101. ISBN 9780786460083.
- 1 2 "On this day, Mar 15, 1901: Black Woman Lynched By White Mob in Tennessee After They Couldn't Find Her Brother". Equal Justice Initiative . Retrieved June 13, 2021.
- ↑ Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 1919. p. 14.
- ↑ "Negro Woman Lynched for Stealing". The Sacred Heart Review . Vol. 25, no. 12. March 23, 1901. Retrieved June 13, 2021.
- ↑ Bey, Lee (June 11, 2018). "Memorializing an American Atrocity". Architect . Retrieved June 13, 2021.
