| Part of Jim Crow Era | |
 Map of Mobile and Ohio Railroad in Columbus, Lowndes County, Mississippi | |
| Date | December 15, 1915 |
|---|---|
| Location | Columbus, Mississippi |
| Participants | A white mob |
| Deaths | 1 |
Cordella Stevenson was an African-American woman who was sexually assaulted and lynched by a mob of white men in Columbus, Mississippi on December 15, 1915.
A barn owned by a white man, Gabe Frank, was burned down in a suspected arson attack. Stevenson's son was accused of burning the barn even though he hadn't been seen in the area for months. Local police arrested Cordella Stevenson and her husband Arch Stevenson and held them for six days hoping that she would tell them where her son was. [1]
At 10:00 PM on December 15, 1915, a mob of white men broke into their home, sexually assaulted her and hung her naked from a tree near the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. [2]
Arch escaped on foot and ran into Columbus, but was unable to obtain aid. No one was ever arrested for Stevenson's rape and murder. [3]
Black women lynched in Mississippi 1900-1919 [4]
| Date of death | Name | Place | Cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1914 | Jennie Collins | Bolivar County | Alleged to have aided the escape of an accused murderer |
| November 24, 1914 | Mrs. Jane Sullivan | Byhalial, Marshall County | Arson |
| December 10, 1915 | Mrs. Cordella Stevenson | Columbus, Lowndes Co. | Alleged arson |
| 1918 | Alma House | Clarke County | Murder |
| 1918 | Maggie House | Shubuta, Clarke County | Suspected of murder |
Notes
References
Within Our Gates is a 1920 American silent race drama film produced, written and directed by Oscar Micheaux. The film portrays the contemporary racial situation in the United States during the early twentieth century, the years of Jim Crow, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration of blacks to cities of the North and Midwest, and the emergence of the "New Negro".
Sam Hose was an African American man who was tortured and murdered by a white lynch mob in Coweta County, Georgia, after being accused of rape.
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wells dedicated her career to combating prejudice and violence, and advocating for African-American equality—especially that of women.
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."
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s, slowed during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and continued until 1981. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states. In 1891, the largest single mass lynching in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants.
On June 15, 1920, three African-American circus workers, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, suspects in an assault case, were taken from the jail and lynched by a White mob of thousands in Duluth, Minnesota. Rumors had circulated that six Black men had raped and robbed a nineteen-year-old White woman. A physician who examined her found no physical evidence of rape.
Joe Coe, also known as George Smith, was an African-American laborer who was lynched on October 10, 1891, in Omaha, Nebraska. Overwhelmed by a mob of one thousand at the Douglas County Courthouse, the twelve city police officers stood by without intervening. Afterward, the mayor called the lynching "the most deplorable thing that has ever happened in the history of the country."
Willie McGee was an African American man from Laurel, Mississippi, who was sentenced to death in 1945 and executed on Tuesday, May 8, 1951, after being controversially convicted for the rape of a white woman on November 2, 1945. McGee's legal case became a cause célèbre that attracted worldwide attention, as it was roundly decried as a miscarriage of justice in the Jim Crow south.
A false accusation of rape happens when a person states that they or another person have been raped when no rape has occurred. Although there are widely varying estimates of the prevalence of false accusation of rape, according to a 2013 book on forensic victimology, very few reliable scientific studies have been conducted.
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.
In Forsyth County, Georgia, in September 1912, two separate alleged attacks on white women in the Cumming area resulted in black men being accused as suspects. First, a white woman reportedly awoke to find a black man in her bedroom; then days later, a white teenage girl was beaten and raped, later dying of her injuries.
The lynching of Marie Thompson of Shepherdsville took place in the early morning on June 15, 1904, in Lebanon Junction, Bullitt County, Kentucky, for her killing of John Irvin, a white landowner. The day before Thompson had attempted to defend her son from being beaten by Irvin in a dispute; he ordered her off the land. As she was walking away from him, he attacked her with a knife and she killed him in self-defense with a razor. She was arrested and put in the county jail.
The Washington race riot of 1919 was civil unrest in Washington, D.C. from July 19, 1919, to July 24, 1919. Starting July 19, white men, many in the armed forces, responded to the rumored arrest of a black man for the rape of a white woman with four days of mob violence against black individuals and businesses. They rioted, randomly beat black people on the street, and pulled others off streetcars for attacks. When police refused to intervene, the black population fought back. The city closed saloons and theaters to discourage assemblies. Meanwhile, the four white-owned local papers, including the Washington Post, fanned the violence with incendiary headlines and calling in at least one instance for mobilization of a "clean-up" operation.
After young African-American men volunteered to fight against the Central Powers, during World War I, many of them returned home but instead of being rewarded for their military service, they were subjected to discrimination, racism and lynchings by the citizens and the government. Labor shortages in essential industries caused a massive migration of southern African-Americans to northern cities leading to a wide-spread emergency of segregation in the north and the regeneration of the Ku Klux Klan. For many African-American veterans, as well as the majority of the African-Americans in the United States, the times which followed the war were fraught with challenges similar to those they faced overseas. Discrimination and segregation were at the forefront of everyday life, but most prevalent in schools, public revenues, and housing. Although members of different races who had fought in World War I believed that military service was a price which was worth paying in exchange for equal citizenship, this was not the case for African-Americans. The decades which followed World War I included blatant acts of racism and nationally recognized events which conveyed American society's portrayal of African-Americans as 2nd class citizens. Although the United States had just won The Great War in 1918, the national fight for equal rights was just beginning.
Christopher C. Davis was a Black man who lived near Albany, Ohio with his wife and two children. He worked as a farm laborer. In 1881, he was accused of raping and assaulting a White woman, after which he was arrested. While in jail in Athens, Ohio, before his trial, a mob of White men broke into the jail and lynched him by hanging him from a bridge over the Hocking River. None of the White men were indicted of a crime.
On March 15, 1901, an African American woman named Ballie Crutchfield was lynched by a white mob in Rome, Tennessee. The mob had tried to murder her brother, earlier that night, but was unsuccessful and took vengeance on his sister, whom they bound, shot, and threw in a creek.
William Baker was an 18-year-old African-American man who was lynched in Monroe County, Mississippi by a white mob on March 8, 1922. According to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary it was the 14th of 61 lynchings during 1922 in the United States.
The lynching of women in the United States refers to the extrajudicial killing of women between the 1830s and the 1960s. While the majority of lynching victims were African-American men and boys, the majority of female lynching victims were African-American women and girls. The lynching of Black women has sometimes been understudied by academics and overlooked by the general public. The role of white women as perpetrators of lynching is also understudied. Between 1865 and 1965, of around 5,000 Black lynching victims, between 120 and 200 Black women and girls were lynched, or around 3% to 4% of all victims. A small number of women lynching victims were white, some of whom were lynched for associating with African Americans. Other women lynching victims were Indigenous, Latina, or Asian. While women lynching victims were often "successfully demonized", the lynching of white women was more likely to cause "shock, horror, and condemnation" from the general public.