| Lynching of Jim Taylor | |
|---|---|
| Location | Murfreesboro Road, Franklin, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Date | April 29, 1891 |
Attack type | Lynching |
| Part of a series on the |
| Nadir of American race relations |
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Jim Taylor was an African-American man who was lynched on April 30, 1891 in Franklin, Tennessee.
Jim Taylor was an African American man who lived and worked as a sharecropper on a farm owned by James Hodge, two miles from Franklin. [1] He was described as "a very large negro", who was "feared by his own race and regarded as desperate" by The Daily American , [1] and as "a dangerous character" by The Leaf-Chronicle . [2]
On April 29, 1891, a circus troupe with many African Americans was in Franklin. [1] Taylor went to Franklin and reportedly shot a circus artist named Morrellton. [2] A policeman named Charles Cook tried to arrest him, and Taylor reportedly shot him in the neck. [1] [2] Taylor was arrested. [1] He reportedly carried two guns and a knife. [1] He was taken to the Williamson County Jail in Franklin. [1]
At 10p.m., a mob entered the jail and dragged him out of his cell. [1] [2] They took him to the bridge on Murfreesboro Road (near modern-day Pinkerton Park), where they hanged him and riddled his body with bullets. [1] [2] [3] The mob, who were on horseback, left shortly after, [2] and Taylor's body was found the next morning. [1]
The lynchers were not identified. [1]
Williamson County is a county in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 247,726. The county seat is Franklin, and the county is located in Middle Tennessee. The county is named after Hugh Williamson, a North Carolina politician who signed the U.S. Constitution. Williamson County is part of the Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN Metropolitan Statistical Area. In the 19th century, tobacco and hemp were cultivated here, and planters also raised warm-blooded livestock, including horses and cattle.
Franklin is a city in and the county seat of Williamson County, Tennessee, United States. About 21 miles (34 km) south of Nashville, it is one of the principal cities of the Nashville metropolitan area and Middle Tennessee. As of 2020, its population was 83,454. It is the seventh-most populous city in Tennessee. Franklin is known to be the home of many celebrities, mostly country music stars like Billy Ray Cyrus and Pop Singer Miley Cyrus.
Nolensville is a town in Williamson County, Tennessee. Its population was 13,829 at the 2020 census. It was established in 1797 by William Nolen, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. Located in Middle Tennessee, it is about 22 miles southeast of Nashville. The town was reincorporated in 1996.
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On March 19, 1906, Ed Johnson, a young African American man, was murdered by a lynch mob in his home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He had been wrongfully sentenced to death for the rape of Nevada Taylor, but Justice John Marshall Harlan of the United States Supreme Court had issued a stay of execution. To prevent delay or avoidance of execution, a mob broke into the jail where Johnson was held, and abducted and lynched him from the Walnut Street Bridge.
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Samuel A. Bierfield is believed to be the first Jew lynched in the United States. Bierfield and his African-American clerk, Lawrence Bowman, were confronted in Bierfield's store in Franklin, Tennessee, and fatally shot on August 15, 1868, by a group of masked men. The killers were believed to belong to a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which had emerged as an insurgent force in the state in 1866. The murder of Bierfield and Bowman was reported by both The New York Times and the Nashville Union and Dispatch.
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Samuel Smith was a 15-year-old African-American youth who was lynched by a white mob, hanged and shot in Nolensville, Tennessee, on December 15, 1924. No one was ever convicted of the lynching.
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.
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Jo Reed was an African American man who was lynched in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 30, 1875, where he was taken by a white mob from the county jail after being arrested for killing a police officer in a confrontation. He was hanged from a suspension bridge but, after the rope broke, Reed survived the attempted lynching, escaped via the river, and left Nashville to go West.
John Carter was an African-American man who was murdered in Little Rock, Arkansas, on May 4, 1927. Grabbed by a mob after another Black man had been apprehended for the alleged murder of a white girl, Carter was hanged from a telephone pole, shot, dragged through the streets, and then burned in the center of the city's Black part of town with materials that a white crowd of perhaps 5,000 people had looted from nearby stores and businesses.
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Three years later, Jim Taylor, a black man accused of shooting a policeman, was seized by a mob from Williamson County's sheriff and hung from the Murfreesboro Pike bridge.