| Date | December 16–17, 1900 |
|---|---|
| Location | Rockport, Indiana Boonville, Indiana |
| Type | Lynching |
| Motive | Suspicion of murder, racial hatred |
| Target | Joe Holly, Bud Rowland, and Jim Henderson |
| Perpetrator | Local towns people |
| Deaths | 3 |
Bud Rowland and Jim Henderson, two Black men, were lynched in Rockport, Indiana on December 16, 1900. [1] The following day, Joe Holly was lynched in Boonville, Indiana for the same alleged crime. [2]
On December 16, 1900, Bud Rowland and Jim Henderson, two Black men, were arrested for the murder of a white barber, Hollie L. Simmons in Rockport, Indiana. He was reportedly jumped by two men and was bashed across the skull with a nail-covered club. [1] The news of the murder spread through town, and suspects were quickly identified that same night. Of those who were questioned, Henderson and Rowland were arrested in Rockport.
Shortly after authorities placed Rowland and Henderson in the local jail, a large group of angry white people used sledgehammers and a broken telegraph pole to ram into the jail. [2] While the mob was getting ready to hang Rowland, he said that he had one more accomplice named ‘Crowfoot’. The white crowd first pulled Rowland out of his cell and hanged him from a tree on the east side of the courthouse, before shooting his body with bullets. [2] The group returned to retrieve Henderson from his cell. They shot him in his cell, dragged him across the courtyard, and hanged him next to Rowland. [1]
After lynching Rowland and Henderson, the white crowd looked for ‘Crowfoot,’ who identified himself as Joe Holly, at a local hotel. Joe Holly was known by several names, including ‘Joe Crowfoot’, ‘Hustling Joe’, ‘Whistling Joe’, and ‘John Rolla’. [1] [2]
News spread that the Spencer County sheriffs took Holly to a jail in the town over, Boonville. On the night of December 17, a crowd of white people from Rockport broke into the Boonville jail. Although Holly pled for mercy, the angry crowd hanged him in front of the Boonville Courthouse. [3] Although not much is known about Holly, it is known that he was from Edmondson, Arkansas. [1] Holly's last wish was to have his body sent to his family, which was never granted. Even less is known about Rowland and Henderson, and their last wishes were never documented.
In Indiana, at least eighteen Black people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. [4]
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) commemorated the lynching of Bud Rowland, Jim Henderson, and Joe Holly in their document, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. The document reported lynchings that occurred in the Southern states, and states outside of the South where anti-Black violence was prevalent. [2] The EJI also memorialized Rowland, Henderson, and Holly in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. [5]
Spencer County is a county located in the U.S. state of Indiana. As of the 2020 census, the population was 19,810. The county seat is Rockport. Despite not being in the Owensboro Metropolitan Area, the entire riverfront of the city of Owensboro, Kentucky borders the southern tip of the county.
The Pickens County Courthouse in the county seat of Carrollton, Alabama is the courthouse for Pickens County, Alabama. Built-in 1877-1878 as the third courthouse in the city, it is noted for a ghostly image that can be seen in one of its garret windows. This is claimed to be the face of freedman Henry Wells from 1878.
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.
The Douglas County Courthouse is located at 1701 Farnam Street in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. Built in 1912, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Notable events at the courthouse include two lynchings and the city's first sit-in during the Civil Rights Movement. Five years after it was opened, the building was almost destroyed by mob violence in the Omaha Race Riot of 1919.
Claude Neal was a 23-year-old African-American farmhand who was arrested in Jackson County, Florida, on October 19, 1934, for allegedly raping and killing Lola Cannady, a 19-year-old white woman missing since the preceding night. Circumstantial evidence was collected against him, but nothing directly linked him to the crime. When the news got out about his arrest, white lynch mobs began to form. In order to keep Neal safe, County Sheriff Flake Chambliss moved him between multiple jails, including the county jail at Brewton, Alabama, 100 miles (160 km) away. But a lynch mob of about 100 white men from Jackson County heard where he was, and brought him back to Jackson County.
The lynching of the Frenches of Warsaw took place in Warsaw, Gallatin County, Kentucky on May 3, 1876, between 1 am and 2 am on a Wednesday morning. Benjamin and Mollie French, African Americans, were lynched by a white mob for the murder of another African American, which was unusual for this period. Lake Jones was an elderly black man who had faithfully served a white family named Howard, both before and after his emancipation from slavery. The Frenches were accused of poisoning Lake Jones with arsenic and intending to steal his money.
George Armwood was an African American who was lynched in Princess Anne, Maryland, on October 18, 1933. His murder was the last recorded lynching in Maryland.
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a non-profit organization, based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who may have been denied a fair trial. It guarantees the defense of anyone in Alabama in a death penalty case.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, is a memorial to commemorate the black victims of lynching in the United States. It is intended to focus on and acknowledge past racial terrorism and advocate for social justice in America. Founded by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, it opened in downtown Montgomery, Alabama on April 26, 2018.
Austin Callaway, also known as Austin Brown, was a young African-American man who was taken from jail by a group of six white men and lynched on September 8, 1940, in LaGrange, Georgia. The day before, Callaway had been arrested as a suspect in an assault of a white woman. The gang carried out extrajudicial punishment and prevented the youth from ever receiving a trial. They shot him numerous times, fatally wounding him and leaving him for dead. Found by a motorist, Callaway was taken to a hospital, where he died of his wounds.
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.
Amos Miller was a 23-year-old African-American man who was lynched from the balcony of the Williamson County Courthouse in Franklin, Tennessee, on August 10, 1888.
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 Henry James was an African-American man who was lynched near Charlottesville, Virginia on July 12, 1898, for having allegedly raped a white woman. James had no known family in the area, and had lived in Charlottesville for only five or six years. He was an ice cream seller; "nothing else is known of him."
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.
Leonard Woods was an African-American man who was lynched by a mob in Pound Gap, on the border between Kentucky and Virginia, after they broke him out of jail in Whitesburg, Kentucky, on November 30, 1927. Woods was alleged to have killed the foreman of a mine, Herschel Deaton. A mob of people from Kentucky and Virginia took him from the jail and away from town and hanged him, and riddled his body with shots. The killing, which became widely publicized, was the last in a long line of extrajudicial murders in the area, and, prompted by the activism of Louis Isaac Jaffe and others, resulted in the adoption of strong anti-lynching legislation in Virginia.
Garfield King was a black man lynched by a mob in Salisbury, Maryland. He reportedly shot Herman Kenney, a 22-year-old white man with a revolver after arguing.
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.
On October 11, 1878, Jim Good, Jeff Hopkins, Ed Warner, William Chambers, and Dan Harris, Sr. were lynched in Posey County, Indiana, near the town of Mount Vernon. These men, who were allegedly connected to the robbery of a brothel, were killed by a white mob who broke into the jail where they were being held. Two other men, Dan Harris, Jr. and John Harris, were also lynched in the days leading up to October 11, in connection with the same alleged offense. This racial terror lynching is the largest reported lynching in Indiana's history.
