Lynching of Josh Shorter | |
---|---|
Location | Eufaula, Alabama |
Coordinates | 31°53′21″N85°9′13″W / 31.88917°N 85.15361°W |
Date | June 8, 1881 |
Part of a series on the |
Nadir of American race relations |
---|
Josh Shorter was an African-American man who was lynched in Eufaula, Alabama, or between Eufaula and Georgetown, Georgia, on the afternoon of Wednesday June 8, 1881.
The lynching is described in an article in The Weekly News and Advertiser, a newspaper published in Georgia, on Saturday June 18, 1881: "A special telegram from Eufaula under date of the 9th, states that a most villainous outrage was committed upon a respectable white girl, twelve years old, by Josh Shorter, a negro, near that city, on Wednesday afternoon. A diligent pursuit by a large party resulted in his capture across the river in Georgia. He was immediately carried to the Alabama side, and upon the Sheriff’s attempting to get possession of him, they hurried him back to Georgia with a large crowd and hung him to a limb of a largo tree, about midway between Eufaula and Georgetown." [1]
The Legacy of Lynching website marks his murder as occurring in Eufaula: "name: Josh Shorter, Jun 1881; description: from riverbank about 200 yards above city bridge". [2]
Montgomery is the capital city of the U.S. state of Alabama and the county seat of Montgomery County. Named for Continental Army Major General Richard Montgomery, it stands beside the Alabama River, on the coastal Plain of the Gulf of Mexico. The population was 200,603 at the 2020 census. It is the third-most populous city in the state after Huntsville and Birmingham, and is the 133rd most populous in the United States. The Montgomery Metropolitan Statistical Area's population in 2022 was 385,460; it is the fourth largest in the state and 142nd among United States metropolitan areas.
Barbour County is a county in the southeastern part of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census, the population was 25,223. Its county seat is Clayton. Its largest city is Eufaula. Its name is in honor of James Barbour, who served as Governor of Virginia.
Eufaula is the largest city in Barbour County, Alabama, United States. As of the 2010 census the city's population was 13,137.
Blakely is a city in and the county seat of Early County, Georgia, United States. As of 2020, its population was 5,371. It is located approximately halfway between Columbus and Tallahassee, Florida on U.S. Route 27.
Georgetown is a city in Quitman County, Georgia, United States. It is on the Alabama-Georgia state line next to Walter F. George Lake and across the Chattahoochee River from Eufaula, Alabama. Per the 2020 census, the population was 2,235. In 2006, Georgetown and Quitman County voted to consolidate their governments, becoming the smallest such consolidated entity in the Lower 48 states.
Eufaula is a city in and the county seat of McIntosh County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 2,813 at the 2010 census, an increase of 6.6 percent from 2,639 in 2000. Eufaula is in the southern part of the county, 30 miles (48 km) north of McAlester and 32 miles (51 km) south of Muskogee.
The Chattahoochee River is a river in the Southeastern United States. It forms the southern half of the Alabama and Georgia border, as well as a portion of the Florida and Georgia border. It is a tributary of the Apalachicola River, a relatively short river formed by the confluence of the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers and emptying from Florida into Apalachicola Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. The Chattahoochee River is about 430 miles (690 km) long. The Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola rivers together make up the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint River Basin. The Chattahoochee makes up the largest part of the ACF's drainage basin.
U.S. Route 82 is an east–west United States highway in the Southern United States. Created on July 1, 1931 across central Mississippi and southern Arkansas, US 82 eventually became a 1,625-mile-long (2,615 km) route extending from the White Sands of New Mexico to Georgia's Atlantic coast.
William Dorsey Jelks was an American newspaper editor, publisher, and politician who served as the 32nd Governor of Alabama from 1901 to 1907. As Lieutenant Governor of Alabama, he also served as acting governor between December 1 and December 26, 1900, when Governor William J. Samford was out-of-state seeking medical treatment.
The Press-Register was a newspaper serving the southwest Alabama counties of Mobile and Baldwin. The newspaper is a descendant of one founded in 1813, making the Press-Register Alabama's oldest newspaper. It is owned by Advance Publications, which also owns the primary newspapers in Birmingham, Alabama and Huntsville, Alabama. The Press-Register had a daily publication schedule since the inception of its predecessors in the early 1800s until September 30, 2012, when it and its sister papers reduced printing editions to only Wednesday, Fridays and Sundays.
The Georgia Southwestern Railroad is a Class III short line railroad company that operates over 234 miles (377 km) of track in southwestern Georgia and southeastern Alabama. Beginning in 1989 as a division of the South Carolina Central Railroad on a pair of former CSX Transportation lines, the railroad has since undergone a number of transformations through abandonments and acquisitions, before arriving at its current form. The railroad was formerly a RailAmerica property before going independent, and in 2008 it was acquired by Genesee & Wyoming Inc.
U.S. Route 82 in Alabama runs northwest to southeast across the northwestern and central Alabama for 240.080 miles (386.371 km). The route enters from Mississippi east of Columbus, Mississippi and exits into Georgia across the Chattahoochee River at Eufaula.
Philip Joseph was an politician and journalist in Reconstruction and Jim Crow-era Alabama. An African American, he was a Republican.
The Columbus Telegram is a newspaper owned by Lee Enterprises and published in Columbus, in the east-central part of the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. It is delivered on Tuesday through Friday afternoon and on Saturday morning.
The McIntosh County Seat War was a dispute in Oklahoma over the location of the McIntosh County seat that took place between 1907 and 1909. Following a pair of elections that resulted in the town of Checotah being designated as the new county seat, the people of Eufaula refused to hand over the county records. As a result, a group of heavily armed men from Checotah attempted to seize the records, but were forced to surrender during the gunbattle that ensued. One year later, after another close election, Eufaula became the permanent county seat.
The 1915 Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association football season was the college football games played by the member schools of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association as part of the 1915 college football season. The season began on September 25.
The Kensington Football Club was one of the first Australian rules football clubs founded in South Australia and played an integral part in the game's development in the state. The early rules used in South Australia were referred to as the "Kensington Rules". Club uniform was a scarlet cap and jacket and white trousers.
The club was one of the founding teams of the South Australian Football Association in 1877.
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.
John D. Roquemore, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, was an American lawyer and state senator from Alabama.