African Americans who were lynched in the U.S.
Nevlin Porter and Johnson Spencer were African-American men who were lynched in Starkville, Mississippi May 5, 1879 for the alleged burning of a barn.
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Nevlin Porter and Johnson Spencer were African-American men who were lynched in Starkville, Mississippi May 5, 1879 for the alleged burning of a barn.
On April 23, 1879, Jordan Moore, a farmer who lived near Starkville, reported being shot at by an unknown stranger. On April 24 a barn containing corn on Moore's property was burned, [1] and a black man, Johnson Spencer was arrested. The following day, while Spencer was incarcerated, another barn containing farm implements and other machinery was burned, and Moore reported finding another black man, Nevlin Porter, in his bedroom. Porter confessed to burning the barn in order to divert attention from Spencer's guilt. Reports in the press stated that Porter had been lynched on the way to the jail proved false as of April 30, but was scheduled for a hearing in circuit court on May 1. [2] However, on May 5, 1879, a mixed-race mob of 121 men were given keys to the jail by the sheriff. The mob locked jailer Henry Isaacs up, and left with Porter and Spencer to the trestle of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad one mile east of the town, where both men were hung with cotton ropes and killed. [3] After an inquest the bodies were turned over to their friends. [4] [5]
Oktibbeha County is a county in the east central portion of the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2020 census the population was 51,788. The county seat is Starkville. The county's name is derived from a Choctaw word meaning "icy creek". The Choctaw had long occupied much of this territory prior to European exploration and United States acquisition.
Starkville is a city in, and the county seat of, Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, Starkville's population is 24,360, making it the 16th-most populated city in Mississippi. Starkville is the largest city in the Golden Triangle, which had a population of 175,474 in 2020, and the principal city of the Starkville-Columbus, MS CSA. Founded in 1831, the city was originally known as Boardtown for the local sawmilling operation there, but was renamed in 1837 to honor American Revolutionary War general John Stark.
The 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.
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 (11) in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants.
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.
Ell Persons was a black man who was lynched on 22 May 1917, after he was accused of having raped and decapitated a 15-year-old white girl, Antoinette Rappel, in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. He was arrested and was awaiting trial when he was captured by a lynch party, who burned him alive and scattered his remains around town, throwing his head at a group of African Americans. A large crowd attended his lynching, which had the atmosphere of a carnival. No one was charged as a result of the lynching, which was described as one of the most vicious in American history, but it did play a part in the foundation of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP.
Echo is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, United States. It was first listed as a CDP in the 2020 census with a population of 352.
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.
William Burns was a 22-year-old African-American man who was lynched on October 6, 1907, in Cumberland, Maryland, for the alleged murder of white Cumberland police officer August Baker.
Jim McIlherron was an African-American man who was tortured and executed by a lynch mob on February 12, 1918, in Estill Springs, Tennessee. McIlherron was lynched in retaliation for shooting and killing two white men after a fight broke out.
Starkville, or Starksville, is a ghost town in Lee County, Georgia. The town is named for American Revolution war hero John Stark.
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.
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 Hartfield was a black man who was lynched in Ellisville, Mississippi in 1919 for allegedly having a white girlfriend. The murder was announced a day in advance in major newspapers, a crowd of as many as 10,000 watched while Hartfield was hanged, shot, and burned. Pieces of his corpse were chopped off and sold as souvenirs.
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".
Lation (Ligon) Scott was an African American lynching victim suspected of raping a white woman in Dyer County, Tennessee. Scott was tortured, mutilated and burned alive by a mob on Sunday, December 2, 1917 in downtown Dyersburg.
L. Q. Ivy was a seventeen-year-old African-American male who was accused of raping a White woman in 1925 in Rocky Ford, Mississippi. He was tortured and burned to death in 1925 by a lynch mob of White people.