Greenfield is a city in and the county seat of Hancock County, Indiana, United States It lies in Center Township and is part of the Indianapolis metropolitan area. The population was 23,488 at the 2020 census.
Joseph Smith, the founder and leader of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his brother, Hyrum Smith, were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, United States, on June 27, 1844, while awaiting trial in the town jail.
The James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home, one of two homes known as the James Whitcomb Riley House on the National Register of Historic Places, is a historic building in the Lockerbie Square Historic District of Indianapolis, Indiana. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1962 for its association with poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), known as the "Hoosier poet".
The Riley Birthplace and Museum, one of two homes called the James Whitcomb Riley House on the National Register of Historic Places, is located at 250 West Main Street in Greenfield, Indiana, twenty miles (32 km) east of downtown Indianapolis.
John William Vawter, from Greenfield, Indiana, was an American landscape artist and illustrator known for his broad strokes and loose Impressionist style.
On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among those killed were Hazel "Hayes" Turner and his wife, Mary Turner. Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day, his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil then set on fire. Mary's unborn child was cut from her abdomen and stomped to death. Her body was then repeatedly shot. No one was ever convicted of her lynching.
The Moore's Ford lynchings, also known as the 1946 Georgia lynching, refers to the July 25, 1946, murders of four young African Americans by a mob of white men. Tradition says that the murders were committed on Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton and Oconee counties between Monroe and Watkinsville, but the four victims, two married couples, were shot and killed on a nearby dirt road.
White caps were groups involved in the whitecapping movement who were operating in southern Indiana in the late 19th century. They engaged in vigilante justice and lynchings, with modern viewpoints describing their actions as domestic terrorism. They became common in the state following the American Civil War and lasted until the turn of the 20th century. White caps were especially active in Crawford and neighboring counties in the late 1880s. Several members of the Reno Gang were lynched in 1868, causing an international incident. Some of the members had been extradited to the United States from Canada and were supposed to be under federal protection. Lynchings continued against other criminals, but when two possibly innocent men were killed in Corydon in 1889, Indiana responded by cracking down on the white cap vigilante groups, beginning in the administration of Isaac P. Gray.
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.
Matthew Williams was a black man lynched by a white mob in Salisbury, Maryland, on December 4, 1931.
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.
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.
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.
William Andrews was an African American laborer who was lynched by a white mob in Princess Anne, Maryland on June 9, 1897. Andrews, then 17, was tried, convicted, and hanged all in one day after being accused of assaulting Mrs. Benjamin T. Kelley.
