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The Watkinsville lynching was a mass lynching that occurred in Watkinsville, Georgia, United States on June 30, 1905. The lynching, which saw a large mob seize nine men from a local jail and kill eight of them by gunfire, has been described as "one of the worst episodes of racial violence ever in Georgia." [1]
In May 1905, a storekeeper named F. M. Holbrook and his wife were murdered in Oconee County, Georgia. [2] In the aftermath, one white man and three African American men were arrested, [2] with the white man accused of the murder and the three African American men accused of being accomplices to the murder. [3] They were held in the jail in Oconee County along with six other individuals, [4] [5] all African American men held for various reasons. [3]
According to The Oconee Enterprise, local newspapers at the time praised residents of the county for "not rushing to judgment". [2] However, at midnight on June 29, a large mob of individuals, reportedly from nearby Morgan County, Georgia, organized and traveled to Oconee County. [2] At 2 a.m. [5] on June 30, 1905, [1] this large mob of between approximately 50 and 100 people [note 1] broke into the Oconee County jail. [1] The mob, consisting of masked white men, [4] went to the house of the town marshal and compelled him to take them to the county jail, where the jailer relinquished the keys to the jail cells at gunpoint. [3] Afterwards, they seized nine of the ten prisoners, including the murder suspect, and proceeded to tie them to nearby fence posts. [4] [5] One prisoner had apparently avoided the attention of the mob and was left in his cell. [5] Of the nine men seized by the mob, only one had been convicted of a crime, while the others were awaiting trial. [5] [3] After tying the men to the posts, they proceeded to open fire on the men, with the New-York Tribune reporting that "five volleys" were fired at the men. [5] Eight of the men died as a result of the gunfire, [1] while one man survived and proceeded to play dead. [5]
Following the lynching, several of the bodies were buried in the same grave, leading a historian to say in an interview with CNN that "within an hour of Atlanta is a mass grave". [1] One of the victims, Sandy Price, was identified by his mother, [1] and he is the only victim with an identified grave. [6] A photograph of the dead bodies, still tied to the fence, was taken shortly after the murders. [2]
In 2007, the lynching attracted national attention as part of a story by CNN. Following this, a group that had worked to identify the graves of the victims in the Moore's Ford lynchings, a 1946 lynching that had occurred on the border between Oconee County and Walton County, Georgia, announced that they would work to identify the unmarked graves of the Watkinsville victims. [1] In 2020, on the 115th anniversary of the lynching, a vigil was held in Watkinsville for the victims, [6] with attendees organizing at the former site of the jail and marching to the grave of Sandy Price, where they paid their respects to the victims. [4] In 2025, a second vigil was held at the county courthouse. The vigil included the unveiling of a memorial plaque dedicated to the victims. [7]