#white mob

On August 7, 1930, a white mob used crowbars and hammers to break into the Grant County jail in Marion, Indiana, to lynch three young Black men who had been arrested earlier that afternoon after being accused of murdering a white man and assaulting a white woman. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19, were severely beaten and lynched, and 16-year-old James Cameron was badly beaten but survived.

That afternoon, word of the charges against these young Black men spread, and a growing mob of angry white residents gathered outside the Grant County jail. Around 9:30 pm, the mob attempted to rush the jail and was repelled by tear gas. An hour later, members of the mob successfully barreled past the sheriff and three deputies, grabbed Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith from their cells as they prayed, and dragged them into the street. By then, the crowd totaled between 5,000 and 10,000 people. While spectators watched and cheered, the mob beat, tortured, and hanged both men from trees in the courthouse yard, brutally murdering them without the benefit of trial or legal proof of guilt.

As the bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith remained suspended above the crowd, members of the mob re-entered the jail and grabbed 16-year-old James Cameron, another Black youth accused of being involved in the crime. The mob beat the teenager severely and was preparing to hang him alongside the others, but when a member of the crowd intervened and said he was innocent, James was released. 

The brutalized bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith were hanged from trees in the courthouse yard and kept there for hours as a crowd of white men, women, and children grew by the thousands. Public spectacle lynchings, in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness and participate in pre-planned heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and/or burning of the victim, were common during this time. When the sheriff eventually cut the ropes off the corpses, the crowd rushed forward to take parts of the men's bodies as "souvenirs" before finally dispersing.

Enraged by the lynching, the NAACP traveled to Marion to investigate and later provided the U.S. attorney general with the names of 27 people believed to have participated. Though the lynching was photographed and spectators were clearly visible, local residents claimed not to recognize anyone pictured. Charges were finally brought against the leaders of the mob, but all-white juries acquitted them despite this overwhelming evidence. In contrast, James Cameron, the Black teenager who survived, was tried for murder, convicted of being an accessory, and served four years in prison. The alleged assault victim, Mary Ball, later testified that she had not been raped.

After his release, James Cameron founded four NAACP chapters in Indiana, authored hundreds of essays on civil rights and a 1982 memoir, and on Juneteenth 1988 opened America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to document the African American Struggle. “I can forgive but I can never forget,” he was quoted as saying. “That’s why I started this museum.” Mr. Cameron was pardoned by the state of Indiana in 1993 and died in 2006.

Again, not 18th century, but Vox made this video about the destruction of “Black Wall Street”, a black neighbourhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, and how even today the teaching of this incident, and the recognition of the victims is on pause, since they were not granted a proper grave.

I cried a little on the comment of the original photographs were used as postcards, but I got my favourite quote almost at the end of the video: “injustice+time, does not equal justice”. And Tulsa is working for justice re-opening the case, looking for the mass grave(s), and matching the dna to descendants for identification all the people who lost their lives during the Tulsa Race Massacree, even if that process take them years.

If you wanna know more (and we all should):

An eyewitness account you can read HERE.

The Washing Post made a story linking the horrible episode and the neighbourhood being gentrified nowadays.

You can check the original photos and documents from 1921 at The Tulsa Historical Society collection online.

On March 4, 1921, a white mob in Baker County, Georgia, that was searching the area to find and lynch a Black man named Zema Anthony came upon a Black man named William Anderson walking down the road and lynched him instead.

Two days before, allegations spread that Mr. Anthony had killed a white sheriff and shot another white man in the town of Newton, Georgia. Without investigation or trial, a mob of white men intent on lynching him gathered and began searching the county with no success. After more than a day of the fruitless manhunt, the heavily armed white mob confronted Mr. Anderson on Friday afternoon as he was simply walking down the road. Terrified, Mr. Anderson ran from the mob, and the white men quickly shot him to death.

Shortly after Mr. Anderson was killed, the body of Mr. Anthony’s aunt was reportedly found floating in a stream. At least one newspaper reported that the same lynch mob had likely killed the Black woman for allegedly harboring Mr. Anthony and helping him to avoid capture. The press coverage did not report her name.

During this era, lynching was a tool of racial terror used to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community through brutal violence that was often unpredictable and arbitrary. As in the case of Mr. Anderson, it was common during this era for a lynch mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense to also target members of the suspect’s family, neighbors, or any and all Black people unfortunate enough to be in the mob’s path. Many Black people were lynched not because they were accused of any crime, but simply because they were Black and present when the lynch mob could not locate its preferred victim.

In the days following the lynching of William Anderson, the members of the mob that killed him claimed that they mistook him for Zema Anthony. Though the mob had no legal authority to kill Mr. Anthony, Mr. Anthony’s aunt, Mr. Anderson, or anyone else, the white men were not arrested or prosecuted and faced no consequences for the deaths of Mr. Anderson or Mr. Anthony’s aunt.

Mr. Anthony was reportedly shot and killed by police in Maryland that July.

On June 23, 1903, a white mob of more than 4,000 people in Wilmington, Delaware, burned a Black man named George White to death before he could stand trial. Mr. White was arrested and accused of killing a young white woman. He adamantly denied any involvement in the crime but was denied the opportunity to defend himself in court. During the era of racial terror, many Black people were lynched after being accused of murder. The mere suggestion of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching. Here, despite Mr. White’s insistence that he was innocent, Wilmington residents were determined to lynch him without delay.  Within one week of Mr. White’s arrest, two lynch mobs attempted to abduct him from the workhouse where he was being held. White Wilmington residents talked openly about these lynching plans. In a sermon on June 21, local white pastor Robert Elwood urged white residents to exact swift public vengeance by lynching Mr. White. A lynch mob began forming the next day, and its members spent the next two days meticulously planning the public spectacle lynching that took place on June 23. Despite this public planning, in which mob members even shared their plans in advance with police officers, authorities charged with protecting Mr. White did not relocate him to a different jail or take any other measures to prevent the lynching. In the early morning hours of June 23, the lynch mob had grown to thousands and included people who had traveled from out of town to participate. The mob stormed the workhouse where Mr. White was being held and threatened to destroy every cell to get him unless authorities turned him over. Officers ultimately chose to protect the property of the jail rather than the life of a man they had a legal duty to protect; after leading the mob to his cell, the officers turned Mr. White over and “stood by to await the inevitable.”  The mob removed Mr. White from the jail and led him, chained, through a crowd of thousands to the pyre built outside the jail, where he was bound with rope and forced into the open flames. As Mr. White burned to death, the crowd of white men, women, and children there to participate in the lynching threw rocks at him and cheered.  After Mr. White was dead, members of the mob continued to shoot at his charred body, and lynching participants took pieces of his remains as “souvenirs”; a local white physician reportedly took Mr. White’s skull and right foot to display in the window of a local saloon. Though thousands of known residents were complicit in the lynching of George White, no one was ever held responsible. Mr. White is one of over 4,400 victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S., and more than 300 victims killed outside the states of the former Confederacy, between 1877 and 1950.  In 2019, the Delaware Social Justice Remembrance Coalition gathered with hundreds of community members to unveil a historical marker memorializing Mr. White. 

Beginning on July 29, 1910, a white mob of hundreds massacred Black residents in and around Slocum, a majority-Black community near Palestine, Texas. According to some estimates, the mob killed as many as 200 Black people in the span of just two days. Hundreds more fled the area in the aftermath of the massacre, forced to leave their homes, farms, and businesses behind.

Local white citizens formed the mob after a series of minor events they perceived to have violated racial hierarchy, including a Black worker being appointed to a position of authority on a nearby road construction project.

Armed members of the mob rode through Slocum and the surrounding area on horseback, firing at any and all Black citizens they encountered. They chased those fleeing into forests and marshes, shooting many in the back as they ran.

Most newspapers downplayed the extent of the violence and claimed that the white mobs only shot at Black citizens after being threatened. However, contemporaneous and subsequent investigations found that the massacre was wholly unprovoked. A local sheriff commented to the New York Times that white men “were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them.” He continued, “These Negroes have done no wrong that I can discover … They hunted the Negroes down like sheep.”

While at least 11 members of the mob were arrested and seven were indicted, no one was ever prosecuted or convicted for their role in the massacre.

Two weeks after the massacre, a group of Black ministers called on President William Howard Taft to intervene in Texas to “suppress lynching, murder and other forms of lawlessness” and “make human life more valuable and law more universally respected.” President Taft declined to take action, characterizing the widespread racial violence as a state matter rather than a federal one.

On July 25, 1946, a white mob lynched two Black couples near Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, in what has been called “the last mass lynching in America.” The couples killed were George W. and Mae Murray Dorsey and Dorothy and Roger Malcolm. Mrs. Malcolm was seven months pregnant. Mr. Dorsey, a World War II veteran who had served in the Pacific for five years, had been home for only nine months. On July 11, Roger Malcom was arrested after allegedly stabbing a white farmer named Barnette Hester during a fight. Two weeks later, J. Loy Harrison, the white landowner for whom the Malcoms and the Dorseys sharecropped, drove Mrs. Malcom and the Dorseys to the jail to post a $600 bond. On their way back to the farm, the car was stopped by a mob of 30 armed, unmasked white men who seized Mr. Malcom and Mr. Dorsey and tied them to a large oak tree. Mrs. Malcom recognized members of the mob, and when she called on them by name to spare her husband, the mob seized her and Mrs. Dorsey. Mr. Harrison watched as the white men shot all four people 60 times at close range. He later claimed he could not identify any members of the mob. The Moore’s Ford Bridge lynchings drew national attention, leading President Harry Truman to order a federal investigation and offer $12,500 for information leading to a conviction. A grand jury returned no indictments, and the perpetrators were never held accountable. The FBI recently reopened its investigation into the lynching, only to encounter continued silence and obstruction at the highest levels. In response to charges that he was withholding information, Walton County Superior Court Judge Marvin Sorrells, whose father worked for Walton County law enforcement in 1946, vowed that “until the last person of my daddy’s generation dies, no one will talk.” In recent years, the tragic lynching at the Moore's Ford Bridge has inspired varied activism including an annual memorial march and legal efforts to gain access to sealed grand jury transcripts—all important ways of confronting the truth of this deadly hate and terror. In 2020, a federal court ruled that the grand jury records must remain sealed.

Learn more about the era of racial terror lynchings in the U.S. through the reports Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror and Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans. 

On July 26, 1949, a mob of hundreds of white men tracked down and shot Ernest Thomas, a 26-year-old Black man, over 400 times while he was asleep under a tree in Madison County, Florida. Two days after being killed by a mob, a coroner's jury ruled that Mr. Thomas’s death was “justifiable homicide.”

Ernest Thomas was one of the so-called Groveland Four, three young Black men and one 16-year-old Black boy, who in 1949 were falsely accused of raping 17-year-old Norma Padgett and assaulting her husband in Groveland, Florida. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as "assault" or "sexual assault." The mere accusation of sexual impropriety regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

On July 16, 1949, two young Black men, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin, and one 16-year-old Black boy, Charles Greenlee, were captured in a manhunt on charges of assaulting Ms. Padgett. Within hours of the accusations, mobs of white residents burned the homes and property of Black families in Groveland. They were taken to Lake County Jail, where they were tortured by the police. The next day, a mob of at least a hundred white men formed outside of the jail and demanded that the three men be released to them. Unable to access their intended targets, the heavily armed white mob went on a rampage of racial terror in Groveland’s Black neighborhoods, where they shot at residents and set fire to their homes. By the hundreds, the Black community fled Groveland, fearing for their lives. Mr. Thomas had evaded capture by the mob and fled too. The mob pursued him for 10 days before they caught him and shot him to death while he was sleeping.

Despite being beaten into giving false confessions, and the State failing to present crucial evidence, such as a medical examination of Norma Padgett, the three survivors of this violence remained incarcerated and were wrongly convicted by an all-white jury. Charles Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison, while Mr. Irvin and Mr. Shepherd, both 22, were sentenced to death.

In 1951, after the work of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Mr. Irvin’s and Mr. Shepherd’s convictions, stating they were entitled to a new trial. Before their trials could take place, Sheriff McCall shot Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Irvin while they were handcuffed together in his custody and being transferred from prison. Mr. Shepherd died, but Mr. Irvin, who was shot and was denied an ambulance because he was Black, survived. Mr. Irvin was then convicted again by an all-white jury in his retrial, and was sentenced to death. Nearing his execution date, Mr. Irvin received a stay, before finally having his sentence commuted and being released from prison in 1968. He died a year later. Charles Greenlee remained on a life sentence and was released on parole in 1962. He died on April 18, 2012.

No charges were ever filed against any of the white law enforcement officers or members of the mob who were active participants in this racial terror. Sheriff McCall, who was infamous for using violence to enforce segregation and terrorize the Black community, claimed that he acted in self-defense in shooting Mr. Irvin and Mr. Shepherd even though they were handcuffed. Not only was he cleared of all charges, but he was re-elected as sheriff on five subsequent occasions.

All four of these men were posthumously pardoned by the Governor of Florida in 2019. Mr. Thomas was one of at least 14 documented racial terror lynchings in Madison County, Florida. Learn more about how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.