On October 9, 1896, James Anderson was lynched by a mob following his arrest by police as a suspect in the death of Randolph Falls, a white farmer from the small town of Toadvine, Alabama. Mr. Anderson and another black man, Henry Cyat, were accused of attacking and robbing Mr. Falls. Mr. Anderson did not
Henry Smith was lynched on Sunday, November 16, 1890, near Hillman, a community about eight miles outside of Birmingham. He had been arrested on an assault charge of a white woman, but insisted he was innocent. Nothing is reported about Mr. Smith’s age, family, or occupation. Marshal Anderson of Blocton arrested Mr. Smith around 6
Tom Redmond was murdered in June 1890 in the aftermath of an altercation between a group of white men and a group of black men that left five others wounded, according to newspaper accounts. For Mr. Redmond’s age, his family, his occupation or his life until this point, no records have been found. Only one
John Steele was an African American married man with four children who worked in Ensley City. No other records could be found on his life or family. On the morning of September 27, 1889, Deputy Sheriff E. King Vann took the Ensley City train to Walker Station to execute a warrant for John Steele, placed
On the morning of January 15, 1889, George Meadows, a young African-American man, would find himself in the crosshairs of a violent moment that he would be unable to avoid. Little is known about his life. Did he have friends? A wife? People who would miss him if he vanished from the face of the
Hardy Posey was the son of Irvine and Rose Posey. He had five siblings. The family lived in Jonesboro in Jefferson County. Mr. Posey grew up with childhood trauma from racial terror violence. According to a newspaper clipping from the Montgomery Advertiser, Wesley Posey’s father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1871. At
Jeff Curry, an African-American cobbler, was lynched by a mob on March 18, 1888, at the Blue Creek Mines just outside Birmingham. It was a Sunday evening when Curry met with a Mr. Powell and his son, apparently discussing a job he had done for them. It was reported that a dispute broke out and
Monroe Johnson was an African-American man who worked on the construction of the Columbus & Western Railway. He lived in Jefferson County at Dunnavant’s Camp, a workers’ camp near Leeds. State records show that he had previously served six months in a mining camp as a convict laborer under the Jim Crow convict-lease system. There
On April 21, 1886, a tragic and familiar demonstration of the prevalence of race-based lynching in Jefferson County unfolded near Pratt Mines outside of Birmingham. An African-American man named Tom Collins was accused of assaulting the wife of William Gould, a farmer living in the area. Though Mr. Collins’s alleged attack of Mrs. Gould was
We know that William Smith was married but little else about his life except that his death was a result of a violent altercation with an officer of the law. News of this altercation, reported in The Citizen-Examiner in November 1912, described Mr. Smith as a “desperado,” criminal and the like. On November 1, 1912,
