Lynching in Montgomery County
Hopkin atlas cover, 1879
The shared details of these three incidents make several things clear. First, these public murders were acts of racial terrorism, not accelerated “frontier-style” justice intended to compensate for an under-developed criminal justice system. Contemporary accounts show that while the lynchings were sparked by allegations of sexual assault or other violence, people were content to leave similar attacks apparently committed by white suspects to the workings of the official justice system. And in each of these three cases, the murdered men were left hanging by a major road until the next morning, a terrifying spectacle that served as a clear warning to the county’s substantial (more than one-third of the population) African American community.
It’s also clear that it is wrong to understand the lynchings as the aberrant acts of small bands of men from outlying towns. While relatively small groups of 30 or so may have been responsible for several of the lynchings, the aftermaths uniformly showed complicity throughout the white citizenry of Montgomery County. Law enforcement officers fired no shots to stop the mobs and made no arrests, and prosecutors and juries found no one to charge. Key officials (with the exception of one judge) remained publicly silent. A major newspaper in the county actually editorialized in defense of a lynching. The only known involvement by a member of the county’s clergy — a group that had both a strong basis and a weekly platform available from which to condemn public murder — was the publication of a strange manifesto by a clergyman that seems to have derailed what had threatened to become a serious investigation of the lynchers.
Although accounts of these incidents appeared in publications around the country at the time, they eventually were largely forgotten — or erased — from the community’s memory, rarely discussed and almost completely absent from books and other references on Montgomery County history.
That began to change with the national work of the Equal Justice Initiative and the publication of founder Bryan Stevenson’s book, “Just Mercy.” A group of activists formed the Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project to research and publicize the incidents and memorialize the victims, while the county historical society, Montgomery History, began ferreting out detailed accounts of the three incidents.
A third research effort, by writer-director Jay Mallin and researcher Linda Mallin Frydl, led to the making of this film.
Hopkin atlas cover, 1879
The shared details of these three incidents make several things clear. First, these public murders were acts of racial terrorism, not accelerated “frontier-style” justice intended to compensate for an under-developed criminal justice system. Contemporary accounts show that while the lynchings were sparked by allegations of sexual assault or other violence, people were content to leave similar attacks apparently committed by white suspects to the workings of the official justice system. And in each of these three cases, the murdered men were left hanging by a major road until the next morning, a terrifying spectacle that served as a clear warning to the county’s substantial (more than one-third of the population) African American community.
It’s also clear that it is wrong to understand the lynchings as the aberrant acts of small bands of men from outlying towns. While relatively small groups of 30 or so may have been responsible for several of the lynchings, the aftermaths uniformly showed complicity throughout the white citizenry of Montgomery County. Law enforcement officers fired no shots to stop the mobs and made no arrests, and prosecutors and juries found no one to charge. Key officials (with the exception of one judge) remained publicly silent. A major newspaper in the county actually editorialized in defense of a lynching. The only known involvement by a member of the county’s clergy — a group that had both a strong basis and a weekly platform available from which to condemn public murder — was the publication of a strange manifesto by a clergyman that seems to have derailed what had threatened to become a serious investigation of the lynchers.
Although accounts of these incidents appeared in publications around the country at the time, they eventually were largely forgotten — or erased — from the community’s memory, rarely discussed and almost completely absent from books and other references on Montgomery County history.
That began to change with the national work of the Equal Justice Initiative and the publication of founder Bryan Stevenson’s book, “Just Mercy.” A group of activists formed the Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project to research and publicize the incidents and memorialize the victims, while the county historical society, Montgomery History, began ferreting out detailed accounts of the three incidents.
A third research effort, by writer-director Jay Mallin and researcher Linda Mallin Frydl, led to the making of this film.