- Source: Lynchings in Elmore County, Alabama
Elmore County is a county located in the east-central portion of the U.S. state of Alabama. Throughout its history, there have been many lynchings in the county including on July 2, 1901, when a local mob lynched Robert (or perhaps Robin) White. In a strange turn of events, a local farmer, George White confessed in court to the killing and named five other local men as killers. Three men were convicted in the killing and sentenced to ten years in prison. On 9 June 1902, they were pardoned by Governor Jelks.
Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. In the Jim Crow American South, it was also used as an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle (often in the form of hanging) for maximum intimidation. Victims often professed their innocence right up to the public deaths in front of crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Lynching victims are never given their time in court to prove their innonence.
Lynching in Elmore County, Alabama
National memorial
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018. Featured among other things is the Memorial Corridor which displays 805 hanging steel rectangles, each representing the counties in the United States where a documented lynching took place and, for each county, the names of those lynched. The memorial hopes that communities, like Elmore County where these people were lynched, will take these slabs and install them in their own communities.
See also
List of lynching victims in the United States
List of Lynchings in 1922 Texas
Bibliography
Notes
References
"The terrible fate of a black brute". The Age-Herald. Birmingham, Jefferson, Alabama: Age-Herald. October 3, 1900. pp. 1–8. ISSN 2692-4099. OCLC 14948274. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
"Mob lynches two negroes for murder". New Britain Herald. New Britain, Hartford County, Connecticut: Herald Pub. Co. January 4, 1915. pp. 1–12. OCLC 173714341. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
Brown, Melissa (2022). "An era of terror: Montgomery family remembers father's lynching, legacy". Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
"Shot to death by citizens". The Indianapolis Journal. Indianapolis, Marion, Indiana: Douglass & Conner. February 21, 1894. pp. 1–8. ISSN 2332-0974. OCLC 8811247. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
Lyman, Brian (February 19, 2019). "The lynching of Robin White and the confession of George Howard". PUB. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
Robertson, Campbell (April 25, 2018). "A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It". The New York Times. Retrieved January 29, 2022.
"In Mob's hands: Five Negroes taken from an Alabama jail". The Topeka State Journal. Topeka, Shawnee, Kansas. June 17, 1898. pp. 1–8. ISSN 2377-7117. OCLC 9124974. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
University of Alabama (2022). "Rufus Swindle". University of Alabama. Retrieved March 27, 2022.