Lynching in America / Lynching of African Americans in Rowan County

Lynching in America, also, Lynching of African Americans in Rowan County. Community Remembrance Project. Lynching in America. Racial terror lynching claimed the lives of thousands of African Americans and created a legacy of injustice that can still be felt today. After slavery ended, many white people remained committed to racial hierarchy and used lethal violence and terror against Black communities to maintain a racial, economic and social order that oppressed and marginalized Black people. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of subordination directed at Black people and was frequently tolerated or even supported by law enforcement and elected officials. White mobs were usually permitted to engage in brutal violence with impunity. Many Black people were pulled out of jails or given over to mobs by law enforcement officials who were legally required to protect them. Terror lynchings often included burnings and mutilation, sometimes in front of crowds numbering in the thousands. Many of the victims of these acts of violence were not recorded and remain unknown, but over 120 lynchings have been documented in North Carolina. On January 15, 2019. Salisbury's City Council formally adopted a Resolution of Reconciliation, committing the city to enacting policies and practices to guarantee equity and justice as well as the publication of an annual report on the city's efforts to eliminate inequity. Memorializing this history is a critical step in advancing the continuing struggle for equality and dismantling systemic inequities., Lynching of African Americans in Rowan County. On June 11, 1902, a white mob of more than fifty men abducted two African American children, ages 13 and 11, named Harrison and James Gillespie from the Rowan County jail and lynched them in front of a crowd of over 400 people. The two boys had been arrested and accused of murder. The white mob hanged them and shot their bodies repeatedly. Four years later, on August 6, 1906, two African American men, Jack Dillingham and Nease Gillespie, and Mr. Gillespie's teenage son, John Gillespie, were abducted from the Rowan County jail in Salisbury and lynched by a white mob of more than two thousand people. Without any evidence of their guilt, they were accused of killing four members of a white family in their home in Unity Township in July 1906, primarily because they worked for the white homeowner. More than two decades later, Laura Wood, a 59-year-old African American woman, who was a farmer, wife, and mother, was lynched on February 11, 1930 in Barber. Mrs. Wood had been accused of stealing food from her white employer. After her family noticed she was missing, her body was found not far from her home hanged from a tree with an iron chain. During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt while lynching and other acts of racial terror denied them equal justice under the law. Almost all of the mob members escaped punishment for these acts of lynching.