On September 18, 1921, 16-year-old Eugene Daniel was lynched for walking into a white girl's bedroom.
Lynching
On Friday, September 16, 1921, five 5 miles (8.0 km) east of Pittsboro, North Carolina, black 16-year-old Eugene Daniel wanted to borrow some twine. He walked into a neighbor′s house and startled a white girl, Gertrude, the daughter of homeowner Walter Stone.[1] Eugene Daniel quickly ran away but on Saturday, September 17, 1921, a bloodhound was acquired from Raeford, North Carolina. The hound tracked Daniel down and he was arrested. That night a mob formed and over-powered jailer W.H. Taylor and seized him from the jail where he was being held. Near the Moore Springs Bridge on the old Raleigh road, he was lynched using an auto chain and the body was riddled with bullets.[2][1] The dangling body became a tourist attraction for white residents and on Monday, September 19, 1921, 1,000 people trekked to see it.
Two years earlier there were several incidents of civil unrest in the so-called
Chicago Race Riot and Washington D.C. race riot which killed 38 and 39 people respectively. Both had many more non-fatal injuries and extensive property damage reaching into the millions of dollars.[3]
National memorial
Memorial Corridor, National Memorial for Peace and Justice
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018, in a setting of 6 acres (2.4 ha). Featured among other things, is a sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo
of a mother with a chain around her neck and an infant in her arms. On a hill overlooking the sculpture 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. At the memorial there are six lynching victims in Chatham County between the years 1885 and 1921:
Harriet Finch, Jerry Finch, Lee Tyson, John Pattishall - September 30, 1885, the group was lynched for allegedly being axe murderers. Harriet Finch is 1 of only 4 lynchings of women to occur in North Carolina.
Henry Jones - January 12, 1899, Jones was lynched after being accused of raping and murdering Nancy Welch/Welsh, a white widow in Chatham County in January 1899.
