This August marks 100 years since the lynching of Raymond Byrd, a 31-year-old Black farmer accused of sexually assaulting a young white girl in Wytheville.
A mob of 50 masked men broke into the cell, beat Byrd within an inch of death before they shot him, tied his body to the back of a car and drove to the site of the alleged crime, where they hung his battered corpse from a tree.
The attack became one of the most notorious lynchings in Virginia, where approximately 100 lynchings have been documented.
A recently launched program through the Virginia Department of Historic Resources seeks to rectify the fact that this history has gone unrecognized for so long.
In the 2025-2026 budget, the General Assembly allocated $76,008 to the agency to cover the administrative and production costs of 15 new historical highway markers at or near the sites of lynchings, which occurred across the commonwealth mostly from 1880 to 1927. The budget item was sponsored by Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun County.
“Lynching not only claimed lives but also left a long-lasting legacy of racial trauma and social division,” Reid said in an email. “The lack of accountability and justice for these crimes fostered a climate of fear and oppression. Acknowledging these events through historical markers can serve as a step toward healing and reconciliation.”
Currently, only 12 of the state’s identified lynching sites hold markers detailing the crimes that taint the soil. Some state lawmakers, historians and community leaders view the new DHR program as a chance to acknowledge this oft-overlooked piece of history.
“It’s really important, in particular this time right now where we’re trying to erase history. These kinds of programs really are very important to make sure that this history is not forgotten, and that actually people are aware of it,” said Gianluca De Fazio, a professor of justice studies at James Madison University. “It’s something that really can make a difference in terms of how we think about our public space — how we think, in terms of our collective memory, of who gets remembered, who gets forgotten.”
Working with a handful of his senior students to comb through historical newspapers, court records and oral histories in 2017, De Fazio assembled a database to detail and map out all known lynchings in Virginia. According to his “Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia” website, 95 Black men and one woman were lynched in Virginia. The comprehensive database is the recommended starting point for any potential applicants to the DHR program.
Nomination forms are open on the department’s website and will be considered on a rolling basis by the Board of Historic Resources, which convenes quarterly to review new proposals for historic sites and markers. Applications will require extensive documentation from primary and secondary sources and should demonstrate support from local governments and community groups. Additionally, the program criteria encourage applicants to identify and include any known descendants of lynching victims in the process.
With funding for only 15 signs, the DHR will only consider one nomination per locality in order to “promote the distribution of these markers across Virginia’s various regions,” according to the nomination form. Historical highway markers typically cost around $3,000.
Some localities saw multiple lynchings, such as Clifton Forge with four documented lynchings or Tazewell County with nine, the most of any county in the state.
Highway marker program manager Jennifer Loux said her department will consider, on a case-by-case basis, whether signs would include mention of other nearby lynchings.
“It would be possible, but not mandatory, for other lynchings that took place in a locality to be mentioned on a marker that focuses on one of them,” said Loux in an email. “A limiting factor will be the space available on the marker.”
Historical highway markers are limited to 700 characters, or approximately 150 words. The DHR has already approved highway historical markers for seven lynching sites:
- Joseph Holmes, May 3, 1869, Charlotte County
- Charlotte Harris, March 6, 1878, Harrisonburg
- Isaac Brandon, April 6, 1892, Charles City County
- Thomas Washington, March 23, 1896, Essex County
- Charles Craven, July 31, 1902, Leesburg
- James Horace Carter, October 12, 1923, King and Queen County
- Leonard Woods, November 30, 1927, Wise County
Four other lynching locations are memorialized through the efforts of the Equal Justice Initiative, the national, nonprofit legal group founded by civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson:
- Robert Clark, June 13, 1891, Bristol
- John Henry James, July 12, 1898, Albemarle County
- Wiley Gynn, June 5, 1902, Wise County
- Dave Hurst, November 14, 1920, Wise County
Additionally, in 2020, the town of Wytheville collaborated with local historian John Johnson to fundraise and erect its own marker for Raymond Byrd.
This leaves more than 80 known lynching sites unmarked. De Fazio says this figure is “a vast undercount of the real number,” given the lack of historical documentation of most crimes against Black victims.
Lynchings in Southwest Virginia
Due to its mountainous terrain, Southwest Virginia was not supportive of the large-scale tobacco plantations found in the eastern part of the state, which kept the region’s Black population low for a time.
“Southwest Virginia is a really odd case, because that will be an area where historians and scientists would not expect a high number of lynchings, because lynchings are very often a legacy of slavery and a plantation economy,” said De Fazio.
Yet, more than half of the state’s total known lynchings took place in its Southwest and Southside regions.
Nine lynchings have been documented in Tazewell County; four took place in Alleghany County; Wythe, Russell, Halifax and Wise counties each had three lynchings; Scott, Smyth, Bland, Henry, Pittsylvania, Roanoke and Campbell counties each had at least one documented lynching, as did the cities of Bristol, Danville, Lexington and Roanoke.
The lynching of Thomas Smith in the city of Roanoke led to the city’s race riot in 1893. Smith was imprisoned after being accused of assault and robbery of a wealthy, white woman when a mob of 4,000 formed around the city jail. The local militia was summoned and eventually fired into the crowd as people attempted to break into the jailhouse and capture Smith. Nine white residents were killed and 34 more wounded, making it one of the few lynchings where more whites than Blacks were killed.
With a handful of exceptions, nearly all of these took place towards the end of the 1800s, spilling into the first couple of decades of the 1900s.
So, how did this seemingly bucolic, majority-white area become embroiled in such racial violence? Industrialization sparked the dormant, yet ever-present, fuse of racism.
The opening of Pocahontas Mine No. 1 in Tazewell County in 1882 ushered in the boom of Virginia’s coal industry. Thousands of job seekers, including African Americans, flooded the region. This economic growth, along with the expansion of three major railroads in the 1890s, led to massive population increases across Southwest Virginia.
“You have an influx of immigrants and African American workers coming and that creates the kind of labor conflict that makes lynching more likely to happen,” De Fazio said.
He also pointed out that preexisting racial tensions were exacerbated by Jim Crow laws, the economic downturn of 1893 and theories of scientific racism — a pseudoscience trending in the U.S. around the mid-19th century that asserted a biological hierarchy of humanity, an order that established white Euro-Americans at the top and non-white races as inferior.
When all of these factors intersected in localities, it only took a small infraction from the Black community — or, more often, a false accusation — to push “the white men to take action outside of the law and go ahead and execute sentence,” said Tom Costa, a retired history professor at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.
Practically every lynching victim in Virginia was already in the custody of law enforcement when they were captured, tortured and killed by white residents.
“That really tells you how lynching is not a matter of getting rid of Black criminals, but really it’s a means to implement racial terror,” De Fazio said. “You’re sending a message to the larger society, saying, ‘Regardless of what the law says, we’re going to make sure that everybody that we think is a potential threat can be eliminated at our will, knowing full well, there’s going to be no consequences for the lynchers.’ Almost every single person, every single lynching, had no legal consequences for the lyncher.”
Take the events of winter 1893 in Tazewell County. Within the span of three days, five Black men were hunted down and lynched, accused of murdering two white men.
Alexander Ratcliff and Benjamin Shortridge were white merchants from nearby Buchanan County who made their way to the town of Richlands in Tazewell County on Jan. 30, 1893. Having conducted their business, the pair visited a saloon before their departure, “whence they were followed by four negroes,” according to the Clinch Valley News.
“In a very short space of time the two men were found lying upon the railroad track, their heads beaten almost to a jelly by club and hatchet,” reads the article. “The scene presented resembled a slaughter place. The banks of the cut to the top and the road bed torn up and covered with blood.”
The bloodbath had only just begun. Jerry Brown, a Black man “having a bad reputation,” was arrested and interrogated by law enforcement. Whether under duress or of his own will, Brown confessed to the murders and implicated three accomplices: Spencer Branch, John Johnson and Sam Ellerson. Branch and Johnson soon joined Brown behind bars, but Ellerson managed to escape custody, albeit temporarily.
That evening, Jan. 31, Brown was the first to meet his fate. “An angry mob of about three hundred people collected around the jail and finally overpowered the authorities and took Jerry Brown from them,” reported the Clinch Valley News. He was taken to the river that forks through the town and lynched, his body left hanging from an oak tree.
The mob returned to the jail for Branch and Johnson to find that the prisoners had been sent to the neighboring town of Cedar Bluff for their protection. Such a precaution was uncommon for white authorities to take on behalf of African Americans in a time when “very often, the jailers would just give them out to these lynch mobs,” De Fazio said. It only briefly delayed the inevitable.
Having received word that Ellerson was hiding out a few miles south of Richlands, a faction of the vigilante horde went to capture him while hundreds of others boarded the train to Cedar Bluff, where they tracked down the remaining two. All three were taken back to the riverbank where a crowd of 500 men, women and children watched as they were hanged alongside Brown from the oak tree.
“The lynching took place between the hours of one and two p.m. and was very orderly, there being no shooting or fighting, and not one of the crowd wore masks,” according to a Roanoke Times article.
Before he was killed, Johnson confessed to another unsolved crime: the murder of James Hunt, a white man, in September 1891. And he pointed the finger at four other men, two of whom were Black. By the following day, Sam Blow was also taken from the county jail and “was hanged to an apple tree near the mouth of Indian creek,” while unconfirmed accounts reported that Sam Burns was also lynched.
No harm befell the white accomplices, nor the scores of white assailants and witnesses to the lynchings.
Remembrance
No markers currently stand in Tazewell County as a physical testament of this violence.
A third-generation Tazewell native, Susie Green, recalls stories passed down in her family, ones infused with a sense of fear and trauma hailing from that era of racial terror. Green’s mother, Thedia Harris, died in June 2025 at the age of 101. She was born in 1923, one of eight siblings. While Harris wasn’t alive to witness the county’s last lynching in 1900 or the killing spree of 1893, she long believed that her mother did.
“[My mother] would say that when she was young, her mom would always call them in early and she would be upset if they didn’t come when she called them after dark,” said Green. “Her mom would get so upset that she thinks that she may have witnessed some hangings and she always feared that would come to [her children].”
Virginia’s last recorded lynching victim was 35-year-old Leonard Woods, who was hanged, shot and burned by a mob of 400 in Pound Gap in Wise County on Nov. 30, 1927. A few months later, Gov. Harry Byrd signed the Virginia Anti-Lynching Law of 1928, the first of its kind in the U.S. to declare lynching as a “specific state offense.” Violators of this law would be prosecuted by the state attorney general, and municipalities where the crime occurred would be subject to paying a $2,500 settlement to the victim’s family.
Some historians consider the measure an “empty-letter law,” given that no white perpetrator was ever prosecuted under the statute. Costa, however, says he tries to look on the positive side — “what little bit of positivity there is” — as the law seemed to have put an end to the “public spectacle lynchings” where white spectators and mobs felt immune from repercussions.
In Tazewell County, Green has played a critical role in remembering this era. She assisted in the creation of a mural depicting influential Black Tazewell residents in 2022. And, the year prior, she was largely responsible for the restoration of Maple Hill Cemetery, securing a DHR highway marker for the final resting place of approximately 300 African Americans.
Initially, Green said she had no plans to apply for the DHR program, but added, “I relish the idea of younger people getting involved; this is an excellent time for them.” After learning that the financial burden of the endeavor would be covered by the state, she began to change her mind.
“I’m passionate about it, and now that you don’t have to fund them … just a matter of getting the information together and submitting it,” she said. “I’m considering it. I can do it, I know I can do it. Maybe that is something I can do and work with somebody on or get a committee together.”
She said she planned to get a group together to discuss the idea in the coming weeks.