The Lynching of Benjamin Thomas, August 8, 1899

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The Lynching of Benjamin Thomas, August 8, 1899

Alexandria Community Remembrance Project

Report by the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project Research Committee, July 2020

Warning: The following article contains graphic descriptions of the lynching of a Black teenager in 1899.

Introduction

Around midnight on August 8, 1899, a 16-year-old African American teenager named Benjamin Thomas was lynched in Alexandria, Virginia. A white mob comprised of Alexandria citizens attacked the city jail on St. Asaph Street, and Benjamin Thomas was dragged half a mile to the southwest corner of King and Fairfax streets, opposite Market Square:

He was dragged, with a rope around his neck, three squares over cobble stones and over the roughest streets of that rough old town, surrounded by a mob of 2,000 whites, who pelted him with stones, brickbats, pieces of iron, pocket knives, and sent bullets through his body for every inch of that distance.1

Benjamin Thomas was hanged from a lamppost and the medical doctor who testified at the coroner’s inquest stated that he died from a bullet wound to the heart.2

Two years before, on April 23, 1897, another African American teenager, Joseph McCoy, was lynched in Alexandria. A white mob attacked the city’s police station and pulled McCoy from his cell, dragged him with a rope around his neck, and then hanged him on the corner of Cameron and Lee Streets, only three blocks from where Benjamin Thomas would be murdered.3

Some things had changed in Alexandria since 1897.4 A different mayor and governor were in office, and members of the Alexandria Light Infantry had left to fight in the Spanish American War. However, there are striking commonalities between these two lynchings. They illustrate a much larger and wider history of systemic racism, injustice, and violence that persists in Alexandria, and America, to the present day.

This narrative highlights the inconsistencies, biases, sensationalism, and falsehoods in official statements and the white press’ reporting about the lynching. In both Alexandria lynchings, the white authorities were deliberately complicit in their refusal to name and bring to justice members of the white mob. In the case of Benjamin Thomas, the officers defending the jail were not prepared to do everything in their power to protect the prisoner. In fact, city officials and law enforcement officers obstructed and punished members of the Black community who were willing to stand up to white violence.

1 Cleveland Gazette (Cleveland, OH.), August 26, 1899, page 1. The Richmond Planet says the mob was comprised of “thousands,” Richmond Planet (Richmond, VA), August 12, 1899, page 2.
2 Alexandria Gazette, August 9, 1899, page 3.
3 Alexandria Gazette, August 8, 1899, page 3.
4 In the late 1890s Alexandria was a city of some 14,500 persons; 31% or about 4,500 were African American. https://www.academia.edu/25968918/The_African_American_Housing_Crisis_in_Alexandria_Virginia_1930s1960s, page 34.

{snip. This goes on for 32 pages.}

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. Opinion: Commentary: Stop To Remember Benjamin Thomas

Opinion: Commentary: Stop To Remember Benjamin Thomas

The teenager was lynched across from Market Square on Aug. 8, 1899.

By Audrey Davis Monday, August 9, 2021

On Sunday, Aug. 8 at Market Square, Alexandria citizens will stop and remember Benjamin Thomas who was lynched across the street from the plaza on that date in 1899. He was a Black teenager who was accused of a crime but denied his right to a fair trial. Just two years earlier, on April 23, 1897, Joseph McCoy, another young Black man, was lynched a few blocks away. Both lynching sites were close to the location of today’s City Hall.

Market Square, in the heart of Old Town Alexandria, stands for everything that we are proud of in our city. Market Square is where we welcome new citizens and honor the victims of the Holocaust and Sept. 11. It is where we welcome political leaders, enjoy festivals, art shows, and our famous farmer’s market. Every day at Market Square you can see the diversity that makes Alexandria a vibrant place to live and work.

Now imagine being African American living in Alexandria before the turn of the century ... You would recognize the u-shaped building known as City Hall — built in 1872 after a fire gutted the original building in 1871. It was still the hub of the city. You might have lived in one of the historic Black enclaves like Hayti, the Bottoms, the Berg, or Uptown. You and your family probably worshipped at one of Alexandria’s historic Black churches, which functioned as spiritual and social refuges, places where you could speak freely.

As an African American, your life was spent navigating a system with laws that always changed for people of color. As a hub of the domestic slave trade that sentenced thousands of African American men, women, and children to a lifetime of bondage and cruelty, this city was complicit in the treatment of Black people as property whose humanity was never considered. This did not change with the end of the Civil War. As an African American, you had little recourse if you had to challenge the white establishment. The threat of violence to you or your family was always there. While Alexandria’s documented lynchings were in 1897 and 1899, incidents of racially based hate crimes occurred throughout Virginia from shortly after the arrival of the first Africans to the present day. Today, we fight to end that legacy.

{snip}

[Thomas Hurt]

2. The following year, the white mob boarded a train near Limon, Colorado...

they took Preston Porter off it, buried a length of rail in the ground and burned him at the stake. He had been accused of killing a white girl and had not had a trial. He had been tortured in Denver until he confessed.

Between 200 and 300 white people from the area watched. The media tied into the telegraph to send updates.

The coroner's inquest later determined he died by causes unknown.

https://www.coloradolynchingmemorial.org/preston-porter-jr

[Dustlawyer]

3. Check out the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco in Wikipedia.

I cannot get the link I tried to place to work.

For sheer horror and brutality this is the one to learn about. I used to wonder how people could have been that cruel and sick until the last few years of Trump. Now I am terminally cynical about our so called “civilization.”

[The Jungle 1]

4. What a lynching really was

Mostly it was a prolonged period of torture followed by death. Collecting body parts was very popular. Change purses and such! Quite fashionable.
Thousands of men and women.

WWII veterans were also lynched!!!!!!!!!

This is some of the American history the right does not want us to teach. I know I was never taught this history in school.

Yet these ignorant fucks still want to celebrate the civil war they lost. Do keep in mind we will kick your ignorant asses again!!!!
Bring it, I am tired of the southern cold war.

Rantings from a pissed old man.