Between the summer of 1869 and the fall of 1870 — barely fifteen months — mobs in Madison County, Kentucky killed at least seven Black people. The county had a courthouse at Richmond, a college at Berea founded on the principle of racial equality, and, for that stretch, a Klan that rode more or less as it pleased.
The killings ran in a tight arc of geography and time. In July 1869, Charles Handerson was shot — and his wife killed with him. That October, George Rose was murdered near Kirkville. On November 4, a mob hanged Frank Searcy at Richmond. On December 12, a band of “unknown men” walked into the jail at Richmond, took two Black prisoners, hanged one and whipped the other. The next February they hanged a man named Sims near Kingston, and hanged and whipped Douglass Rodes in the same neighborhood. By September 1870 they had hanged Oliver Williams, and along the way shot Howard Gilbert. [1871 Memorial of the Colored Citizens of Frankfort, incidents in Madison County; Colored Conventions Project.]
Eight households, by a conservative count, in one county, in a little over a year.
The county kept its own
What is remarkable is not only that this happened, but that we can still read about it in the white newspapers — which generally preferred not to dwell on such things. The Kentucky Gazette in Lexington, no friend of Reconstruction, reported the December jail raid almost in passing: “Ku Klux in Madison. Two negroes who were [held] at Richmond were taken by unknown men, supposed” to be Klan. [Kentucky Gazette, Dec. 15, 1869.] Two months later it noted, just as flatly, that “the Ku-Klux in Madison… hung a man named Sims who lived near” Kingston. [Kentucky Gazette, Feb. 12, 1870.] By that February the paper was running a grim weekly tally — “From the Jail to the Tree. Two Victims in one Week” — and observing that the Klan was “dispatch[ing] their victims” so steadily “there will be few left in a short time, for the courts of Justice to administer upon.” [Kentucky Gazette, Feb. 23, 1870.]…