William Thacker was a white lynching victim, which accounts for the detailed documentary evidence of his life and death. Thacker was born on May 5th, 1859 in Lawrence, Kentucky. He was raised by Nathaniel and Lucrecia Thacker and was the eldest of 4 children. In
Walter Merrick was one of approximately twenty white men lynched in Kentucky between 1880 and 1950. Merrick’s race and the unusual circumstances of the lynching accounts for the abundance of official evidence detailing Merrick’s life and homicide. Merrick was born in March 1891 in Caldwell
The family of William Butcher appears in the 1880s U.S. Census. Butcher’s mother and father were African Americans born in Tennessee around 1860. They were likely enslaved. In the 1880 Census, John Butcher, William’s father, was listed as a 25-year-old farmworker and Alice Butcher, William’s
