Extant biographical information about Henry Colbert has not been found to date. Newspaper articles identified him as an African American man who worked as a farmhand and lived in Kentucky in 1883. Despite their racial biases, newspaper accounts of the preceding incident agreed on several facts. The Hickman Courier covered the lynching and proceeding trial. […]
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 mother, was a 21-year-old housekeeper. William Butcher was their only […]
Elijah Drake, Henry Smith, and James Stewart were three young men who resided in Madrid Bend, Fulton County, Kentucky. Fulton County is located in western Kentucky, next to the Mississippi River and on the borders of Mississippi and Tennessee. James Stewart was born in February 1875 in Tennessee and was 27 years old at the […]
Bill Dooley was an African American man who lived in the outskirts of Fulton, Kentucky (a town in southwestern Kentucky bordering Tennessee) with his wife and children. He was employed as a railroad section hand by the Illinois Central Railroad. News reports after his death referred to Dooley as “a peaceable, inoffensive man.” Nothing else […]
Joe Bumpus was a Black man born in September of 1869 in Tennessee. He eventually moved to Kentucky, and married a woman named Addie in 1898. She had a daughter named Henrietta who was born before they married, but Bumpus claimed her as his stepdaughter in the 1900 Census. At that time, his stepbrother Turner […]
Lawrence Dempsey was born in 1877 in Fulton County, Kentucky. There is no available census data showing his birth month or date, or the name of his parents. Dempsey first appeared in the newspapers in Fulton County, Kentucky. The Illinois Central Railroad Company had several railroads going through Western and Central Kentucky, specifically, Fulton County. […]
