https://doi.org/10.21061/RemembranceofRacialViolence
Chloe Allen and Tom Costa1
Introduction
Sometime in October 2022, thieves stole a memorial marker on a remote stretch of highway between Norton and Appalachia, VA. The sign, dedicated less than a month earlier, memorialized the 1920 lynching of David Hurst, a Black coal miner accused of breaking into a white woman’s home and assaulting her. It and two other roadside markers were the results of a four-year project to inform and educate the community about the three lynchings that occurred in Wise County, VA. The signs were the products of the Wise County/City of Norton Community Remembrance Coalition, a broad-based group of local educators and students, religious leaders and community advocates.
Lynching, a brutal form of racial terror, has left deep scars in American history. In Wise County, Virginia, the legacy of such violence is both haunting and instructive. This essay explores three specific lynchings that occurred in the region, highlighting the local conditions, class dynamics, and political contexts that made these events both unique and reflective of broader patterns of racial violence. By engaging with historical scholarship and contemporaneous reports, this essay aims to shed light on the efforts necessary to document and memorialize these atrocities, emphasizing the ongoing struggle against erasure and the resilience of community organizers.
Lynching in Virginia and Wise County
Lynching, a crucial part of white southerners’ efforts to limit and control the lives of African Americans following the Civil War, was the extra-judicial punishment meted out to Black people alleged to have violated community racial codes. Violations ranged from minor things such as failing to exhibit “proper” deference in the presence of whites to more serious crimes of assault, particularly against white women. In particular, Black men alleged to have committed such offenses were summarily executed in public spectacles often involving brutal tortures. These acts were primarily public events, attended by hundreds if not thousands of people. As such, they “held a singular psychological force, generating a level of fear and horror that overwhelmed all other forms of violence,” and were intended to terrorize and traumatize entire communities and to reinforce white supremacy (Wood, 2009).
Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,400 documented lynchings occurred across the United States, mostly (but not exclusively) in the South. While it is impossible to determine the exact number, about 75-85 lynchings occurred in Virginia (Virginia Humanities, EJI). In the 1890s, during the height of racial violence against Black people, 32 lynchings happened in Virginia alone (DeFazio, Racial Terror).
Among Southern states, Virginia had the fewest lynchings; by contrast Georgia and Mississippi each had nearly 500. Contemporary apologists attributed the small number of lynchings to the idea that white and Black Virginians were a “better class” of people than denizens of the Deep South, but historians assert that labor relations and economic factors were more significant explanations for the relatively low numbers (Brundage, 1993). The state’s economy featured smaller farms growing more crops instead of large-scale cotton agriculture that persisted in the Deep South after the Civil War. Virginia’s farming featured less sharecropping, and more Black farmers possessed their own small plots of land. Regardless of the explanations for the frequency of lynchings in the state, of all its geographic regions, Southwest Virginia— particularly the counties of Tazewell, Russell, and Wise—experienced a disproportionate number of lynchings. According to one study, twenty-eight of the total number of lynchings in Virginia occurred in the Southwestern part of the state, the area west of Roanoke (Virginia Humanities, DeFazio, Racial Terror, Brundage (1993).
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Southwest Virginia experienced rapid change as timbering and coal mining expanded into the region, bringing economic and demographic change. Wise County saw an influx of laborers, primarily young, unmarried men to work in the coal mines. While most of these newcomers were white, the smaller proportion of Black immigrants had a disproportionate effect in an area where an exceedingly small Black population lived. These changes resulted in social tensions and outbreaks of racial violence (Brundage, 1993).
There were three lynchings in Wise County: Wiley Gynn (or Gwynn) in 1902, Dave Hurst in 1920, and Leonard Woods in 1927. Each of the three exhibited many of the general characteristics that marked lynchings elsewhere: they were public events; they were attempts to enforce racial community codes outside the legal system; two of the lynchings involved alleged crimes against white females; each lynching featured torture and public display of the dead bodies; and, with the important exception of the Hurst killing, none of the white perpetrators were prosecuted.
The Wise County lynchings, however, also exhibited characteristics beyond the general pattern. They all happened after the 1890s, when lynchings in Virginia had begun to decline. Wiley Gynn’s lynching happened during a period of heightened racial tension locally, as another Black man from the same area had been jailed for murdering a white man. The delay in carrying out his execution may have contributed to the precipitous action of the mob when Gynn was arrested. In most lynchings, local authorities stood by while the mob acted; in Gynn’s case, however, the Commonwealth’s Attorney rushed to the scene and attempted to stop the lynching. The killing of Hurst might have been prevented if officials had received more timely notice of the plan; two weeks later the county sheriff successfully prevented the lynching of a Black man named Sydney Williams. The final recorded lynching in Wise occurred on the Virginia-Kentucky border and attracted such publicity that Virginia Governor Harry Byrd signed the first state anti-lynching into law the following year—although the law was largely symbolic.
The lynchings in Wise County thus exhibit specific local characteristics that deviate from the general pattern. The area had undergone tremendous shifts in population as the timber and coal boom attracted a large influx of people from outside the region. Each of the three victims came from elsewhere and represented the significant demographic changes to the region: Wiley Gynn came from North Carolina, Dave Hurst was Alabama born, and Leonard Woods hailed from Pittsburgh.
Wiley Gynn was a 28-year-old Black man in 1902, married with a young son. Although listed in some accounts as a miner, he and his wife also operated a boarding house in Bondtown, a neighborhood just north of Coeburn, VA. Seven of the eight Black laborers living there were from outside the region. On June 6, Gynn was accused of molesting a 12-year-old girl, Alice Green, near Tom’s Creek, a mining community north of Bondtown. Newspaper accounts of the incident varied. Initially, Gynn was said to have “attempted to commit an assault.” But a week later, the local Big Stone Gap Post printed a more inflammatory account: Gynn had been arrested “For Attempted Rape On a Twelve Year Old White Girl” (Alexandria Gazette, June 7, 1902; Big Stone Gap Post, June 12, 1902).
The girl’s cries attracted a group of men who apprehended Gynn and secured him in the Bondtown lockup. Wise Commonwealth Attorney W. G. Dotson arrived to take Gynn to the county jail, but by then a white mob had gathered, some accounts say numbering upwards of 500 and began marching Gynn toward a nearby tree. Realizing what was about to happen, Gynn attempted to escape and was shot to death—with his body “riddled with bullets.” His corpse was reportedly left by the side of the railroad tracks, so that “those passing on the railway trains saw lying beside the track the mutilated body of a man who had committed the foulest crime known to man—the ravishing of a baby girl” (Roanoke Times, June 7, 1902; Tazewell Republican, June 12, 1902; Richmond Dispatch, June 6, June 7, 1902).
Questions remain about why the mob acted so quickly against Gynn. The outcome of a different case involving a Black man accused of murder provides some hints to the answer. In December of the previous year, in the same general area of the Gynn incident, a Black miner named Robert Foy was arrested for killing Dayton Miller, a white official of the Crane’s Nest Coal and Coke Co., located near Tom’s Creek. Lodged in the Wise jail, Foy awaited trial while speculation that he would be lynched circulated in local newspapers: “The negro is in jail at this place, and the officers would doubtless make a stubborn resistance should a mob attack the jail, but we doubt if any guard could save him should a determined mob appear” (Big Stone Gap Post, Dec. 26, 1901).
By the end of January, Foy had been found guilty and sentenced to hang. There is some confusion about what happened next, but apparently the initial verdict was thrown out. Foy was tried again in March, found guilty, and sentenced to death a second time. But the story did not end there. In May, Foy escaped from jail and remained at large for a week before being apprehended. Authorities then discovered that he had contracted smallpox, causing further delay. He was eventually hanged in August, eight months after the murder of Miller and two months after the mob lynched Gynn. As the Foy case shows, even when the legal process was followed, any delay heightened racial tensions. The quick mob action in the Gynn case may have been precipitated by frustration among whites over the delay in executing Foy.
The next documented lynching in Wise County occurred 18 years later. On November 12, 1920, a Black man named Dave Hurst allegedly broke into a home at Cane Patch near the mining town of Dunbar, VA and allegedly assaulted an elderly white woman, “choking her until she was unconscious.” She recovered and managed to scare Hurst off, then flagged down a passenger train near her home. Several railroad workers followed Hurst down the tracks, captured him and took him to the Wise County Jail. Hurst’s time in jail was short, however. Two days later, in the early hours of the morning, a white mob broke Hurst from the jail, transported him near the scene of the crime he was alleged to have committed and hanged him, according to some accounts from a railroad trestle bridge. Others assert he was hanged from a coal tipple. According to the local paper, “While the body was hanging it was riddled with shots and later tied, it is supposed, to an automobile and dragged to a point near Blackwood where it was found Sunday morning lying by the roadside. All of the negro’s clothes were torn off and his body was terribly cut up by bullets” (Big Stone Gap Post, November 17, 1920).
As in Wiley Gynn’s and Robert Foy’s cases, local officials had seen Hurst apprehended and locked up, and they remained determined to see punishment done. But the white mob responsible for Hurst’s hanging planned their action carefully, taking Wise County Sheriff A.P. Corder and other officials by surprise. Between three and four in the morning, “Entrance was gained to the jail by breaking down the doors” (Roanoke Times, Nov. 16, 1920).
An angry Sheriff Corder later asserted he could have prevented Hurst’s lynching had he received timely warning. He did arrest several members of the lynch mob, and two of them were sentenced to terms in the state penitentiary, although the governor later commuted their sentences. Two weeks after the Hurst lynching, a Black man named Sydney Williams was arrested for assaulting a white store clerk in the town of Appalachia. As Williams sat in the Wise jail, Sheriff Corder got wind of an attempt to break him out. He deputized additional guards, procured a machine gun, and managed to fight off the mob when they gathered, killing two white men in the process. For his efforts, Corder attracted the praise of the NAACP. Both the local chapter in Graham (now Bluefield), VA and the national office sent the Sheriff commendatory telegrams: “We wish to express to you its commendation in the highest terms,” Walter White wrote, “for the manly stand taken by you in preventing the lynching of a colored man named Williams. . . If every community in America, particularly in the South, had officers of the law who would fulfill all their offices as you have done, it would be but a short time before lynching, the greatest blot on American civilization would be entirely wiped out” (NAACP Administrative Files).
The two cases, coming so close together, illustrate another key factor in understanding lynching. Lynching was almost always state-sanctioned racial terror: sometimes officials simply refused to protect Blacks jailed for alleged crimes, more often local authorities actively abetted lynch mobs. The fact that Sheriff Corder’s action in protecting Sydney Williams was so unprecedented implies that lynching could be prevented if officials were serious about protecting prisoners in their care. Walter White’s message clearly states that fact. And seven years later, the final documented lynching confirms that pattern, as local authorities did nothing to prevent the violence, even according to some accounts, actively participating.
The lynching of miner Leonard Woods in 1927 became a national sensation. Woods, a black miner working in Kentucky, was hanged, shot, and his body set on fire. The lynching took place at Pound Gap, just on the Virginia side state line, and the governors of the two states became involved in a dispute over jurisdiction. Woods had been arrested for allegedly killing Herschell Deaton, a well-respected member of the Coeburn, VA community, at Slick Rock, the Black section near Jenkins, KY, late on the night of November 27. Local whites were outraged, but their anger masked several real questions about what Deaton and his two companions were doing in that location late at night. There was enough speculation about what happened, that allowing justice to take its course might have revealed some uncomfortable truths about what happened in the rough coal towns of southwest Virginia and southeast Kentucky.
According to the official account of the incident, Deaton and two friends encountered Woods and two black women, Susan Armister and Anna Mae Emery. Woods demanded that Deaton give the three a ride, and Deaton objected. A scuffle ensued and Woods allegedly shot and killed Deaton with a pistol one of the women produced. Susan Armister and Anna Mae Emery, questioned at their boarding house, identified Woods as the shooter, and Kentucky authorities captured him a short time later. The three were transported from Jenkins to Whitesburg, KY out of fear that they would be lynched.
On the Virginia side of the border there was outrage at the death of Deaton, a well-connected member of the Coeburn community and a Mason. On November 29, following his well-attended funeral, a mob of 500 men according to some accounts, drove in a convoy of vehicles across the state line. Crossing the border, the Virginia men were joined by a large group of Kentucky whites. They proceeded to Whitesburg, broke Woods out by cutting through the roof of the jail and drove him to Jenkins where they intended to lynch him. Jenkins Sheriff Sam Privitt, acting for the Consolidated Coal Company, told the mob that they couldn’t hang Woods in Jenkins, so they took him back across to the Virginia side. Sheriff Privitt was said to have accompanied the mob across the border, ostensibly “for protection,” but Privitt later vehemently denied the charge, even driving to Norton, VA to protest to the editor of the local Coalfield Progress, the newspaper that provided the “official” account.
According to the news account, the mob hoisted Woods up on a wooden platform that had been erected just two weeks earlier for dignitaries to officiate at the opening of a new road through the gap from Virginia to Kentucky. There he was hanged, shot, then his body cut down, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. Woods’s body was left on the platform for the following day, and there are accounts that local schoolchildren were among those who saw it (Coalfield Progress, November 30, 1927; Hollyfield, 2005).
Even if local authorities had the will to prosecute the mob, it would have been nearly impossible due to political factors: the sensational public nature of the lynching of a Kentucky man in Virginia for killing a Virginia man; questions about the circumstances surrounding Woods’s alleged killing of Deaton; and the involvement of Governors Harry Byrd of Virginia and William Fields of Kentucky to determine jurisdiction.
Kentucky’s Governor Fields appointed Letcher County attorney Henry Moore to investigate Woods’ lynching, and Norton anti-lynching crusading editor Bruce Crawford of Crawford’s Weekly, a rival paper to the Coalfield Progress, published a series of editorials that raised questions about what really happened. Moore’s inquiry was chiefly designed to make sure that Virginians were blamed for the lynching. “The idea of lynching Wood [sic] seems to have originated at the burial of Deaton at Coeburn, Va., on Tuesday morning as the crowd left Coeburn in Tom’s Creek Tuesday night to carry out the plan and were reinforced by others joining in at Borton [sic] and Pound Gap,” according to Moore’s report. The mob then “came to Whitesburg in motors bearing Virginia license tags,” and crossed “the state line at Pound Gap at intervals of five, ten and fifteen minutes . . . passing through Jenkins, Fleming and Neon and on in the direction of Whitesburg” (Louisville Courier-Journal, Dec. 3, 1927).
Crawford’s remarks, while raising questions about what happened on the night Deaton was killed, did nothing to sway authorities to investigate. Asserting that “rumors have been heard to the effect that there may have been more provocation for the shooting than was originally reported,” Crawford’s inventive account ended with a description of the ghastly scene of souvenir-pickers viewing Woods’ body: “Bullets that protruded from the blistered skin of the Negro were picked out by curiosity seekers. Blood-stained scantlings were carried away. Many had carved red shavings from the timbers and taken them for trophies. Cartridges were scooped up by many hands from the ground” (Crawford’s Weekly, Dec. 3, 1927).
The NAACP investigation presented a more specific account of the story of the confrontation between Woods and Deaton. Relying on the evidence of Lawrence Kellis, an African-American teacher and social worker who lived in Blackey, KY, the NAACP argued that Woods shot Deaton in self-defense after trying to stop the two women from going along with the white men from Coeburn. This version of the story was soon picked up by several prominent African-American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Norfolk, Virginia Journal and Guide. Kellis wrote to the NAACP headquarters, asserting that the identities of at least six of the mob were known and urging them to send an investigator: “I have rumors of several persons but being colored myself I cannot talk to the whites and get their names conclusive. All you would have to do is to send some real fair, light complexioned person of Mr. Walter White[‘s] type or some interested white person.” Kellis himself was fed up: “I am leaving Xmas. I cannot stand the KKK conditions in Letcher County any longer” (NAACP Administrative Files).
Regardless of what really happened outside Slick Rock on the night of November 27, 1927, Governor Byrd, embarrassed by the sensational coverage, promised to prosecute the perpetrators: “If the lynching occurred on Virginia territory every resource of the state will be extended to the local authorities to apprehend and punish the perpetrators of this outrage. . . The lynching was a dastardly and cold-blooded crime without the slightest justification.” Byrd’s pronouncement proved an empty pledge. The jurisdictional dispute (note the “If”), and the high standing of Deaton and members of the lynch mob in the local community meant there was no inclination among local officials to pursue the matter. Nevertheless, Governor Byrd, who had been similarly embarrassed by the lynching of Raymond Byrd outside Wytheville in 1926, decided to press for a state anti-lynching law. In March 1928, the Virginia legislature passed the nation’s first such statute, although it proved an empty gesture; no one was ever prosecuted under its provisions (Whitesburg Mountain Eagle, Dec. 8, 1927; Smith, “Anti-lynching law,” Leidholt 2011).
Above all, the three Wise County lynchings show the persistence of local conditions in determining how suspected Black men were treated (Smith 2002). The cases of Gynn, Hurst, and Woods each had compelling backstories. Wiley Gynn, the boarding house operator, was murdered by a mob that had been frustrated with the delays in the execution of another Black man. Dave Hurst, the Alabama miner accused of assault and breaking and entering, might have escaped lynching if only the local sheriff had acted more quickly. And Leonard Woods’ lynching created such a political firestorm that Governor Byrd, however reluctantly, acceded to a state law against lynching.
The three lynchings in Wise County also show how at least some local authorities sought justice for both Blacks and whites. But the nature of the county’s segregated society and the belief that its Black inhabitants were inherently prone to criminal activity made it impossible to uphold equal justice. Even when successful in seeing a measure of justice done to a Black offender, as in Robert Foy’s case, the delays in sentencing may have led to the unjust killing of Wiley Gynn. While Foy’s offense, killing a mine official, seems to be more serious than Gynn’s, the fact that Gynn had allegedly attacked a young white girl, stoked the white mob’s irrational fears of sexual violence that resulted in Gynn’s spontaneous lynching, even as Commonwealth Attorney Dotson pleaded with the whites.
David Hurst’s offense, initially reported as breaking and entering, was exaggerated into an alleged assault on a white woman, a clear violation of the code. Hurst’s lynching serves as a poignant reminder that young Black men must act according to a strict code of behavior, or they could face quick extra-legal retribution despite the authorities’ determination to uphold justice, as Sheriff Corder’s actions made clear. Corder might have been able to prevent Hurst’s murder; he kept Sydney Williams from being lynched and succeeded in bringing several of the perpetrators of Hurst’s murder to justice. These unprecedented acts that were praised by the national media and the NAACP alike.
The 1927 killing of Leonard Woods represented the total breakdown of whatever tenuous commitment to justice existed for Black people in Wise County. Several political factors—the jurisdictional issue, conflicting accounts of what happened to Herschel Deaton, and above all, the status of Deaton in the community and corresponding standing of the lynch mob—made justice for Woods impossible. Woods’ lynching, which only happened in Wise by the vagaries of circumstance, proved such an embarrassment to Byrd, that the governor, prodded by public reaction to the editorial comments of newspaper editors, including Bruce Crawford, and committed to avoiding federal intervention, finally agreed to a state anti-lynching law. But the Virginia law lacked the power of a federal statute, which southern filibuster repeatedly killed for over a century. In March 2022, the long-awaited federal law became a reality when President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, finally recognizing lynching as a federal hate crime (U.S. Congress 2021-2022).
The Wise County/City of Norton Community Remembrance Project
The lynchings of Gynn, Hurst and Woods were forgotten soon after they occurred. Members of Wise County’s Black community occasionally heard the stories, but the horrific events were erased from local, collective memory. A current popular, but misguided perception among county folk is that Blacks, foreigners, and whites all worked together in the mines while maintaining segregated living conditions above ground. But the reality was that the imposed separation of Whites and Blacks and foreigners reveals a society in which native-born whites held clear notions of supremacy. “They wanted all the foreigners together, they didn’t want them mixed up with the Americans. The colored people, they didn’t want them mixed up, they had a separate camp, Smokey, for them. . . There were about fourteen homes for colored people, besides they had a colored people’s church, they had a colored people’s schoolhouse, and a colored people’s boardinghouse” (Shackelford and Weinberg, 1988). In some quarters Black workers were hated because they would work for lower wages that allowed the coal companies to keep overall wages low and working conditions poor. “[My father] would say ‘I don’t like colored people because they have been slaves, and they work as cheap labor. Wherever the boss puts them they take it and won’t open their mouth’” (Shackelford and Weinberg, 1988). But such sentiments were not widespread, and none of the Wise lynchings were the result of labor disputes. Rather, the Wise County lynchings stemmed from perceived violations of community standards of racial behavior. Gynn, Hurst, and Woods were lynched because they were Black men who violated a code of racial behavior (Brundage, 2001).
Regardless of the underlying reasons for the Wise lynchings, their history had been largely forgotten. During the summer of 2018, Rev. Preston Mitchell, then Deacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia and Dr. Tom Costa, Professor of History at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, traveled together to Montgomery, AL to visit the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) headquarters. Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, established EJI in 1989 to address mass incarceration and abuse of poor and marginalized persons in state courts and prisons. As they undertook their work, EJI discovered that much of the current problem of unequal justice takes root in the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In 2018 EJI opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, adding educational programs to raise awareness of current and past issues of injustice in communities across America. A core purpose of the organization is educational outreach, most prominently featured by Community Remembrance Projects, broad-based efforts to research and place signs marking the more than 4,400 lynchings that occurred across the US from Reconstruction to WWII. Mitchell and Costa naively thought they could simply drive down and pick up the sign for the Wise County lynchings. As their project developed, it proved far more complex (EJI).
Through his church, Rev. Mitchell had been involved in efforts to secure a memorial to the lynching of Raymond Byrd in Wytheville. That effort failed for several reasons, but primarily because the community was divided. So, Rev. Mitchell turned his efforts to Wise, where he lived for many years and contacted Costa, a close friend and colleague, to ask if he would like to travel to Alabama. Upon their return, the two decided to begin a memorialization project based in Wise County and adhering to EJI’s Community Remembrance guidelines.
Around the same time, Tabitha Smith, Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UVA-Wise, had been approached by Rachel Spraker, Assistant Vice President for Equity and Inclusive Excellence of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (UVA-Wise’s parent institution) about developing a project to memorialize Wise County’s three lynchings. The University of Virginia in Charlottesville had erected a sign marking the 1898 lynching of John Henry James, and Spraker asked Smith if anyone at UVA-Wise was engaged in similar efforts. Smith had been a member of UVA-Wise’s own diversity initiative, a 2018 meeting of its students of color, from which grew several projects, including the opening of a Multi-Cultural Center, a “History of Diversity at UVA-Wise Timeline,” and a grant to develop more projects. Rev. Mitchell and Professor Costa met with Smith, and the Wise/Norton Community Remembrance Project was born (Interviews with Preston Mitchell, Tom Costa, and Tabitha Smith, 2022).
Smith designated a portion of her grant to pay Costa and three students to conduct the historical research necessary for the markers. Costa, who had taught a course in local history since he had arrived at UVA-Wise, had never heard of the lynchings, another indication that their history had been forgotten. During the summer of 2019, Costa and his students conducted the research, using Prof. Gianluca DeFazio’s website on “Racial Terror,” as a starting point, then looking at newspaper accounts and census records (DeFazio, Racial Terror). Gradually the stories emerged, each lynching with its specific local twist (as previously discussed).
As the research continued, Rev. Mitchell, convinced from his experience at Wytheville that broad-based community participation was necessary from the beginning, began putting together a coalition/committee of college and community members to work on the project. The committee included representatives from the college, Black and white churches, the Wise County School Board, the Historical Society of the Pound, and began meeting to develop ideas for memorializing the lynchings.
From the beginning, Rev. Mitchell emerged as the driving force behind the effort. Hailing from Bristol, VA, educated at The Citadel, Mitchell coached and taught in Wise County public schools and at the College at Wise for 39 years. More recently, he was ordained Deacon in the Episcopal Church. These experiences first drew him to the lynching project. Following a church conference on Race and Reconciliation in Atlanta in 2017, Rev. Mitchell became interested in the notorious 1926 lynching of Raymond Byrd in Wytheville, where, as he put it, “the Bishop was asking us to find something to where we could sort of dig into some history and understanding of our own region” (Interview with Preston Mitchell, 2022).
When the Wytheville project fell through, Rev. Mitchell and Dr. Costa began speaking to local community groups to drum up support for a project in Wise County. One of the earliest conversations took place at a meeting of the Historical Society of the Pound, which was interested in a sign marking the Leonard Woods lynching in 1927. Margaret Sturgill, Co-Chair of the Pound group, indicated that the Society had been discussing the lynching for several years but did not really know how to respond to “the inhuman event. . . . We were ashamed to admit that our ancestors and community participated in such a horrendous act.” When Mitchell and Costa met with them in 2019, Sturgill realized that the Community Remembrance Project was the solution to their problem. Joined by other members of the group, Sturgill was instrumental in collecting donations to pay for the state highway sign that the coalition erected in October 2021 (Interview with Margaret Sturgill, 2022).
Another important member of the coalition from the beginning was Frank Gravely, an African American native of Pocahontas, VA. After his father was killed in a mining accident in 1957, Gravely shelved plans to attend college and began working for Westmoreland Coal Company. Following a stint in the military, he settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he lived for several years. In the early 1970s, he moved to Norton, VA and entered Mountain Empire Community College, where he was the first Black person to graduate. An amateur historian, Gravely believes that the Community Remembrance project is important to bring neglected parts of history to light. He frequently presents programs on local Black history in area schools and churches and is continually surprised that people, white and Black, do not know of these events. “The younger generation, it’s a shame that a lot of things have been kept away from them; even the news media, even parents, and things have kept a lot of Black History from the kids because they figure out it’s something in the past. If you can’t deal with the past and the things that happen, how are we going to handle it?” (Interview with Frank Gravely, 2022).
Two members of the local news media became especially important additions to the group. Jeff Lester, editor of the Norton Coalfield Progress, regularly featured articles on the coalition and its work, and Mike Still, former adjunct instructor in the College’s Communications Department, writes for the Kingsport Times-News. Still’s articles on the work of the coalition reached a wider audience in Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee. Another media specialist who joined the group is Will Isom, director of Black in Appalachia, who shot videos of the sign installation and soil collection ceremonies.
Late in 2021, the core leadership was augmented when Terran Young-Outsey, a Norton community activist and president of Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, and Stephanie Cassell, English teacher at John I. Burton High School, Norton, joined Mitchell, Costa, and Smith.
The primary objective was to secure a marker for the three lynchings. The coalition’s work was aided in February 2019, when the Virginia State legislature, by a unanimous joint resolution, officially expressed regret for lynching and encouraged communities to engage in projects to remember and educate communities about the horror of lynching (Virginia General Assembly, 2019).
Buoyed by the state resolution, coalition members began attending individual town council meetings to secure the support of local leaders. The towns of Appalachia, Big Stone Gap, Coeburn, Pound, Wise, and the City of Norton wrote their own resolutions supporting the project, modeled on the state’s resolution. Last on the list of local government officials was the County Board of Supervisors, without whose support the project would not be possible. After meeting individually with supervisors and County Administrator Mike Hatfield to lay the groundwork, in April 2021 the coalition presented its formal application for a historical marker dedicated to all three victims to be placed at the county courthouse. According to Mitchell, the courthouse was the appropriate location because “that is where the justice is, and that is where the law is, and there was justice denied to those who were lynched.” The coalition had prepared and had script approval from EJI for a single sign with all three victims mentioned (Interview with Preston Mitchell).
Despite securing support from six of the eight county supervisors, the board tabled the coalition’s motion for a single sign at the courthouse. A month later, they came back with a counteroffer: the supervisors would approve a sign marking the Hurst lynching alone to be placed on county property along Kent Junction Road between Norton and Appalachia, about a mile and a half from the lynching site. With the state having approved a marker for the Leonard Woods lynching, the county’s authorization of the Hurst sign meant that the coalition would have to approach the town of Coeburn to propose a third sign for Wiley Gynn. The additional applications took extra time and effort. Separate scripts for each sign had to be approved, but ultimately, Wise County would have three separate markers, one for each of the lynchings, rather than a single sign memorializing all three (Lester, May 18, 2022).
The coalition then proceeded to prepare scripts for separate signs for Hurst and Gynn and submitted a proposal to the Coeburn Town Council for the Gynn marker to be placed at Bondtown Community Park, a couple of hundred yards from the site of Gynn’s murder. In the meantime, the state sign for Woods had been delivered and was dedicated at Pound Gap in October 2021. The two EJI signs were approved soon after; the Hurst marker dedicated in September 2022, and the Gynn sign was the last to be placed, dedicated in April 2023. While the state marker has the same script on both sides, simply recounting the story of Woods’s lynching; in keeping with their purpose, the EJI signs have more of an educational function with a different script on each side, one side describing the specific lynching that occurred near that area, and the other side providing a general overview of lynchings in America. These highway markers were the most important aim of the Community Remembrance coalition from the start, to tell the stories of Leonard Woods, Dave Hurst, and Wiley Gynn (n.a., 2022; Sorrell, 2021; Costa, 2022; Maine, 2023; Slepyan, 2023).
The coalition’s work to place the memorial markers helped fulfill a central goal of EJI, educating communities about the horror and trauma of lynching. The signs comprise the most visible and public manifestation of that goal and represent an important first step in recognizing and acknowledging the horror of lynching. As Mitchell often states: “We must reveal before we can heal.” But there were other activities that the coalition planned and carried out to educate the community. In July of 2021, coalition members and supporters participated in soil collection ceremonies at or near each of the three lynching sites. EJI sponsors soil collection at lynching sites as an important part of community remembrance, to collect physical reminders of those spots where racial violence occurred. Terran Young-Outsey, co-chair of the Wise/Norton coalition, stated the significance of soil collection: “At the site where someone died, there’s a power in that soil, so recognizing it, remembering it, does not heal outwardly, it heals the land in that way.” EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery recognizes the power of soil as a visual reminder of racial violence and display jars of soil from lynching sites across the United States. The Wise coalition sent soil from its three sites to Montgomery and maintains jars of soil at the college for traveling displays across the county (Isom, 2021).
These community-based activities—placing historical markers and collecting soil from lynching sites, and the publicity surrounding them—all serve as positive accomplishments of the Wise/Norton coalition and helped begin the work to educate the community and promote racial healing. The theft of the Hurst marker, a literal attempt to erase the tragic and violent history of lynching, more than anything else reinforces the necessity of educating communities about racism and its role in our history. Coalition members were initially shocked and angered at the theft but soon resolved to try to identify the perpetrators by advertising a reward for information leading to their arrest, and most importantly, secure a replacement sign to be placed at a more secure location. To date, the thieves remain unknown, but EJI furnished a replacement for the stolen marker.
On February 9, 2024, the memorial sign project was completed when the replacement for the Hurst marker was re-dedicated on the grounds of Mountain Empire Community College’s Center for Workforce and Innovation, a 24-hour monitored secure site, just up the road from the original location. Dr. Kristen Westover, President of MECC, who was instrumental in the sign’s relocation, spoke to the gathering. Her address provided a fitting summary of the importance of the coalition’s work, as it seeks “not only to recognize the atrocities of our past, but also to illuminate the path towards a more inclusive and empathetic future. . . Historical markers are far more than mere signs: they are beacons of truth that guide us through the murky waters of our collective past. They serve as vital tools for education, allowing present and future generations to confront the realities of racial violence and the resilience of those who suffered” (Crowson, 2024; Westover, 2024).
As Dr. Westover so forcefully enunciated the incidents that these activities seek to highlight must become a permanent part of public-school curriculum, as only through a more broadly-based educational effort can we develop a shared understanding of how these traumatic events of our past inform the present and help us move forward.
The coalition sponsored an initial step toward that objective. In summer 2022, Costa organized a workshop for teachers. Eighteen Social Science and English teachers participated in a daylong exploration of the national and local significance of lynching in our history. Presentations from EJI on their work, John Johnson on the Raymond Byrd lynching, and Costa on the Wise lynchings and the Community Remembrance Project sparked a discussion about how to deal with these difficult but important topics in the classroom. Teachers discussed several creative ideas, some of which are more fully explored in the essays that follow. Participants discussed adapting lesson plans from Dr. DeFazio’s website, “Racial Terror” by using the local lynchings. Another group talked about examining the inflammatory rhetoric in newspaper accounts. And several English teachers focused on using children’s literature to illuminate historical incidents of racial violence. Most importantly, the teachers expressed interest in the broader significance of a curriculum focusing on historical trauma. As one participant wrote, “I want to use this as a teaching tool for understanding empathy” (DeFazio, Racial Terror; “Teaching about Lynching: Wise County and Beyond” Workshop Teacher Evaluations).
Racism and its effects can never be expunged until we are willing to acknowledge its role as a major part of this country’s history. Marcia Mitchell, the Director of Student Support Services at UVA-Wise and member of the coalition, wrote a response to the theft of the sign that stands as the most eloquent expression of the importance of the work of the coalition: “as a black member of the Community Remembrance Project, whose goal is to bring awareness of the history of lynching in Wise County and the City of Norton, it is sad to see the work of so many result in something so unfortunate. Perhaps it is even more sad that, in some ways, something like this was expected. Resistance . . . stealing of dignity, that is the history of blacks in America and those who dare to align with them. The events surrounding the stealing of the Hurst marker prove the struggle continues” (M. Mitchell, 2022).
Conclusion
The historical trauma of lynching in Wise County serves as a powerful reminder of the need for vigilance and action in preserving our collective memory. By documenting these events and the efforts to memorialize them, we honor the victims and educate future generations about the realities of racial violence. This essay underscores the importance of community resilience and the role of educators in confronting historical injustices, ensuring that the lessons learned from the past inform our efforts to build a more just and equitable society.
In the next chapter Dr. Gianluca DeFazio, so instrumental in helping the Wise/Norton coalition begin its work, offers a more detailed examination of the curricular components of teaching about lynching. His website and associated lesson plans establish a template for moving forward from public displays to a more extended comprehension of racial trauma and its effects on Black communities. And in the chapters that follow, contributors offer additional ideas regarding the public and personal educational benefits of shedding light on incidents of racial violence.
References
Internet Sites
De Fazio, Gianluca. Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia. https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/valynchings/, esp. https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/valynchings/three-lynchings-in-wise-county/ and https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/valynchings/curriculum/
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). https://eji.org/, esp. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/
Isom, Will (2021) Lynching Site Soil Collections, Wise County, VA https://youtu.be/MjwyZHJdyjc
Virginia Humanities. Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/, esp. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lynching-in-virginia and J. Douglas Smith, “Anti-Lynching Law of 1928.” https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Antilynching_law_of_1928#start_entry
Newspapers
For the historical narrative (Sec. I), the following newspapers were used:
Alexandria Gazette
Big Stone Gap Post
Coalfield Progress (Norton VA)
Crawford’s Weekly (Norton VA)
Louisville Courier-Journal
Mountain Eagle (Whitesburg KY)
Richmond Dispatch
Roanoke Times
Tazewell Republican
For information about the development of the Community Remembrance Project (Sec. II), the following newspaper articles were most helpful.
Costa, Tom. (2022, September 20). Lynching highway marker to be dedicated. Coalfield Progress.
Crowson, Kenneth. (2024, February 13). Historic marker arrives at new home. Coalfield Progress.
Lester, Jeff. (2022, June 11). Lynching memorial project grows. Coalfield Progress.
Lester, Jeff. (2022, May 8). County okays marker. Coalfield Progress.
Maine, Lisa. (2023, April 25). Third lynching sign unveiled Saturday. Coalfield Progress.
Mitchell, Marcia (2022, November 29). Why it matters that a sign was stolen. Coalfield Progress.
[n.a] (2021, August 24). Remembrance project moves forward. Coalfield Progress.
Sorrell, Robert. (2021, October 14). Marker to recognize 1927 Wise County lynching. Bristol Herald Courier.
Slepyan, Anya. (2023, June 19). The practice of memory: commemorating America’s history of racial terror. Daily Yonder https://dailyyonder.com/the-practice-of-memory-commemorating-americas-history-of-racial-terror-equal-justice-initiative/2023/06/19/
Still, Mike (2019, August 5). Students take part in study of 20th century lynchings in Wise. Kingsport Times-News.
Archival Material and Government Documents
NAACP Administrative Files. The NAACP actively investigated lynchings across the United States. The Administrative Files, subhead “Lynching,” “folder Whitesburg,” contains valuable material relating to the lynching of Leonard Woods.
U.S. Congress 117th Congress (2021-2022), “Emmitt Till Anti-Lynching Act. H.R. 55. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/55
Virginia General Assembly (2019), House Joint Resolution No. 655: Acknowledging with profound regret the existence and acceptance of lynching within the Commonwealth. https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?191+ful+HJ655ER
Secondary Books and Journal Articles
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. (1993). Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930. University of Illinois Press.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. (2001). Racial violence, lynchings, and modernization in the mountain south. in John Inscoe (Ed.), Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation. University Press of Kentucky.
Leidholdt, Alexander S. (2011). “‘Never thot this could happen in the South!’ The anti-lynching advocacy of Appalachian newspaper editor Bruce Crawford,” Appalachian Journal.
Shackelford, Laurel and Bill Weinberg, (Eds.) (1988). Our Appalachia: An Oral History. University Press of Kentucky.
Smith, J. Douglas. (2002). Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. University of North Carolina Press.
Wood, Amy Louise. (2009). Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. University of North Carolina Press.
Oral Interviews
Hollyfield, D. B. (2005) “Stories True and Real in the Life of D.B. Hollyfield,” audio CD.
In fall 2022, History students at UVA-Wise conducted interviews with the following members of the Coalition:
Tom Costa
Becky Branham
Frank Gravely
Sandra Jones
Preston Mitchell
Ray Moore
Tabitha Smith
Margaret Sturgill
Other
“Teaching about Lynching: Wise County and Beyond” (2022). Workshop for Teachers, UVA-Wise
Westover, Kristen. (2024). Address given at Hurst sign re-dedication, February 9, 2024.
- The authors wish to thank Zoe Crihfeld, who co-authored an earlier account of the three lynchings from which most of part I is taken, and Dr. Gianluca DeFazio, of James Madison University, whose “Racial Terror” website provided much of the information used to research the lynchings. ↩︎
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