Isaac Brandon Lynched, 6 April 1892

V-54

A mob of about 75 masked men dragged Isaac Brandon from a cell in the old Charles City County jail and hanged him from a tree on this hillside on the night of 6 April 1892. Brandon, a 43-year-old black man, had been held in jail on a charge of assaulting a white woman. He was married and the father of eight children. No charges were filed in connection with Brandon's murder. More than 4,000 lynchings took place in the United States between 1877 and 1950. In Virginia, approximately 100 people, the vast majority of them black men, were killed in documented lynchings. Lynch mobs terrorized African Americans and helped to maintain white supremacy.

Department of Historic Resources, 2018

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Charles City County Death Register (1865-1896), p. 32. Richmond Dispatch, 9 April 1892. Pittsburgh Dispatch, 10 April 1892. Richmond Times, 14 April 1892. Richmond Planet, 19, 23 April, 7 May 1892. Roanoke Times, 2, 9 April 1892. Washington Evening Star, 11 April 1892. Executive Letter Book of Gov. Philip W. McKinney, 1890-1893 (Library of Virginia). Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (3d. edition, 2017). Brendan Wolfe and Laura K. Baker, “Lynching in Virginia,” Encyclopedia Virginia (Nov. 2016) https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Lynching_in_Virginia Map of Virginia’s Lynching History (StoryMap) https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/2109d0f66f52493e08c3de26a682a059/map-of-virginias-lynching-history/index.html RJ Ramey, ed., Monroe Work Today Dataset Compilation (version 1), 23 Oct. 2017, Archives, Tuskegee University. Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia, 1877-1927 (James Madison Univeristy) http://sites.jmu.edu/valynchings/ Sterling Giles and Brian Williams, “A Shameful Chapter in Virginia History: Lynchings,” 17 May 2016. https://www.fredericksburg.com/features/history/a-shameful-chapter-in-virginia-history-lynchings/article_f9c9c4cd-7a77-581e-b31b-cafa1d54524f.html J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Jim Hall, The Last Lynching in Northern Virginia: Seeking Truth at Rattlesnake Mountain (Charleston: History Press, 2016). W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). John M. Coski, “The New Old Order in Charles City County: Reconstruction and Race Relations, 1865-1900,” Charles City County: An Official History (1989). Family Group Report, Descendants of Isaac Brandon Charles City County Marriage Register, Book 2, p. 14. U.S. Census, 1880.