Between 1865 and 1950, thousands of Black people in the United States were victims of racial terror lynching, a form of racial terrorism intended to intimidate Black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy led to fatal violence against Black women, men, and children. Many African Americans were lynched after accusations of violating social customs, engaging in interracial relationships, or committing crimes even when there was no evidence tying them to any offense. Mobs often seized victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or police custody without fear of legal repercussions, and police rarely used force to resist white mobs and sometimes participated in the killings. These lynchings often included burnings and mutilation, sometimes before crowds of thousands, and although many victims' names were never recorded, at least 60 racial terror lynchings have been documented in Missouri. In the pre-dawn hours of July 10, 1897, an armed mob of white men brutally lynched Erastus Brown, a Black husband and father of two, near the Bourbeuse River Bridge in Union, Missouri. Brown was no more than 20 years old when he was killed. On July 2, he left home to retrieve medicine for his sick infant child and was accused of hitting a white woman with a rock. He was arrested soon afterward with no evidence tying him to the alleged crime and placed in the Union County Jail. On July 10, an armed lynch mob of about forty prominent white farmers rode to Union, stormed the jail without resistance from the officers on duty, dragged Brown to the bridge, and hanged him from a nearby willow tree. Although several community members, including the county prosecutor, saw or interacted with the mob, no one would identify its members to local authorities afterward, and the local sheriff said there was "no use" in investigating the lynching. Like nearly all lynching victims, Brown was killed without legal intervention or protection from a white mob that was not held accountable, and his infant child died two days later.