On Saturday, October 21, 1916, in Abbeville, a white mob lynched Anthony Crawford, a black leader, after he cursed a white man during an argument over the sale of his cottonseed. Crawford, a 56-year-old planter known as "Grandpa" Crawford, owned 427 acres of land, had 13 children, and helped establish a school, a church, and farms in the local black community. During the Jim Crow era, successful black people were conspicuous, and arguing with whites was dangerous. After a white merchant demanded to buy Crawford's cottonseed for a lower price and Crawford refused, he was arrested. A few hours later, 300 white men seized him from jail, dragged him through town behind a buggy, and at the fairgrounds stabbed, beat, hanged, and shot him more than 200 times, then forbade his family to remove his body from the tree. Terrorized by continued threats, the well-established Crawford family and many other local black people concluded that Abbeville was not safe, and most of the family scattered North, leaving behind what their patriarch had built. In the broader history of South Carolina, racial violence grew out of slavery, white resentment of black political and economic advancement after emancipation, and the collapse of federal protection in 1877, after which lynching became a tool for re-establishing white supremacy and terrorizing the black community. Between 1877 and 1950, white mobs lynched more than 4000 black people in the South, including more than 180 in South Carolina; in Abbeville County, at least seven other men were lynched during the era: Dave Roberts in 1882, James Mason in 1894, Thomas Watts and John Richards in 1895, Allen Pendleton in 1905, Will Lozier in 1915, and Mark Smith in 1919.