Shortly after midnight on Friday, November 27, 1925, three white men abducted thirty-five-year-old Arthur Henry, a Black man, from his bed at Orange General Hospital after he had been shot and beaten in his home, arrested, and confined in the hospital's Negro Ward with his hands and feet shackled. He had been admitted hours earlier with injuries after an exchange of gunfire with police, but while officials claimed he shot at detectives when they entered his home to investigate a report, two witnesses said the shooting occurred while police had him in a back room. Although the hospital superintendent reportedly warned police that mob violence was likely and an officer was assigned to guard him, no one stopped the mob from seizing him. Nearly two weeks later, twelve days after the abduction, his body was found in Conway, shot through the heart. Arthur Henry never had the opportunity to defend himself at trial, and although his wife, Viola Henry, and three other Black women were arrested as witnesses to the original shooting, no one was arrested or held accountable for his lynching; a coroner's jury concluded that he died at the hands of unknown persons. His killing took place within a broader era of racial terror in which Black people were regularly presumed guilty without evidence, especially when accused of harming white police officers. Between 1865 and 1950, lynching and racial violence terrorized thousands of Black people in the United States as white supremacy drove violent abuse and political, social, and economic exploitation, and mobs often acted with impunity, sometimes carrying out public killings, burnings, and mutilation before huge crowds to enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. Like Arthur Henry, many Black people were taken from homes, public spaces, courtrooms, or custody by law enforcement officials who failed in their duty to protect them. More than 344 racial terror lynchings have been documented in Florida, including at least 33 in Orange County. The Wells'Built Museum stands on the site of the segregated Wells'Built Hotel, established in 1926 as the area's first Black hotel by Dr. William Monroe Wells, the prominent Black doctor and coroner who signed Arthur Henry's death certificate, and it is only a few blocks from Henry's home and from the Black ward of Orange General Hospital where he was abducted.
