Following the Civil War, violent resistance to rights and equality for Black Americans and an ideology of White supremacy led to fatal violence against Black women, men, and children. Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black people in the United States were victims of racial terror lynching, the most public and notorious form of racial terrorism, used to intimidate Black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. Many were lynched after accusations of violating social customs, engaging in interracial relationships, or committing crimes, even without evidence, while White mobs ignored the legal system and seized victims from homes, public places, jails, prisons, courtrooms, and police custody without fear of punishment. These lynchings often included burnings and mutilation, sometimes before crowds of thousands. More than 300 racial terror lynchings have been documented in non-southern states, including at least 15 in Ohio. Near this site on November 21, 1881, a mob of at least 30 White men lynched Christopher Davis, a 24-year-old Black farm laborer who lived near Albany with his wife and two children. After a White woman reported being assaulted on October 30, her relatives accused Davis and he was arrested, though many believed he was innocent. Threats of lynching led the local sheriff to move him from Athens to the jail in Chillicothe. In a letter to his wife, Davis affirmed his innocence and wrote that for months he had feared trouble was coming on him. Returned by evening train to Athens on November 20 to await trial, he was seized from the jail the next morning, dragged by a rope around his neck to the South Bridge, and hanged despite his pleas of innocence. He was buried in West State Street Cemetery on November 22, but later that day his body was exhumed and taken to Starling Medical College without his family’s permission. The men who lynched him faced no consequences, and one later became a local judge. Davis’s lynching and the mistreatment of his body reflected the racial terror and hostility of that era and contributed to a legacy of injustice that still impacts the community today.