Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of black people in the United States were victims of lynching and racial violence. The lynching of African Americans during this era was a form of racial terrorism intended to intimidate black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation, and it was most prevalent in the South. After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy led to violent abuse of racial minorities and decades of political, social, and economic exploitation. White mobs were usually permitted to engage in racial terror and brutal violence with impunity, and many black people were pulled out of jails or given over to mobs by law enforcement officials who were legally required to protect them. Terror lynchings often included burning and mutilation, sometimes in front of crowds numbering in the thousands. In response, millions of black people fled the South and never returned. More than 330 racial terror lynchings of African Americans have been documented in Texas alone. In Travis County, racial terror lynching devastated African American communities for decades. On August 14, 1894, a white mob seized a black woman and two black men from a small jail about thirty miles from Austin. According to news reports, the woman was a white family's nurse when their child died, and without evidence or investigation she was accused of responsibility for the child's death; two black men were also arrested. Despite the absence of evidence to support any claim against the accused, a mob of armed white men abducted the three prisoners from the jail, tied them to stakes in a nearby field, and riddled them with gunshots, killing all three. No one was held accountable. Press coverage published as far away as Britain failed to name the three victims, the town of their arrest, or the location of their lynching, but did state that the woman and two men were very likely innocent of any crime.