Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of African Americans in the United States were victims of racial terror lynching, a violent resistance to emancipation and equal rights that was intended to intimidate Black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. After the collapse of Reconstruction, white supremacy and violent resistance to equal rights led to fatal violence against Black men, women, and children accused of violating social customs, engaging in interracial relationships, or committing crimes. In Mississippi, more than 650 racial terror lynchings have been documented, including at least seven in Lafayette County, where for decades African American men were lynched by white mobs, often after allegations involving white women that were rarely seriously scrutinized. Mobs frequently took victims from jails while law enforcement officers, despite being legally required to protect them, often offered little to no resistance, and those responsible were usually never punished. In Lafayette County, Harris Tunstal was kidnapped from jail and hanged behind the Methodist Episcopal Church near the Oxford square on July 12, 1885; Will McGregory was shot to death during his trial before a magistrate and then hanged near Orwood on November 13, 1890; an unknown Black man was kidnapped from the Oxford jail and hanged on September 2, 1891; Will Steen was lynched near Paris on July 30, 1893, because of rumors that he was boasting about an affair with a white woman; William Chandler was shot and hanged from a telegraph pole across from the depot in Abbeville on June 19, 1895; Lawson Patton, a jail trustee accused of murdering a white woman, was fatally shot in his cell and hanged on the grounds of the Lafayette County Courthouse on September 9, 1908; and on September 17, 1935, Elwood Higginbottom, on trial for the alleged murder of a white farmer, was dragged from jail and hanged by a mob of white men about a mile and a half north of the Oxford square.