Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of black people in the United States were victims of racial terror lynching, a form of racial terrorism used to intimidate black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy led to fatal violence against black women, men, and children accused of violating social customs, engaging in interracial relationships, or committing crimes, and community leaders who opposed this violence were often targeted by mobs as well. Racial terror lynching became a public and notorious form of subordination frequently tolerated or supported by law enforcement and elected officials, with white mobs often acting with impunity as black people were taken from jails or turned over by officials legally required to protect them. These terror lynchings often included burnings and mutilation, sometimes before crowds numbering in the thousands. Although many victims' names were never recorded, more than 650 racial terror lynchings have been documented in Mississippi alone, including at least seven in Lafayette County. On the evening of September 17, 1935, Elwood Higginbottom, a 28-year-old African-American tenant farmer, husband, and father of three children, was being held in the Oxford jail. Four months earlier, landholder Glen Roberts had led a posse to Higginbottom's house over a property dispute, and Higginbottom defended himself and fled after Roberts was fatally shot. After Roberts's funeral, citizens of Oxford and the county joined officers from Lafayette and other counties in a manhunt, beat Higginbottom's sister, and threatened to burn his brothers to death in retaliation. Captured a few days later in Pontotoc County, Higginbottom was held in Jackson until his trial date in Oxford. As anger grew that a guilty verdict was not coming quickly enough, a mob of 50 to 150 white men gathered outside the jail, broke in, and took Higginbottom to a wooded area near the Three-Way on Old Russell Road. Higginbottom fought for his life, but the mob forced a rope around his neck and hanged him to death, and reports described five bullet holes in his body. The lynching drew outrage from the N.A.A.C.P., which wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt and blamed his death on callous indifference toward federal or state protections against anarchic mobs. Roosevelt's administration did not respond, and Mississippi officials charged no one with Higginbottom's murder.