Racial terror lynching claimed the lives of at least 6,500 Black people in the United States between 1865 and 1950 as white supremacy was upheld after the Civil War through racist laws, segregation, exclusion, and lethal mob violence used to intimidate Black communities and maintain racial hierarchy. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of this racial terrorism, often sparked by accusations of sexual assault by Black men against white women and often carried out by mobs who abducted victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, and even from police custody while law enforcement rarely resisted. In Maryland, at least 40 racial terror lynchings have been documented, including the lynching of Benjamin Hance in St. Mary's County. At approximately 2:00 am on June 17, 1887, a white mob lynched Benjamin Hance, a 22-year-old African American resident of St. Mary's County, at the intersection of Newtowne Neck Road and Macintosh Run. In May 1887, while running an errand for his employer, Hance allegedly encountered a white woman, Alice Bailey, who later reported an assault and claimed that he made "an improper proposal" to her, after which he was taken into custody and placed in jail. On June 17, a mob of white men came to the jail intent on lynching him, battered down the jail doors with axes, dragged him from his cell, and carried him outside. A white man who lived near the jail saw the abduction and, instead of intervening, asked the mob to carry out the lynching elsewhere so as not to disturb his wife. The mob took Hance two miles away and hanged him from a witch hazel tree. His body was later buried in the St. Aloysius Church Old Cemetery, and local law enforcement officials failed to indict, prosecute, or hold anyone accountable despite several mob members having been identified by county residents.