Racial terror lynching killed thousands of African Americans and left a legacy of injustice that still persists. After slavery ended, many white people remained committed to racial hierarchy and used lethal violence and terror against Black communities to maintain a racial, economic, and social order that oppressed and marginalized Black people. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of subordination directed at Black people and was often tolerated or supported by law enforcement and elected officials, while white mobs were usually allowed to commit brutal violence with impunity. Many Black people were taken from jails or surrendered to mobs by officials legally required to protect them, and terror lynchings often included burnings and mutilation before crowds numbering in the thousands. Many victims were never recorded and remain unknown, but more than 120 lynchings have been documented in North Carolina. In Rowan County, on June 11, 1902, a white mob of more than fifty men abducted two African American children, Harrison and James Gillespie, ages 13 and 11, from the Rowan County jail and lynched them before a crowd of more than 400 people after they had been arrested and accused of murder; the mob hanged them and repeatedly shot their bodies. Four years later, on August 6, 1906, two African American men, Jack Dillingham and Nease Gillespie, and Nease Gillespie's teenage son, John Gillespie, were abducted from the Rowan County jail in Salisbury and lynched by a white mob of more than two thousand people. They were accused, without any evidence of guilt, of killing four members of a white family in Unity Township in July 1906, largely because they worked for the white homeowner. More than two decades later, Laura Wood, a 59-year-old African American woman who was a farmer, wife, and mother, was lynched on February 11, 1930, in Barber after being accused of stealing food from her white employer; when her family realized she was missing, her body was found not far from her home, hanging from a tree with an iron chain. During this era, deep racial hostility throughout Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt, while lynching and other acts of racial terror denied them equal justice under the law, and almost all of the mob members escaped punishment. On January 15, 2019, Salisbury's City Council formally adopted a Resolution of Reconciliation, committing the city to policies and practices intended to guarantee equity and justice and to publish an annual report on efforts to eliminate inequity.