The Lynching of Benjamin Thomas

Close to midnight on Tuesday, August 8, 1899, Benjamin Thomas, a 16-year-old Black Alexandrian, was lynched from a lamppost on the corner after white rioters attacked the City Jail on N. St. Asaph Street, seized him, and dragged him for a half-mile on a cobblestone street while hitting him with bricks, iron, and stones as he cried out for his mother. Under the shadow of City Hall and the police station, he was stabbed, kicked, shot, and hanged. Police had arrested Thomas on Monday, August 7, 1899, on the word of an eight-year-old white neighbor and charged him with assaulting her. When Alexandria's Black community learned of his arrest, they feared another lynching because two years earlier a white mob had murdered local Black teenager Joseph McCoy based on similar allegations. Groups of Black men organized and offered their aid to police in an attempt to protect Thomas, but the police and Mayor George Simpson ridiculed their concerns. Standing on the jail steps, Simpson asked the mob to leave and promised that if a court did not convene that day, he would personally lead a mob the next night to lynch Thomas. Police arrested many in the Black community that night, and the mayor sentenced them to heavy fines or jail time, yet no whites were held accountable for Thomas's lynching. After the killing, his body was taken to Demaine funeral home on King Street, where his mother, Elizabeth Thomas, could not bear to look upon him. At a memorial service at Shiloh Baptist Church, a crowd of 600 heard Rev. Henry H. Warring proclaim Thomas an honest boy, innocent of the crime that led to his lynching. After he was interred at Penny Hill Cemetery, the Black community mobilized to help the Thomas family raise funds to move his body from a pauper's grave to Douglass Cemetery, but no relocation was recorded, leaving his final resting place uncertain.

Alexandria, Virginia · United States