Between 1865 and 1950, white mobs lynched over 6,500 Black people across the U.S. as white Southerners resisted equal rights after the Civil War and sought to reestablish white supremacy through law, intimidation, and racial violence. By Reconstruction's end in 1877, federal courts and Congress had abandoned enforcement of laws meant to protect formerly enslaved people, and lynching emerged as a public form of racial terrorism that often included shooting, burning, or mutilation as well as hanging. Black political activity was treated as a threat to the racial hierarchy, and many Black people were lynched for attempting to vote, engaging in political organizing, or simply as part of random terror in the wake of racial disputes to send the message that dissent would not be tolerated. In the months after the 1898 massacre in Phoenix, hundreds of terrorized Black residents fled the region, transforming a population that there had been more than two-thirds Black. Although many victims of racial terror lynching will never be known, at least 207 have been documented in South Carolina, including at least 16 in Greenwood County. From November 9-14, 1898, white mobs in Phoenix lynched at least eight Black men and one Black woman and terrorized Black residents after the November 8 general election, the first since the 1895 state constitution effectively barred Black people from voting. That morning at the local polling site, a white poll manager was killed and a prominent white supporter of Black voting rights was repeatedly shot during an altercation over his attempt to help Black men participate in the political process. Already enraged by the threat of Black political action, hundreds of white citizens immediately began hunting down Black people they claimed were present. On November 9, a mob rounded up a group of Black people in the woods near Rehoboth United Methodist Church and fatally shot Wade Hampton McKinney, Jesse Williams, Columbus Jackson, Drayton Watts, and George Logan, while others were wounded or escaped. On November 10, a mob shot Essex Harrison in the heart in the same woods and dumped his body with the others, and white mobs also lynched Ben Collins and Jeff Darling. On November 14, Eliza Goode, an elderly Black woman, was killed in her home by white men firing indiscriminately into houses on her street. No one was ever held accountable for these lynchings, and arbitrary beatings and whippings of Black people in the region continued for years afterward.