Between 1865 and 1950, more than 6,500 Black men, women, and children were victims of lynching in the United States as white Southerners used fatal violence and terror after the Civil War to resist equal rights and maintain racial hierarchy. Lynchings became a public form of racial terrorism, carried out even in communities with functioning legal systems where Black people were denied equal protection under the law. White mobs seized victims from homes, public spaces, jails, prisons, courtrooms, and police custody without fear of legal repercussions, often terrorizing families, neighbors, and other Black residents as well. Law enforcement routinely failed to prevent these killings and sometimes incited or participated in them, while white officials tolerated the violence by failing to prosecute those responsible. In Alabama, more than 400 racial terror lynchings were documented between 1885 and 1950, including at least 11 in Madison County. On March 21, 1890, near Meridianville, a white mob lynched 16-year-old Robert Mosley, a Black farm laborer, after a white woman related to his employer accused him of sexual impropriety the previous day. As the accusation spread, at least 25 armed white men, including the chief of the night police, pursued him, terrorized Meridianville by invading homes and conducting arbitrary searches, and seized his father to force information about his whereabouts. Around 5:00 am, the mob found Robert while he was eating breakfast 16 miles southeast of Huntsville; after he tried to flee, they shot him, causing a non-fatal injury, captured him, and carried him back to Meridianville to a wooded area where the alleged assault was said to have occurred. Around 4:30 pm, a crowd of 450 white men gathered to witness the lynching. Before he was hanged from a tree, Robert reportedly protested the mob's attempt to cover his face with a handkerchief, pleading, "Let me see one more time in this world." The mob left his body there, the white press praised the mob and the accuser afterward, Robert had no opportunity to defend himself at trial, and no one was ever held accountable.