Between 1865 and 1950, racial terror lynching claimed the lives of thousands of African Americans and created a legacy of injustice that can still be felt today. After emancipation, white Southerners remained committed to white supremacy and used fatal violence and terror against Black communities to maintain the racial hierarchy and exploitative practices established during slavery. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of racial terrorism and was generally tolerated in communities with functioning criminal justice systems. White mobs targeted Black women, men, and children who exercised their civil rights, defied racial social customs, or were accused of crimes, often on mere accusations and without due process or equal protection under the law. Victims were regularly pulled from jails or delivered to mobs by law enforcement officers required to protect them. In Alabama, more than 360 documented racial terror lynchings took place, including at least 30 in Jefferson County. On December 7, 1896, William Wardley, a Black man, was lynched by an armed mob of white Irondale residents after a merchant refused to accept his money for apples because he assumed it was counterfeit. A mob that included a local minister and a police constable pursued Wardley and his two companions and fatally shot him, and his body was later found along a railroad track a little over a mile outside town. His two companions survived. Afterward, the U.S. Treasury Department investigated the counterfeit claim and proved the money was real, but its report did not mention Wardley’s death, white residents continued to maintain the false claim to justify the killing, the local press reported that Wardley caused his own death to avoid capture, and no one was ever held accountable for his lynching.