After the Civil War, an ideology of white supremacy persisted as many Americans continued to believe in racial hierarchy, and violent resistance to Black equality ushered in an era of racial terrorism in which more than 6,500 Black people were victims of racial terror lynchings in the United States between 1865 and 1950. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of terror and racial control, and spectacle lynchings that often included burning flesh and mutilation traumatized African American communities while reinforcing white racial dominance through gruesome public torture and murder. Crowds of often thousands of ordinary white Americans gathered to view and participate in these violent public lynchings, and during an era when the definition of Black-on-white rape did not require an allegation of force and any allegation of a Black man coming in contact with a white woman could lead to deadly violence, white mobs lynched thousands of Black men. In Omaha, George "Joe Coe" Smith, a 50-year-old husband and father, was falsely accused of the rape and murder of a white child and lynched in 1891 after being arrested, seized from the Douglas County jail, beaten to death, and hanged from a pole at 17th & Harney, and although many victims' names will never be known, at least 5 lynchings have been documented in Nebraska. On September 28, 1919, thousands of white people in Omaha, aided by local law enforcement, lynched Will Brown, a Black man who had been accused after another account from a white woman reporting a rape was published in the local press. Although Brown maintained his innocence, the sympathetic white press published false allegations and justified public violence, and a crowd of hundreds of armed white people led by the woman's brother formed and accused him. After Brown, a 40-year-old laborer, was arrested, hundreds of people set the Douglas County Courthouse on fire and seized him from jail as local law enforcement yelled, "Come and get him! He is yours!" Thousands of white men and women watched as Brown was beaten and hanged from a pole at 18th and Harney, then his body was shot for twenty minutes, tied to a police car, dragged several blocks to 17th & Dodge, set on fire, and dragged through the streets of downtown Omaha. No one was ever held accountable for Will Brown's lynching.