Between the end of the Civil War and the close of World War II, white mobs killed thousands of Black Americans in racial terror lynchings and committed widespread violence that traumatized millions more. In Lowndes County, Alabama, the courthouse built in 1856 stood in a community where thousands of Black people were still enslaved, and for generations afterward Black residents received little or no protection from racial violence. In addition to the 1888 lynching of Theo Calloway on the courthouse grounds, at least six more of Lowndes County's sixteen documented African American lynching victims were seized from jail or police custody when killed: William Westmoreland in 1896, John Jackson in 1900, William Jones in 1914, Samuel and William Powell in 1917, and G. Smith Watkins in 1935. White lynch mobs were emboldened by legal systems that refused to arrest, prosecute, or punish mob members, and as late as 1948 a grand jury in this courthouse refused to indict white men who admitted shooting and killing Elmore Bolling, a prosperous Black businessman. Most documented Lowndes County lynchings never even resulted in a lyncher's arrest, and none led to a murder conviction. On March 29, 1888, a mob of at least 200 white men lynched Theo Calloway, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, near the courthouse in Lowndes County. Accused of killing a white man, he insisted he had acted in self defense, but he never had the chance to stand trial. Aided by the local sheriff, the mob abducted him from jail just hours before he was scheduled to appear in court, hanged him from a chinaberry tree on the courthouse lawn, and riddled his body with bullets while armed officers made no effort to protect him. Theo Calloway, one of at least eleven children, was from nearby Sandy Ridge. His parents, Johnson and Fanny Calloway, arrived for his hearing and instead had to retrieve their son's mangled corpse. For months afterward, Lowndes County Black residents protested the lynching, but local newspaper headlines applauded the mob's act, and with support from the governor, local law enforcement and state officials violently confronted and arrested dozens of Black people for demanding justice. No one was ever punished for the lynching.