Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of black people in the United States were victims of lynching and racial violence, especially in the South, where lynching of African Americans served as racial terrorism intended to intimidate black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy fueled violent abuse of racial minorities and decades of political, social, and economic exploitation, while white mobs often carried out brutal violence with impunity, sometimes with victims taken from jails by or with the cooperation of law enforcement officials. Many victims' names were never recorded, but more than 300 documented lynchings occurred in Alabama, with Jefferson County recording 29, the highest number in the state and the ninth highest total in the nation during this era. In August 1908, a group of white men took William Miller from his jail cell in Brighton, Alabama, during the night and lynched him in nearby woods. Miller was a black leader advocating better labor conditions in the coal mines when he was arrested on false charges of violence. Coal mining in Alabama began with slave labor in the 1840s and expanded in the late 1800s as Birmingham became "The Magic City," but after slavery ended, coal companies relied on black workers forced into bondage through convict leasing, under which tens of thousands of black people were arrested for trivial offenses and leased to private companies that worked them mercilessly. In Jefferson County, leased convicts and poorly paid black miners were seen as a threat by white laborers seeking higher pay, and although there were efforts to organize labor unions, the challenge that formerly enslaved people posed to existing labor practices and racial hierarchy was not tolerated by many whites. William Miller's lynching was an act of racial terror intended to discourage challenges to the existing racial order in Alabama's industrial and agricultural economies.