After the Civil War, white supremacy fueled violent resistance to equal rights for Black people, and lynching emerged as arbitrary, deadly violence used to enforce racial hierarchy and terrorize Black communities. Thousands of African Americans were lynched, often by large crowds, and their bodies were sometimes left on display for hours or days. In Lee County and elsewhere in Alabama, Black people faced a presumption of guilt that left them vulnerable to accusations and mob violence without investigation. On March 17, 1900, after a white teenager reported being startled on seeing Charles Humphries, a young Black employee of her father, in her room, a mob of white men went to his home near Phenix City the next morning and shot him more than 40 times. On November 3, 1902, an armed white mob seized Samuel Harris, who was picking cotton when two white women reported a robbery and assault nearby in Salem, and within hours, despite no evidence implicating him, more than 125 men shot him to death; his pregnant wife, Beatrice, was arrested as an accomplice, and newspapers did not report what happened to her afterward. In 1886, cousins John Moss and George Hart were among those searching for a missing white man in Waverly when a lynch mob accused them of murder; on November 3, white men kidnapped Moss, tortured him, hanged him, and burned his body. Hart was taken to the Montgomery jail to avoid mob violence, but after he returned to Opelika for trial on November 1, 1887, and news spread that the evidence against him was too weak for conviction, more than 60 armed white men kidnapped him from the Lee County Jail on November 5 and hanged him from the same tree as Moss, pinning a placard to his back threatening anyone who cut him down. White communities often supported such violence, local officials and law enforcement were complicit or ineffective, no one was held accountable in these killings, and lynching inflicted lasting traumatic wounds that drove thousands of Black people to flee the South as refugees of racial terror.