Between 1882 and 1930, Florida had one of the highest per capita lynching rates in the United States, and Alachua County ranked near the top. After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution ended slavery and extended constitutional rights to Black people, but many white communities responded with violence and lynching to preserve racial hierarchy. Racial terror lynching emerged as violent resistance to emancipation and equal rights for African Americans, intended to intimidate Black people and maintain white economic, political, and social control. Black women, men, and children were lynched for resisting economic exploitation, violating perceived social customs, engaging in interracial relationships, or being accused of crimes even without evidence. In Alachua County, many white business leaders and politicians promoted racial terrorism to drive down wages, deny Black land ownership, and prevent Black people from voting, while newspapers often justified mob violence by promoting racist stereotypes and supporting extra-legal killings. More than 350 victims of racial terror lynching were documented in Florida between 1865 and 1950, with at least 12 people lynched in Gainesville. White mobs lynched at least four Black men in Gainesville between 1877 and 1950 in disregard of the legal system and their constitutional rights: Tony Champion, abducted from his jail cell and hanged from a tree near NE 6th Street on February 17, 1891; Andrew Ford, seized from jail and lynched from the same tree on August 24, 1891; Alfred Daniels, handed over by a complicit deputy sheriff to a white mob that hanged him and riddled his body with bullets on November 26, 1896; and Lester Watts, a Black farmer fatally shot by white men in front of his wife near University Ave. on March 21, 1942. Even before Reconstruction ended in 1877 and federal protection for Black people in the South was withdrawn, white mobs in Gainesville had lynched at least eight Black people, and no one was ultimately held accountable for the lynchings of Champion, Ford, Daniels, or Watts.
