Between 1865 and 1950, thousands of African Americans were victims of mob violence and racial terror lynching across the United States as white Southerners resisted equal rights after the Civil War and sought to uphold white supremacy through intimidation and fatal violence. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of racial terrorism, intended to terrorize the entire Black community with arbitrary and unpredictable mob violence, often with the involvement or tolerance of law enforcement and public officials who failed to protect Black people and rarely held mob participants accountable. At least 120 racial terror lynchings have been documented in North Carolina, including at least three in Buncombe County. On August 11, 1897, Bob Brackett, a Black traveling laborer working in the Asheville, North Carolina, area, was lynched by a mob of at least 1,000 white people in Reems Creek Township. After a white woman from Weaverville reported an assault on August 8, 1897, race-based suspicion was immediately directed toward Black men in the area. On August 10, despite a lack of evidence and no investigation, a mob of white men seized Brackett at the home of a local reverend in nearby Barnardsville, and he was detained in the Buncombe County Jail in Asheville. When a white mob stormed the jail and found that the sheriff had taken Brackett by train to Raleigh, the mob abducted him from the sheriff at the Terrell train station and marched him approximately 12 miles on foot toward the location of the reported attack. Before reaching Weaverville, the mob lynched Brackett on the grounds of the Hemphill School. No one was ever held accountable for his lynching.