Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of African Americans were victims of lynching and racial violence in the United States. Florida had one of the highest per-capita rates of Black victims lynched by white mobs, including five known lynchings in Hillsborough County: Galloway in 1892, John Crooms in 1893, Lewis Jackson in 1903, Samuel Arline in 1912, and Robert Johnson in 1934. Racial terror lynching was used to instill fear in the Black community and maintain white supremacy, with law enforcement, juries, and public officials often indifferent to, complicit in, or encouraging such violence. At least 319 victims of racial terror lynching were killed in Florida, and the resulting intimidation devastated African American communities for decades and drove many families to flee the South. On January 30, 1934, Robert Johnson, a 40-year-old Black man, was lynched in Tampa after being wrongly arrested two days earlier following a white woman’s report of an assault. The next day, Tampa law enforcement officers confirmed his innocence and cleared him of any connection to the assault, but instead of releasing him, officials turned him over in the middle of the night to an armed white man with no legal authority, the brother of the Hillsborough County constable, who falsely claimed to be a deputy constable. A few hours later, he reported that Johnson had been lynched by a mob, and Johnson’s body was found shot to death near the Hillsborough River at Sligh Avenue. A coroner’s jury concluded that no mob members could be identified and that the constable’s brother was not responsible for the murder, and no one was ever held accountable.