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 functioned 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 abuse of racial minorities and decades of political, social, and economic exploitation, while white mobs often carried out brutal violence with impunity, sometimes with the cooperation or inaction of law enforcement. In Alabama alone, more than 350 documented lynchings took place. In the middle of the night on February 11, 1906, a large white mob abducted Bunk Richardson from the Etowah County Jail in Gadsden and lynched him. In July 1905, three men were accused of the rape and murder of a white woman; Richardson was not involved in the crime but knew one of the suspects and was also arrested. After the four were taken to the jail in Gadsden, a mob of 300 people gathered to lynch the suspects, but it was held back and the prisoners were taken to Jefferson County the following day. Two of the accused, Jack Hunter and Vance Gardner, were later tried, convicted, and executed in Gadsden for the crime. The third, Will Johnson, was also convicted and sentenced to death, but Alabama Governor William Jelks doubted Johnson’s guilt and commuted his sentence to life in prison, and Johnson was sent back to Jefferson County to serve that sentence. The commutation sparked outrage in Gadsden, and a mob responded by seizing Richardson from the jail even though he had never been charged with the crime. The mob dragged him down the street and hanged him from the train trestles crossing over the Coosa River. His relatives were forced to leave town and abandon thriving businesses, the entire Black community lived in fear, and no one was ever charged for his lynching.