John Henry James Lynched In Virginia For Being Very Black

There wasn’t much, isn’t much known about John Henry James other than he was an ice cream salesman in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was lynched by a mob of 150 White men on a locust tree in Woods Crossing, Virginia. John Henry James was murdered like so many other men in the 100 years after the end of the Civil War because a White woman said a Black man had assaulted her. In this case, it was a woman named Julia Hotopp who was returning to the family farm from Charlottesville, and she had dismounted to open the gate at the farm when someone assaulted her. When she woke up she saw the horse had gone to the house and saw her brother riding towards her. She fainted when he got to her side but woke again back in the house. She told him that a, “very black man, heavy set with a slight mustache in dark clothes and shoes with his toes sticking out”, had done the deed. The newspapers of the times wrote a very detailed account of her words. These papers also reported Hotopp had then passed out again and was under several doctors' care. Other writings on this lynching and the reports of the time John Henry James wasn’t a well-known man, a few people knew him from his ice cream sales route, but whether he lived in his own home or a boarding house, no one knew if he had other jobs, as he probably did because vagrancy and idleness could lead to incarceration. The newspapers though did everything they could to portray him as a vagrant and transient tramp. Based on the description Hotopp had provided authorities they looked for the darkest negro they could find and found John Henry James in a bar called Dudley’s in the town of Staughton. The police chief of Charlottesville arranged for a train to take him and John Henry James back to Charlottesville from Staughton. While a grand jury had already been impaneled and Hotopp’s statement collected, she also said she could identify her attacker if needed. Yet White rage was exploding all over Albemarle County and a mob formed to meet the train before John Henry James could be secured in the jail. The mob of 150 men stopped the train at Woods Crossing and pulled John Henry James off the train and drug him to a tree about 40 yards from the train after a few minutes of him pleading for mercy and declaring his innocence the mob hung him, to make sure he was dead they shot his body to pieces. The mob then dispersed but left the body where others could collect souvenirs. A coroner’s jury a day later declared that John Henry James died from bullet wounds and the hanging at the hands of persons unknown. Sources: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lynching-of-john-henry-james-1898-the/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/72083419/?terms=%22John%20Henry%20James%22%20 https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2018/06/06/the-legacy-of-john-henry-james/