The Lynching of Benjamin Thomas, August 8, 1899

Alexandria Community Remembrance Project

Report by the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project Research Committee, July 2020

Warning: The following article contains graphic descriptions of the lynching of a Black teenager in 1899.

Introduction

Around midnight on August 8, 1899, a 16-year-old African American teenager named Benjamin Thomas was lynched in Alexandria, Virginia. A white mob comprised of Alexandria citizens attacked the city jail on St. Asaph Street, and Benjamin Thomas was dragged half a mile to the southwest corner of King and Fairfax streets, opposite Market Square:

He was dragged, with a rope around his neck, three squares over cobble stones and over the roughest streets of that rough old town, surrounded by a mob of 2,000 whites, who pelted him with stones, brickbats, pieces of iron, pocket knives, and sent bullets through his body for every inch of that distance.1

Benjamin Thomas was hanged from a lamppost and the medical doctor who testified at the coroner’s inquest stated that he died from a bullet wound to the heart.2

Two years before, on April 23, 1897, another African American teenager, Joseph McCoy, was lynched in Alexandria. A white mob attacked the city’s police station and pulled McCoy from his cell, dragged him with a rope around his neck, and then hanged him on the corner of Cameron and Lee Streets, only three blocks from where Benjamin Thomas would be murdered.3

Some things had changed in Alexandria since 1897.4 A different mayor and governor were in office, and members of the Alexandria Light Infantry had left to fight in the Spanish American War. However, there are striking commonalities between these two lynchings. They illustrate a much larger and wider history of systemic racism, injustice, and violence that persists in Alexandria, and America, to the present day.

This narrative highlights the inconsistencies, biases, sensationalism, and falsehoods in official statements and the white press’ reporting about the lynching. In both Alexandria lynchings, the white authorities were deliberately complicit in their refusal to name and bring to justice members of the white mob. In the case of Benjamin Thomas, the officers defending the jail were not prepared to do everything in their power to protect the prisoner. In fact, city officials and law enforcement officers obstructed and punished members of the Black community who were willing to stand up to white violence.

1 Cleveland Gazette (Cleveland, OH.), August 26, 1899, page 1. The Richmond Planet says the mob was comprised of “thousands,” Richmond Planet (Richmond, VA), August 12, 1899, page 2.
2 Alexandria Gazette, August 9, 1899, page 3.
3 Alexandria Gazette, August 8, 1899, page 3.
4 In the late 1890s Alexandria was a city of some 14,500 persons; 31% or about 4,500 were African American. https://www.academia.edu/25968918/The_African_American_Housing_Crisis_in_Alexandria_Virginia_1930s1960s, page 34.

{snip. This goes on for 32 pages.}