Book Displays: Equal Justice Initiative 2024: Feb

The materials for this month's subject contain disturbing subject matter and images and may be upsetting or traumatizing to some audiences.

Calendar photo caption: A mother and child collect soil to honor a victim of racial terror lynching as part of EJI's Community Remembrance Project. (Ozier Muhammad)

Many white people sought to enforce racial hierarchy by instilling fear in the Black community through brutal violence that was often unpredictable and arbitrary. Among the documented victims of racial terror lynchings are dozens of children, including infants and toddlers under the age of five. 

On October 3, 1908, in Fulton County, Kentucky, five Black children in the Walker family were lynched along with their father by a mob of 50 white men. The men shot to death four of the children, including an infant who was hit by a bullet while in the arms of their mother, and burned the fifth child alive in the Walker family's home. No one was ever convicted for these murders. 

A 12-year-old Black boy named L.D. Nelson was seized by a white mob from a jail in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, and hanged from a bridge along with his mother on May 24, 1911. Even though unmasked men had launched a full-scale attack on the jail with law enforcement present, a grand jury declined to indict anyone for the crime. 

Two Black teenage boys, 15-year-old Ernest Collins and 16-year-old Benny Mitchell, were lynched by a mob of at least 700 white men, women, and children in Colorado County, Texas, on November 12, 1935. Several newspapers printed a photograph of two white local law enforcement officials posing with a rope used in the lynching, but no one in the mob was punished. 

Of the 6,500 victims of racial terror lynching that EJI has documented in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950, nearly 100 are children. The racial terror lynchings of more children went unreported, and in many cases, the identity of victims remains unknown.