The lynching of Wyatt Outlaw
26 February 1870The courthouse square, Graham, Alamance County, NC
Klansmen took Graham's Black town commissioner from his home and hanged him in the courthouse square. The state's attempt to answer it ended with the governor impeached and removed from office.
Wyatt Outlaw came home from the Union army - he had served in the 2nd United States Colored Cavalry - and opened a woodworking shop on North Main Street in Graham, repairing wagons and making coffins. He founded and led the local Union League, was elected a town commissioner, and was by all accounts effective at working across the colour line in Alamance County. That was the problem.
On the night of 26 February 1870 a Klan mob of seventy to a hundred men dragged him from his house, past his young son, and hanged him from an elm limb in the courthouse square. They slashed his mouth and pinned a note to his body: "Beware you guilty both white and black."
Governor William Holden answered the Klan campaign by declaring Alamance and Caswell counties in insurrection and sending the militia under Colonel George Kirk - the Kirk-Holden War. The courts freed the men arrested, the Democrats took the legislature, and in 1871 Holden was impeached and removed from office, the first state governor in American history to be removed. Eighteen men were eventually indicted for Outlaw's murder. The charges were dropped. The killing of an elected Black official, and the destruction of the governor who tried to prosecute it, is as clear a picture as exists of how Reconstruction was ended.
Sources
- LynchingNCpedia, State Library of North Carolinancpedia.orgIncludes the detailed account of Outlaw's killing and the note left on his body.
- Kirk-Holden WarNCpedia, State Library of North Carolinancpedia.orgCarries the detail of the killing - the elm, the slashed mouth and the note pinned to the body - and the impeachment and removal of Governor Holden that followed.