City Jail: A Site of Racial Terror in Alexandria (Historical Marker)

Here follows the inscription written on this roadside historical marker:

City Jail: A Site of Racial Terror in Alexandria
Lynching of Benjamin Thomas, 1899
— City of Alexandria, Est. 1749 —

At this intersection, a jail opened in 1827 when Alexandria was a part of Washington, D.C. In the 19th century, it housed criminals, debtors, and Civil War military prisoners. Before Emancipation, the jail was among the locations where enslaved people were sold. Later, Alexandrians arrested for Black Code violations, such as vagrancy, and sentenced to work on the chain gang were housed here. Attached to the ail was a tall, whitewashed wall, enclosing a courtyard that served as the site of several executions.

In the summer of 1899, this jail was the scene of the lynching of Benjamin Thomas, a Black teen accused by a 7-year-old white child of attempted assault.

Alexandrian Freeman H.M. Murray wrote in his diary, "a boy, Ben Thomas, was arrested here for attempted assault. The evidence was very meager - the little girl saying he pulled up her clothes. The next night he was lynched brutally, dragged, etc. It has been a fearful shock to the city, the colored people particularly. Many whites deplore it. There has been a great deal of lynching & white capping in the South this summer." On the night Thomas was arrested, a threat of a lynching drew out Black leaders to protect him. Authorities would later blame these heroes for upsetting the white community and causing the lynching.

In the 1980s, the jail closed, and the property was developed into a townhouse community. A portion of the jail's facade and exterior wall remain today as part of these private residences.

A "Public Prison" for the Enslaved
Long before a lynch mob abducted Benjamin Thomas from the Alexandria ail, this site was one of racial oppression, particularly due to its connection to slavery. Within a decade of Congress authorizing $10,000 to build this jail, the American Anti-Slavery Society featured it in an oversized broadsheet documenting how "public prisons" in the nation's capital — funded by taxpayers — were associated with slavery.

The jail regularly held Black people who had been captured after attempting to escape from bondage until their enslavers claimed them. Some enslaved people were publicly auctioned at this site, often because their enslaver did not want to claim them, or to pay off a dead enslaver's debt.

Enslaved people charged with serious crimes in Alexandria City, and County — present-day Arlington — were frequently incarcerated here. In 1858, Jenny Farr, was executed in the yard after being sentenced to death for killing her enslaver's wife who had abused her. A local paper wrote, "five hundred persons witnessed the sad scene."

Trail of Terror
On August 8, between 500 and 2000 people were outside this jail demanding authorities turn over Benjamin Thomas. Police refused to give him up. Gunshots ran out and the guards sought cover in an interior office. After ramming the jailhouse door with a beam, at least 50 men entered the building looking for Thomas, but they were confronted with a fortified door. When they worked to open it, Mayor George Simpson appealed to the crowd to go home, promising to call a Grand Jury the next day to "legally" hang Thomas.

After breaking into the hall, the lynchers terrorized prisoners while searching for Thomas. "As the mob caught sight of him, a piercing shriek of exultation rent the air. Pistols were fired and a throng of hundreds charged down upon the helpless victim," wrote The Washington Post, August 9, 1899.

According to news accounts, they placed a rope around his neck, in his mouth and under his arms, the "hooting and jeering mob" dragged him, "his head bumping over cobblestones." For over a half a mile, they struck, stabbed, and kicked Thomas who cried out for his mother.

"His cries and moans were heartrending," wrote the Evening Star, "down to King Street the crowd proceeded, shouting and firing pistols in the air."

At the corner of King and Fairfax Streets, they hanged Benjamin Thomas from a lamp post, then fired rounds of bullets into his body.

Timeline
• April 23, 1897
Joseph McCoy is lynched.

• August 7, 1899
8:00 p.m.
Benjamin Thomas is arrested.

8:00 p.m. - 2:00 a.m.
Alexandria's African American community alerts officials to a lynching threat.

• August 8, 1899
2:30 a.m.
Black Americans are arrested for disorderly conduct, carrying concealed weapons and attempting to incite a riot.

12:00 p.m.
Thomas is sent to this jail to await a grand jury.

10:00 p.m.
An armed lynch mob assembles outside the jail.

11:00 p.m.
The mayor tries to persuade the mob to leave by promising a "legal" execution the next day.

11:00 p.m. - 12:00 a.m.
The mob takes Thomas and hangs him at the corner of King and South Fairfax Streets.

• August 9, 1899
11:00 a.m.
A Coroner's Inquest determines Thomas died of two gunshot wounds to his heart.

12:00 p.m.
A Coroner's Jury finds that Thomas came to his death "from gunshot wounds inflicted at the hands of a mob unknown to the jury."

[Captions:]
Constructed in 1827, the Alexandria jail was located at the northeast corner of Princess and North St. Asaph Streets. After the jail closed in 1987, the west façade was preserved and incorporated into new homes standing today.

Aerial View Route of Thomas Lynching
The jail and jail yard are visible in this photograph taken from a plane and looking east over Alexandria in 1919. Red boxes and arrows show the six-block path the lynch mob took after abducting Benjamin Thomas. They dragged Thomas down St. Asaph Street and then east on King Street to the southwest corner at Fairfax Street where they hanged him from a lamp post and shot him to death.

Erected 2023 by City of Alexandria, Virginia; Alexandria Community Remembrance Project; sponsored by Walter E. Steimel, Jr.


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Here follows an excerpt from the "Civil War Washington D.C." blog written on Sunday, January 22, 2012:

Alexandria's Jail and Contrabands

Last month, Kate Masur recounted in the New York Times Opinionator Senator Henry Wilson's December 1861 crusade against the "sordid conditions" in the Washington city jail faced by African-Americans. In Washington, African Americans were regularly detained by the city's constables as suspected fugitives and held without charges in the city jail through 1862. Not entirely surprisingly, this practice also occurred south of the Potomac in Union occupied Alexandria. 150 years ago this month, Senator Wilson, a Massachusetts Republican, rose on the Senate floor to read into the record a scathing critique of the situation in Alexandria's jail.

In May 1861, some secessionists fleeing Alexandria on the eve of the Union invasion paid a fee to deposit their slaves in the jail to prevent them from running away. Amongst the slaves held there were those of John A. Washington, George Washington's great-grandnephew who was serving the Confederacy. What particularly galled abolitionists was that despite the jail now being run by Union authorities, this practice persisted. For example, in January 1862, a Mrs. Marshall, an affluent Virginian was arrested inside Federal lines, disguised. Her apparent purpose for entering Union lines was to retrieve two of her runaway slaves and have them held in the Alexandria jail for "safe keeping."

On December 9, 1861, The New York Times reported that Mr. Allen, the Government detective, had inspected the prison and found the conditions there to be as "equally revolting with those which have come to light in reference to the Washington jail." (Allen may have been a reference to "Maj. E.J. Allen," the pseudonym used by detective Allen Pinkerton at the time.) Senator Wilson, a strong abolitionist, first visited Alexandria's city jail at about the same time to inquire into the conditions of the contrabands there. A month later, he rose on the Senate to read from a follow-up letter that he had received from Dr. Samuel G. Howe concerning the conditions of the contrabands in Alexandria's jail:

"The same atrocities are practiced under the same authority in the jail at Alexandria, which I lately inspected. The building is a wretched one, totally unfit for a public prison. It seems to have been built in the days when accused persons were considered as public enemies, and to be caged like wild beasts. The cells are narrow, darnk, and damp ... In the case of the negroes who are arrested for being without free papers or passes, the board is paid by the master when he comes for them. If no claimant appears, and the poor fellow cannot prove that he is free, he is kept until the fees amount to a sum, when he may be sold..."