The Lynching of Benjamin Thomas (Historical Marker)

Here follows the inscription written on this roadside historical marker:

The Lynching of Benjamin Thomas
August 8, 1899

Close to midnight on Tuesday, August 8, 1899, Benjamin Thomas, a 16-year-old Black Alexandrian, was lynched from a lamppost on this corner.

Earlier, white rioters attacked the City Jail on N. St. Asaph Street, where they seized and dragged Thomas for a half-mile on a cobblestone street, hitting him with bricks, iron, and stones, as he cried out for his mother. Under the shadow of City Hall and the police station, he was stabbed, kicked, shot, and hanged.

On Monday, August 7, 1899, police had arrested Thomas on the word of an eight-year-old white neighbor and charged him with assaulting her.

When Alexandria's Black community learned of Thomas' arrest, they feared another lynching. Two years earlier, a white mob murdered a local Black teenager, Joseph McCoy, based on similar allegations. Attempting to protect Thomas from such a fate, groups of Black men organized, offering their aid to police. The police and Alexandria's mayor, George Simpson, ridiculed their concerns.

Mayor Simpson stood on the steps of the jail and asked the mob to leave, saying "Fellow citizens, if you will disperse and go away quietly, I will promise you that a court will be convened today.... If this is not done, I will give you my word, as a man of honor, that I will personally lead a mob tomorrow night to lynch Thomas...."

The police arrested many in the Black community that night and the mayor sentenced them to heavy fines or jail time. Yet, no whites were held accountable for the lynching of Benjamin Thomas.

After the brutality inflicted on Thomas, his body was taken to Demaine funeral home on King Street. His mother, Elizabeth Thomas, "could not bear to look upon her boy." At the memorial service at Shiloh Baptist Church, a crowd of 600 people heard Rev. Henry H. Warring proclaim Thomas an honest boy, innocent of the crime that led to his lynching.

After Thomas was interred at Penny Hill Cemetery, the Black community mobilized to assist the Thomas family to raise funds to move his body from a pauper's grave into Douglass Cemetery, but the relocation was not recorded. There is still a question as to the final resting place of Benjamin Thomas.

At this location on August 8, 1899, just before midnight, Benjamin Thomas was lynched.

[Caption:]
Leadbeater Corner, site of the lynching. "It is a dismantled post at the southwest corner of King and Fairfax Streets… The lamp was removed and the iron post permitted to stand when the electric lighting system was installed several years ago. On this post is a United States letter box." Times (Washington, D.C.), August 10, 1899. Photo courtesy Alexandria Special Collections Library.

Erected 2021 by City of Alexandria, Virginia; Alexandria Community Remembrance Project.