This Day in History: 1914-03-31

A white lynch mob in Wagoner County, Oklahoma, seized a 17-year-old Black teenaged girl named Marie Scott from the local jail, dragged her screaming from her cell, and hanged her from a nearby telephone pole. Days before, a young white man named Lemuel Pierce was stabbed to death while he and several other white men were in the city’s “colored section”; Marie was accused of being involved. The Associated Press wire report and accounts published by Northern papers explained that the group of white men had ventured into the Black residential area to sexually assault Black women and attempted to rape Marie Scott. Learn more.