Horace Maples was an African-American man who was lynched by a mob of approximately 2,000 people in Huntsville, Alabama, on September 7, 1904. Maples had been accused of murder and was being held in the county jail when it was set on fire by the crowd. He jumped from a second story window in the jail, but was seized by the crowd and hanged on a tree on the courthouse lawn. Brent J. Aucoin, Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South, University Alabama Press. 2016 Maples' body was then shot full of bullets by people in the crowd. Thirty years of lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. Compiled and published by the NAACP April 1919, p. 15
A state court grand jury returned indictments against some of those who actively participated in the lynching, but these were overturned. Later, however, federal judge Thomas Goode Jones, a former Confederate, ruled that the lynchers had violated federal laws.Brent Aucoin, A Rift in the Clouds: Race and the Southern Federal Judiciary, 1900-1910, University of Arkansas Press. 2007
Memorial A memorial in Maples' memory and his death was established at the Madison County Courthouse on September 7, 2020.
References
External links "HANGED BY A MOB. Negro Who Murdered White Man Smoked Out of Jail and Lynched." Ingham County News (Mason, Mich.). Sept. 15, 1904, p. 3