How a Murder Fueled Racial Terror in Florida

In December 1922, the body of Ruby Hendry, a twenty-four-year-old white teacher, was found beside a train track in Perry, Florida, touching off a manhunt historian Christopher Calton says became a campaign of racial terror. Police arrested four Black men with no real evidence before naming an escaped convict, Charlie Wright, as the suspect, and hundreds of armed men, aided by hounds, hunted him through the swamps for six days. As JSTOR Daily reports, vigilantes killed Black residents and burned the community's church, school, and lodge one building at a time while Wright remained free. When he was finally captured, a mob of thousands chained him to a stake and burned him alive, an episode Calton ties to the era's convict-leasing system, which trapped Black laborers in forced labor at nearby turpentine camps.

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