Charlotte Harris

Charlotte Harris was lynched by a white mob near Harrisonburg on March 6, 1878. Two weeks earlier, Harris had been accused of instigating a young African American man to burn down a barn belonging to a local and prominent white family. On the night of March 6, 1878, she was abducted, or relinquished from the custody of law enforcement, while awaiting trial; Harris was hung from a tree a few hundred yards from her jail holding cell. 

In the weeks that followed Harris’ lynching, a grand jury convened on Court Square in Harrisonburg to investigate and indict her killers but in the end would refuse to charge any of them with the crime. The judge presiding over this grand jury went on to become the Governor of Virginia from 1894 -1898, Charles Triplett O’Ferrall. He would make no mention of the case in his memoir. The young man initially accused of igniting the barn was later exonerated. 

The 1878 lynching of Charlotte Harris in Harrisonburg is the only documented case of the lynching of an African American woman in all of Virginia’s history.