Lynching of George Taylor

On October 30, 1918, Ruby Rogers was at her home near Rolesville, North Carolina, while her husband, Leonidus "Lee" Rogers, a prominent local farmer, was away on business about 2 miles distant. Rogers later stated that an African-American man entered her home, threatened her with a knife, and sexually assaulted her before fleeing. A physician who examined her afterward confirmed that an assault had occurred.

In the days that followed, local police brought at least three African-American men to Rogers for identification as possible suspects. She did not identify any of them, and each was released. As tensions rose among white residents of Rolesville, law enforcement intervened to stop a mob attempting to seize one of the released suspects.

On November 5, 1918, police received information that George Taylor, an African-American man, had visited a friend in the Rolesville area on the day of the assault. He was arrested in nearby Wilson, North Carolina, and brought to the Rogers farm for identification. Rogers initially stated that Taylor was not her assailant, but after he was asked to repeat certain phrases she said had been used during the attack, she identified him as the man who had assaulted her.

Police placed Taylor in a vehicle to transport him to Raleigh, the Wake County seat, to begin the arrest process. Before leaving the Rogers property, the vehicle was stopped by four masked, armed men, who forcibly removed Taylor and took him into nearby woods. His body was discovered the next morning near the woods. According to press accounts, he had been severely injured and tortured before his death, shot more than 100 times, and hanged upside down by his feet from a tree; his back and sides had been cut with a knife after death.

Authorities conducted an inquiry into the lynching, interviewing more than 30 people, both Black and white, from the community. Consistent with the pattern in many lynching cases of the era, no suspects were ever publicly named and no one was charged in connection with Taylor's death. The Durham Herald reported that witnesses were "displaying either unparalleled ignorance of the doings in their community, or are champion forgetters."

The case was described in contemporaneous press coverage as a "genuine old-fashioned lynching" and is identified as the only known lynching to have occurred in Wake County, North Carolina. In 2018, on the 100th anniversary of his death, George Taylor was publicly honored in a commemorative event.