Lynching of Raymond Byrd

Raymond Arthur Byrd (April 2, 1895 – August 15, 1926) was an African-American farmhand and World War I veteran living in the Black Lick district of Wythe County, Virginia. Born in Speedwell, Virginia, he married Tennessee "Tennie" Hawkins in 1919, and the couple had three children. Byrd served in the 807th Pioneer Infantry in France during the war and later worked as a farmhand for Grover Grubb, a white landowner with three daughters.

In July 1926, one of Grubb's daughters, Minnie, gave birth to a child she had conceived with Byrd. Grover Grubb, enraged, pressed local prosecutors to charge Byrd with rape. An investigation by the Commonwealth Attorney and a private lawyer determined that two of Grubb's adult daughters had consented to relations with Byrd, meaning no charges could be sustained on that basis; however, Byrd was accused of molesting Grubb's third daughter, who was twelve years old, and charged accordingly. Wythe County Sheriff W.C. Kincer arrested Byrd peacefully on August 7, 1926, and he was held in the Wytheville jail under guard.

In the early morning of August 15, 1926, a mob of between 25 and 50 masked and armed men overpowered the jailer, Claude Richardson, and forced him to hand over the cell keys. Byrd was shot, beaten with rifle butts, tied to a car, dragged several miles, and hanged from a tree near St. Paul's Lutheran Church, close to Grover Grubb's farm. The jailer delayed reporting the abduction for more than an hour despite being unharmed, and the sheriff's response was limited to dispatching a single deputy. Byrd's body was found the next day and cut down by the sheriff on August 16, 1926.

The lynching drew national and regional press condemnation and embarrassed Governor Harry F. Byrd, who had sought to present Virginia as a progressive state. A grand jury composed entirely of white men convened in September 1926 and eventually indicted one man, Floyd Willard, for murder in January 1927, after he reportedly boasted to hunting companions about his role in the killing. At trial on July 19, 1927, Willard's family provided alibi testimony and neighbors vouched for his character; an all-white jury acquitted him after less than ten minutes of deliberation.

Public outrage over the lynching and the acquittal, fueled by advocacy from figures such as Norfolk Virginian-Pilot editor Louis I. Jaffé, contributed to the passage of Virginia's anti-lynching law. Governor Byrd signed the legislation on March 14, 1928, allowing members of a lynch mob to be prosecuted for murder collectively and empowering the governor to fund investigations into lynchings.