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Researchers unearth century-old documents in Virginia Beach lynching
After the Virginia Mercury’s two–part investigative series into the 1885 lynching of Noah Cherry in what is now Virginia Beach, staffers at the Library of Virginia in Richmond searched archives and discovered a variety of documents, including the coroner’s inquest about Cherry’s death, which hasn’t been seen publicly since the late 19th century. In a […]
Some Virginia newspapers powered political disenfranchisement, brutalization of Black people
When 10-year-old Alice Powell was mysteriously killed in 1885, the Norfolk Virginian and the Richmond Dispatch put together a timeline of her murder, which they blamed on Noah Cherry, a Black man who was lynched soon after the newspapers published the story. But the timelines didn’t agree with each other, or with the county’s death […]
New information in 138-year-old Virginia Beach lynching shatters state’s genteel veneer
According to a news story, Medora Alice Powell was singing a Christian hymn, “The Sweet By-and-By,” as the 10-year-old girl left for school early in the morning on Friday the 13th of November in 1885. She took a solitary path through a portion of the rural area then known as Princess Anne County where Holland […]