Of the 492 lynchings that occurred in Texas between 1882 and 1930, the incident that perhaps received the greatest notoriety, both statewide and nationally, was the mutilation and burning of an illiterate seventeen-year-old black farmhand named Jesse Washington by a white mob in Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916-an event sometimes dubbed the "Waco Horror."

As an angry mob dragged him from the hospital, Zachariah Walker is said to have cried, "For God's sake, give a man a chance! I killed Rice in self-defense. Don't give me no crooked death because I'm not white!" His pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. In a field just outside the borough of Coatesville, Walker was thrown into a hastily constructed fire. Three times he attempted to crawl out, only to be pushed back in until he moved no more.

There had been a lynching in Pickens County. A 24-year-old black man named Willie Earle had been seized from the county jail by a mob, carried across the Greenville County line and beaten, stabbed, and blasted twice at close range with a shotgun.

Eighty years ago, on Aug. 7, 1930, Lawrence Beitler took what would become the most iconic photograph of lynching in America. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were lynched in the town center of Marion, Ind., for allegedly murdering a white factory worker, Claude Deeter, and raping his companion, Mary Ball. But the case was never solved.

Seventy-five years ago, a 17-year-old was lynched in Union County. If L.Q. Ivy had lived, today he would be 94 years old - the same age as his sister-in-law, Mattie Ivy Bruce, who clearly remembers his murder.

It was a hotter than usual 4th of July on the streets of Jacksonville in the year 1892.  In fact, the city was dangerously close to igniting into a racial inferno.  The soupy summer air was ripe for lynching and if not for the organized resistance of the black population and the quick action of Sheriff Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, Jacksonville might easily have descended into an explosion of blood-red 4th of July fireworks.

On the night of March 23, 1912, an angry mob of men pulled Sanford Lewis, a black man, from the Fort Smith city jail and hanged him by his neck from a trolley pole.

The gruesome death of Willie Earle served as proof to at least one life motto, said James Shannon: the more things change, the more they stay the same. In observance of the 60-year anniversary of Earle’s death, Shannon’s Greenville-based magazine printed an in-depth essay describing what happened with 31 white men accused of murdering a 24-year-old black man, and why it matters.

I was recently asked if I had any knowledge of a 1918 crime that occurred in Huntsville, Texas (Walker County). The crime was described as the lynching of a family of six African Americans on June 4, 1918. I think I was asked about it because the family and I share the same surname, the crime was committed in Texas, and, finally, I live in Texas.