Raymond Arthur Byrd was a veteran of World War I, who served with the 807th Pioneer Infantry, a segregated unit fighting in France during the last months of combat in the fall of 1918. After the war, Byrd lived with his wife and three children in Black Lick, located just a few miles north of where route 76 crosses Mill Creek and several miles west of Wytheville. Bird worked as a laborer on a farm owned by a local white family. In the summer of 1926, Byrd was accused of inappropriate sexual relations, arrested, and then murdered while he was locked up in the Wytheville jail. Despite widespread condemnation of this lynching by state officials, including the governor, none of the white men who committed this murder were ever convicted. The lynching did result in the first Virginia state law regarding lynching, passed in 1928, but this episode must also be seen as part of a long history of using racialized violence to maintain structures of white supremacy in law, politics, and society. In the summer of 2020, a historical marker to the lynching of Raymond Byrd was placed in downtown Wytheville, along Route 76, due primarily to the sustained efforts of local historian John Johnson. Cyclists in southwestern Virginia thus have an opportunity to view, and reflect upon, the complicated history of racial relations that led to this lynching episode and the subsequent efforts to recognize the long term significance of this moment from almost a century ago.
Welcome to episode 24 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to the area where the route crosses Mill Creek, located nearly 430 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and just under 130 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte. Please note that this episode includes descriptions of graphic violence which some listeners may find disturbing.
Raymond Arthur Byrd died on August 15, 1926, while being held in prison in downtown Wytheville. Just a few days earlier, Byrd was accused by his employer, the white farmer, Grover Grubb, of fathering a child born to his daughter Minnie. An investigation demanded by Grubb led to criminal charges against Byrd. He was arrested and taken to the jail in Wytheville.
The events that followed were documented at the time and have been confirmed by more recent historical accounts. In the early hours of Sunday morning, August 16, 1926, a mob of about fifty men came to the jail in downtown Wytheville. All of the men had concealed their identities, and some wore women’s clothing. They forced their way into the jail and restrained the jailkeeper who was alone with the prisoners. Byrd was shot and killed while he was sleeping. The mob then beat his body with rifles. His lifeless body was removed from the jail, tied to the back of a car, and dragged about nine miles west toward his home and the farm of Raymond Grubb. His body was hung from a tree where it remained until it was removed by the Sheriff later on Sunday morning.
A report about the lynching was published the very next day in regional newspapers. Almost immediately, white newspapers across Virginia condemned the killing for violating due process of law. These editorial statements marked an unusual and almost unprecedented denunciation of violence against African American men. Governor Harry F. Byrd (no relation) echoed and amplified these condemnations. The governor appointed a special investigation team and offered an award for information about those who committed this attack.
Despite this public pressure, no arrests were made in the days, weeks, and even months that followed the lynching of Robert Byrd. More than 70 witnesses were interviewed, yet charges were brought against only one man of the estimated fifty men who took part in this attack. This man was acquitted by an all-white jury after a brief deliberation. No charges were ever filed again. Almost one hundred years later, the perpetrators of this crime have never been brought to account.
In 1928, the Virginia state legislature passed an anti-lynching law, driven in part by the establishment’s concern over extra-judicial killing. This law was the first time a state legislature passed a law banning lynching. At the same time, Virginia’s representatives in Congress along with almost all other southern white representatives fought with determination against the proposed federal anti-lynching bill, which was never passed into law.
African American newspapers have long occupied an important yet complicated place in public discourse. From their founding, these newspapers have always devoted attention to issues most directly relevant to African Americans. In this way, they have addressed filled gaps left by the white press and challenged perceptions that served to reinforce the dominant white order. These newspapers, along with The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led efforts to pressure Congress to pass a national law against lynching. Although these efforts failed, due primarily to determined opposition from white southern representatives, the efforts of these journalists brought public attention to extrajudicial killings which primarily targeted African American men.
In their response to the lynching of Byrd, Virginia’s two leading Black newspapers, the Richmond Planet and Norfolk Journal and Guide, concentrated on highlighting the reaction of the white establishment, including statements from the governor and editorials from white newspapers. The condemnation of the lynching published by editors of majors newspapers in Richmond, Norfolk, Roanoke, and other cities were republished in these two newspapers as evidence that the killing was widely repudiated by the leading voices in the state.
Both newspapers also published their own articles and editorials denouncing the killing of Byrd by the white mob. On August 21, the weekly Norfolk Journal and Guide published a front page story that described the killing in graphic detail, which ended with the sentence: “Thus, Virginia retains its place in the column of lynching states.” The article also described the steps taken by the Governor, and then ended with the statement that “Wytheville was not excited about the affair,” suggesting that this murder was already being forgotten or suppressed within the local community. The latter point was the focus of an editorial in the same issue, which used satire to complain that the murder of an African American was treated as little more than “a prank” by the white community in Wytheville.
One week later, in the August 28 issue, the Norfolk Journal and Guide made a connection between Byrd’s death and the potential for meaningful legislation on this issue: “A lynching is so dark and heinous; so revolting to the precepts of civilization and to the tenets of orderly constituted society that there can be no bright spots about it, but if there is to be discerned a ray of light anywhere in connection with Virginia’s latest lynching, it is the torch held up the State press in publishing, uncolored and uncompromisingly, the full details of the diabolical mess, then editorially denouncing it resolutely and unequivocally, and demanding that the law of the Commonwealth be made to reach and punish these offenders against its majesty.” The editorial then demanded: “The mob must be taught its lesson. The administrators of the law must be made to know that the people demand that their laws shall not be flouted nor derided by any man or group of men; that personal vengeance must never dethrone legal process in Virginia. The Wytheville lynchers can be caught, and the long arm of the law should not relent in its quest until they are rounded up and made to pay the penalty of murderers.”
As it became clear that no legal measures would be taken against the killers, the Norfolk Journal and Guide repeated this complaint that perpetrators of this crime had little cause for concern in an August 28 editorial: “Considering these allegations, is there any cause for fear of punishment on the part of lynchers in Virginia? They know that it is more precarious to bootleg liquor or to break the speed limit on the highway than it is to riddle a human being with bullets, savagely mutilate his body, and hang it to a tree limb. Why, lynchers know that no local acquiescence is required for the State’s legal machinery to go anywhere in its confines after the distiller or the speeder, but when it comes to pursuing participants in mob violence, local ineptitude may effectively become an impasse.”
Even as the white establishment and African American newspapers joined together to condemn the lynching as extra-judicial killing, no efforts was made to use this incident to question or challenge the existing system of racial segregation. Virginia’s white political elite regularly affirmed that white supremacy was both a political priority and a legislative fact. The Public Assemblage law, passed in March 1926, just a few months before the Byrd’s lynching, required racial segregation in all places of public assembly, thus elevating a set of local practices to the level of state law, which made Virginia unique among all states.
African American newspapers also used the example of this lynching to encourage some acceptance of the system of segregation for the sake of the African American population. In an editorial published on September 11, the Richmond Planet condemned this most recent example of lynching, which the paper had denounced for more than forty years. Yet one lesson that the editorial cited from this incident was the importance of practicing “racial integrity” by maintaining the separation of the races, while allowing the judicial machinery to continue its work: “Find out the Wytheville lynchers and place them where they belong…Governor Byrd is doing his best. Punish the lynchers.”
The death of Robert Byrd was the subject of limited scholarly research in the decades that followed, but largely faded from public view until the determined efforts of one man, John Johnson. A retired Army veteran and engineer, Johnson grew up in Wytheville, where he heard from family about the death of Byrd. He also learned how to navigate public spaces where open expressions of racism were expected and accepted by the white majority. Johnson spent almost thirty years collecting facts about African Americans in Wythe County, including as much as possible about the death of Byrd. Johnson began by talking with African Americans, including his father, one of several men guarding the jail on the night of Byrd’s murder. He also consulted with a daughter of Byrd, still living in Wytheville. Johnson also began speaking with white community members, including some who admitted that their relatives had been part of the mob that carried out the lynching. Even as he sought more evidence about the death of Byrd, Johnson repeatedly encountered community members who warned him not to dig up this difficult moment in the town’s history.
Yet some white community members responded more favorably to Johnson’s inquiries. A piece of rope used to tie Byrd’s hands after he was murdered is now part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum of African American history in Washington DC. This rope was given to Johnson by a white man in Wytheville, whose family had kept the relic hidden behind a wardrobe for decades.
This episode also connects these events from a century ago to the ways that recent events associated with the deaths of African American men have challenged beliefs about race, violence, and the law. These shifts are illustrated by the decision made in summer 2020 to place a historical marker in downtown Wytheville to commemorate the lynching of Raymond Byrd, a visible reminder along route 76 of the continued effort to recognize the victims of racist violence and their long term significance in American life.
The historical marker placed in downtown Wytheville was the product primarily of John Johnson’s determined effort to uncover the facts of this lynching and to bring this disturbing history to the attention of the public. The marker was also a product of the transformation in historical memory about these issues during the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by a member of law enforcement, which brought widespread attention to the deaths of African American men in history. The marker was established by the town of Wytheville, but the driving force behind this decision was local historian John Johnson, whose decades of research made it possible to establish this historical marker.
Cyclists along Route 76 will pass by several locations relevant to this history. Black Lick, where Byrd lived with his family, is just north of route 76. Cyclists will also pass St Paul Methodist Church, not far from the tree where Byrd’s lifeless body was hung after his death. Murpheyville Cemetery, where Byrd was buried, is located just west of route 76 in Rural Retreat. The tombstone reads: “Raymond Arthur Byrd. Virginia. Private. 807 Pioneer Infantry. August 15, 1926.” The inscription thus references Byrd’s military service — a fact that appears not to have been acknowledged in the numerous press accounts of his murder. The application for this headstone was submitted to the War Department in 1936, a decade after this veteran was killed in a lynching, by his widow, Tennie Byrd Patterson. The historical marker about Raymond Byrd is located directly on route 76, in a downtown Wytheville municipal park, not far from the historical jail where he was murdered by a mob.
You have been listening to episode 24 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to the area where the route crosses Mill Creek, located nearly 430 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and just under 130 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte. To learn more about the stories in this episode, visit our website or follow us on social media, all accessible from the homepage for this podcast.
