Charles Lewis (1918)

Charles Lewis was a Black soldier who had just been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army when a masked white mob hanged him near Hickman, in Fulton County, Kentucky, on December 16, 1918, about a month after the end of World War I. He was still in his uniform. Lewis was accused of robbery. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, when a deputy tried to search him, Lewis denied the charge and pointed to his Army uniform as evidence that he was a soldier, not a thief; he was then charged with assault and resisting arrest and jailed. Around midnight a masked mob of seventy-five to one hundred men stormed the jail, smashed the locks with a sledgehammer, pulled Lewis from his cell, and hanged him from a tree. The next day, hundreds of white residents came to view his body, still in uniform. No one was arrested. His killing is one of the earliest in the wave of violence against returning Black servicemen that continued through the Red Summer of 1919.