Lucius McCarty

Lucius McCarty was a Black veteran of World War I. On August 31, 1919, a white mob of about 1,500 people at Bogalusa, in Washington Parish, Louisiana, shot him more than a thousand times after he was accused of attempting to assault a white woman. The mob then dragged his body behind a car through the town's Black neighborhoods and burned it in a bonfire. His killing was one of many directed at returning Black servicemen during the Red Summer of 1919, and it added to the racial tension in Bogalusa in the months before the violent suppression of a biracial labor union there that November.