Warning: The following article includes descriptions of violent crime. This post is not recommended for young readers.

In the summer of 1897, a heinous crime was committed in the community of West Point. In the next few hours, in their zeal for vengeance, the people of the county committed a similarly heinous crime in retribution for the act. This is the story of the worst lynching in Lawrence County’s history.

On July 13, 1897, 18-year-old Rena Williams, the daughter of W.L. Williams of West Point, granddaughter of the late Confederate Captain Lewis Kirk, and fiancée of a Mr. Pardue of Nashville, left her home in the morning to pick blackberries nearby. When she didn’t return, friends and neighbors began to search for her.

They found her lifeless body at around 5 p.m. Rena was tied to a tree by the neck, exposed, with part of her clothing stuffed in her mouth. She had been raped and brutally beaten around her face and chest, with one eye gouged out.

Someone recognized the strap used to tie her neck to the tree, and said they had seen a local black man named Anthony “Bull” Williams in possession of it not long before. The entire community immediately took up arms and went out in search of Anthony Williams, who was nowhere to be found.

Using bloodhounds belonging to a Mr. Morrison, the sheriff and several other search parties tracked Williams through Iron City. That night, Williams stayed at the home of a black woman, to whom he gave Rena’s belt.

At around 1 or 2 o’clock on the afternoon of July 15, Williams approached the home of a Mr. Clark, who lived near the Hines community of Lauderdale County, Alabama (near modern Zip City), about sixteen miles of where the rape and murder had occurred. Williams asked Mrs. Clark if he could have “a chew of tobacco.” She sent him to the field, where Mr. Clark was working. Clark saw that Williams’s face and arms were scratched very deeply, and held him in custody until a search party came near.

The depth of his wounds indicated to those who captured him that Rena gave a fierce struggle in her final moments. Once he was in custody of the mob, the men told Williams that they intended to take him back to the same tree where he had raped and murdered Rena, where they intended to tie him and burn him alive.

When the party reached West Point, however, an angry crowd of more than 500 people had gathered, including a group of around 15-20 people from Florence, and Rena’s fiancé, all of who had taken the train to Westpoint in order to participate in the lynching.

When the furious mob first saw Williams at around 7 p.m., they could not contain their rage. Williams was knocked to the street, beaten mercilessly, and trampled to death. Everyone present with a weapon then fired “volley after volley” on Williams, before piling railroad cross ties atop his body, soaking him in coal oil, and setting his corpse on fire in the street.[1]

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[1] “A Horrible Crime,” Florence Times. (Florence, Ala.) July 16, 1897, p. 3.