Lynching Of Eliza Wood

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“Between 1877 and 1950, there were at least 237 lynchings in the state of Tennessee. These were acts of terrorism against the African American community. In Madison County, on August 16, 1886, Eliza Woods, a black domestic worker, was accused of poisoning her white employer. That night, a mob stormed the jail, dragged Ms. Woods to the courthouse and ripped her clothes off. Although Ms. Woods declared her innocence, she was hanged from a tree and her body riddled with bullets. Ida B. Wells, who would become a leading anti-lynching crusader, protested the lynching of Eliza Woods many times in her writing.”

These words appear on a historical marker placed here in 2020 by the Jackson-Madison County Community Remembrance Project in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative, which funded the project. The Madison County Commission approved the siting of the marker on the courthouse grounds at the approximate spot where the mob lynched Woods.

The killing of Eliza Woods was the first of at least three racial terror lynchings which took place in Madison County. This memorial marker also describes the lynching of John Brown in 1891. Neither Eliza Woods or John Brown received due process for their alleged crimes and were killed by mobs who never faced prosecution for their lynchings. The husband of the woman Woods allegedly poisoned died in an insane asylum after confessing that he killed his wife.