Historical Marker For 16-Year-Old Lynching Victim Robert Mosley Unveiled 134 Years Later

Mosley was killed after a white woman accused him of burying her alive, sparking a mob of over 500 white citizens.

A historical marker in honor of Robert Mosley, an 1890 victim of a lynching in Huntsville, Alabama, was unveiled on Dec. 7, an effort between the Madison County Remembrance Project and the Equal Justice Initiative.

According to WAFF, Mosley, 16, was killed for allegedly committing what was described as an outrage of modesty, the same kind of violation of white supremacist social norms prevalent in the Jim Crow South that resulted in Emmett Till’s murder nearly 60 years later in Mississippi.

David Person, a co-founder of the Madison Remembrance Project, said the installation is part of a larger effort to install markers near where at least 10 people have been lynched in the Alabama county.

“Our objective is to try to commemorate all of those lives so we hope to be able to see markers installed in the proximity of those events over the course of the next several years,” Person told WAFF.

“What happened here and in other places around Huntsville, it was wrong. Simply put, it was wrong,” Carl Cooney Jr., a member of the Prince Hall Masons of Alabama, told WAFF. “It was a bad spot on our American history, however each one we remember, each one that we commemorate places us a step further as a country and garners more togetherness.”

According to Person, getting the monument erected took seven years.

“[It’s] something we believe will not only document a horrible historic occurrence but also give us an opportunity as a community to reckon with these kinds of evils hopefully in a way that will prevent them from happening in the future to anybody,” Person said.

According to Fox 54, Mosley was killed after a white woman accused him of burying her alive, sparking a mob of over 500 white citizens, which hung Mosley from a tree and discarded his body nearby.

“I think the best way to heal the wound is to actually have something like this,” Donald Yamamoto-McCrary, a resident of Hunstville who learned about Mosley’s abbreviated life from the marker, told Fox 54. “It needs to be put back on the operating table. It needs to be addressed. More people need to know about it.”

“You can’t enjoy the light without the darkness. You can’t enjoy the good history without knowing the bad history. We need to start at the micro level. Be kind to your neighbor, regardless of who your neighbor is, regardless of what color they are, what is their national origin.”