George Taylor, lynched in 1918, honored with historic marker near spot in Rolesville

In 1918, a crowd of 300 people hung a Black farmer named George Taylor upside-down from a tree and took turns cutting him while he dangled there, finally riddling his body with more than 100 bullets.

Taylor was accused of assaulting a white woman named Ruby Rogers, knocking her unconscious while she held her baby in her lap, presumed guilty though she could not identify him as the culprit when deputies presented him — only later by the sound of his voice.

Before a deputized citizen could drive Taylor to jail, four masked men stopped their car and dragged him to the Rolesville pasture where he would hang for more than 12 hours.

This grim moment marked the only lynching in Wake County history, and until Saturday, it received little mention in history’s pages.

But after eight years of community effort, Taylor has a tall blue marker in Rolesville’s Main Street Park, recording his death in unflinching detail.

His family embraced as Town Manager Eric Marsh unveiled it, some of them learning of the lynching only within the last few weeks.

“It was buried in our family history,” said Sharin Wilson, Taylor’s great-great-granddaughter who came from New York. “We feel like we are attending a funeral. We went to school here. We were living here, and we did not know this. ... Not only are we George Taylor, but we all are George Taylor.”

Saturday’s recognition came as racial justice activists nationwide try to calculate the scope of lynching over a century.

It is strange, they note, that many locations remain unknown though the mobs who carried them out were deliberate enough to photograph themselves in the act.

The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative documents 120 racial terror lynchings in North Carolina alone, but the Red Record Project counts 175 between the end of the Civil War and the 1940s — four in Orange County and one in Wake.

“Lynching was much more than just a response to crime,” write its authors, one of whom is Seth Kotch, American studies professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. “It was part of a narrative of white supremacy that sought to write out Black success, Black families and Black personhood.”

And even when the spot is known, so much time has passed without any official marking that the landscape makes any memorial difficult.

In 1921, a mob lynched 16-year-old Eugene Daniel in Chatham County , believing him guilty of attempted rape without a trial. About 1,000 people watched, and Daniel’s body hung from a chain for more than 12 hours. But because the site is now under Jordan Lake, soil from the site was collected and placed in a jar in the Chatham Community Library — an exhibit that includes soil from five other lynching sites.

Rolesville’s marker came about through the Wake County Community Remembrance Coalition, which includes help from both Rolesville and the Equal Justice Initiative. But over the last seven years, several Wake County teachers have made Taylor and lynching a project for their students, including a fund-raiser to create a website for their research.

“We must resist the urge to look away from this history,” said Mikhaila Lambert, a student at UNC-Greensboro who started her research at Middle Creek High School. “Lynching is all about the dehumanization of Black bodies, but let me humanize them for you. These people were somebody’s children.”

Bettie Murchison, co-chair of the remembrance project, recalled growing up around Rolesville when it was largely farmland, and being unable to eat in the town’s only restaurant.

When integration arrived 50 years after Taylor’s lynching, she said, the restaurant’s owner closed its doors rather than allow Blacks to eat there.

“It has taken over 100 years for this recognition to occur,” she said. “Today is a day of reckoning. We’re talking about race. We’re talking about murder. We’re talking about cover-ups. We’re talking about oppression. I have survived Jim Crow laws meant to make me feel less-than. ... I’ve watched my mother proudly dress up to exercise her right to vote.”

Several speakers addressed the unspoken question, “Why dig this up now?” Many answered their own question: The only way to end injustice is to place it under bright lights, or in this case, in the middle of a town park.

“Would George Taylor ever have imagined he would be remembered this way?” asked Ann-Michelle Roberts, chair of the historical marker committee. “It changes what racism looks like: this marker, his story, his legacy.”