In April 1892, Henry and Ephraim Grizzard, two African American brothers from Middle Tennessee, were lynched after being accused of assaulting two white sisters in Goodlettsville. The charges were never proven, yet both men were killed by white mobs without a trial.
The events began in April 1892 in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. Mollie and Rosina Bruce, daughters of the late Confederate veteran Lee Bruce, reportedly told authorities they had been assaulted by several African-American men.
Rumors spread quickly, igniting anger in the white community. Henry Grizzard was arrested first. Reports claimed he confessed to the crime and implicated another man named Mack Harper. On April 24, 1892, before any trial could be held, a mob seized Henry. They hanged him near the Bruce home in broad daylight.
Following Henry’s killing, authorities in Nashville arrested Ephraim Grizzard and his brother John, along with Harper and another man named Manuel Jones. John and Jones were later released due to lack of evidence. The Bruce sisters had not made a positive identification of their alleged attackers.
Despite the weak case, Ephraim remained in custody at the Davidson County Jail in Nashville. Tensions in Goodlettsville did not subside. On April 29, a mob of around 300 white men traveled to Nashville with the intent of lynching him.
The First Mob Attempt
Governor John P. Buchanan and Adjutant General Norman arrived at the jail before dawn to try to defuse the situation. Gunfire erupted between the mob outside and the guards inside the jail. Two white men, Charles Rear and N. D. Guthrie, were fatally wounded.
The Governor pleaded with the mob to allow the legal process to proceed. By 5 a.m., the crowd dispersed. For a brief moment, it seemed Ephraim might survive long enough to face a trial.
The Second Mob and Public Killing
The calm did not last. The next afternoon, April 30, an even larger crowd began to gather. Men came from far and wide. By some estimates, the mob swelled to as many as 10,000 people.
They eventually stormed the jail, overpowering the guards, and dragged Ephraim through the streets of Nashville. They took him to the east side of the Woodland Street Bridge over the Cumberland River, near where Nissan Stadium stands today.
Ephraim was hanged from the bridge. While his body swung lifeless, members of the mob riddled it with bullets, striking him more than 200 times. His corpse was then taken back to Goodlettsville, shown to the Bruce family, and burned to strike fear in the hearts of the black locals.
Civil rights activist and journalist Ida B. Wells investigated the case. She found claims that Ephraim had been friendly with one of the Bruce sisters and suggested that his killing was motivated more by racial outrage over this interracial contact than by evidence of an assault.
Wells also noted the hypocrisy of Nashville’s white citizens. At the time, a white man accused of raping an eight-year-old Black girl was sitting in jail unmolested. No mob came for him. In her words, Ephraim’s death was “a naked, bloody example of the blood-thirstiness of the nineteenth century civilization of the Athens of the South.”
Black community members who protested about the lynching were themselves threatened with violence and forced to flee. Speaking out against such killings could cost a Black person their home, their safety, or even their life.
One of the most well-known cases was that of Mary Turner, a pregnant woman who was lynched in Georgia in 1918 after publicly condemning the killing of her husband. A white mob murdered her, cut open her womb, and stamped on the unborn child.
For decades, the lynching of the Grizzard brothers remained an open wound in Nashville’s history, until 2017, when the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee’s Task Force on Anti-Racism and Lipscomb University’s Christian Scholars’ Conference organized a memorial service at Fisk University.
That same year, a plaque was installed at St. Anselm’s Episcopal Church. It recognized Ephraim and Henry Grizzard, along with Samuel Smith of Nolensville, another Black man lynched in the region. Together, they were remembered as three of six documented victims of lynching in Davidson County after Reconstruction.
In 2019, “We Remember Nashville,” working with the Equal Justice Initiative, organized a week of remembrance. A historical marker was placed to honor the Grizzard brothers, along with markers for David Jones and Jo Reed, two men lynched in the 1870s. These efforts ensure that their lives, and the injustice they suffered, will not be forgotten.
Sources:
Lynching in America / The Lynchings of Henry and Ephraim Grizzard
https://eji.org/news/eji-partners-community-memorialize-lynching-victims-nashville/
