On August 19, 1886, in in the small town of Jackson, Tennessee, a terrible injustice occurred when Eliza Woods, an African-American woman, was brutally lynched by a mob after being falsely accused of poisoning her white employer, Jessie Woolen.
Eliza Woods served as a cook in the home of Jessie Woolen, a white woman in Jackson, Tennessee. When Woolen fell ill and subsequently died, an autopsy revealed that her stomach contained traces of arsenic, a common poison. Suspicion quickly fell on Woods after authorities discovered that she had a box of rat poison at her home. In the racially charged atmosphere of the South, this piece of circumstantial evidence was enough for many to pronounce her guilty, despite no solid proof.
After her arrest, she was taken to jail. However, instead of receiving a fair trial, Woods became the victim of mob justice. A mob of about 1,000 people stormed the jail, forcibly removing her from her cell. They dragged her to the courthouse, where the horrific violence escalated. In a shocking display of inhumanity, she was stripped naked, hanged, and then shot multiple times by the enraged mob. Woods’ body was left hanging from the tree until the next morning when the Sheriff of the town cut her down and ordered her burial.
Three years after Woods was killed, a shocking confession came to light: Jessie Woolen’s husband admitted that he was the one who poisoned his wife. This confession, however, did little to bring justice to Woods, as the legal and social systems of the time rarely held lynch mobs accountable for their actions.
The lynching of Eliza Woods was one of the early cases that caught the attention of Ida B. Wells, a pioneering African-American journalist and civil rights activist. Born into slavery during the Civil War, Wells became one of the most vocal opponents of lynching in the United States. Her reportage on cases like that of Eliza Woods helped to shed light on the systemic racism and violence that African-Americans faced in the post-Reconstruction South.
For many years, the lynching of Eliza Woods remained a painful but often overlooked chapter in American history. However, in 2020, the Jackson-Madison County Community Remembrance Project and the Equal Justice Initiative installed a plaque at the Jackson, Tennessee courthouse, where she was lynched, to ensure that her story would not be forgotten.
