John Henry James sold ice cream. That’s all that’s known about him, except for how he died on July 12, 1898, just a few years after moving to Charlottesville.

James was murdered by a white lynch mob.

More than a century after his death the community in 2019 acknowledged James publicly with a historical marker near the Albemarle County Courthouse in Court Square.

In bronze letters standing in relief on a blue background, it reads: 

In 1898, a black man named John Henry James lived and worked in Charlottesville as an ice cream vendor. He had only been a resident of the area for five or six years before July 11th, 1898, when he was falsely accused of assaulting a white woman and arrested. The police transferred Mr. James to Staunton that evening to avoid a potential lynching, but officers escorted him back to Charlottesville the next morning by train. While en route, an armed mob of 150 white men stopped the train at Wood’s Crossing in Albemarle Count, and seized Mr. James. Learning of the mob’s attack, a group of black men tried to stop the lynch mob but were outnumbered and forced to retreat. The white mob threw a rope over Mr. James’s neck and dragged him about 40 yards away to a small locust tree. Despite his protest of innocence, the mob hanged Mr. James and riddled his body with dozens of bullets. The Richmond Planet, an African American newspaper, reported that as his body hung for many hours, hundreds more white people streamed by, cutting off pieces of his clothing, body, and the locust tree to carry away as souvenirs. The grand jury, interrupted by news of the lynching, issued a posthumous indictment, as if Mr. James were still alive. Despite the presence of the Charlottesville police chief and Albemarle County sheriff, no one was ever charged or held accountable for the murder of John Henry James.

Until very recently, that marker stood just yards from two Confederate monuments. One, “At Ready” (or “Johnny Reb”), was of a Confederate soldier standing tall atop a stone pedestal in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse, dedicated in 1909 and removed in September 2020. The other, a massive bronze equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, was gifted to the city in May 1921 and removed in July 2021.

It took a century after those monuments were erected, but researchers now say that James’ death is connected to Charlottesville’s Confederate statues in ways beyond physical proximity.

“We uncovered a quantifiable relationship between Confederate memorials and the explicitly racist practice of lynching,” University of Virginia psychology PhD student Kyshia Henderson told Charlottesville Tomorrow. Henderson researches the ways in which white Americans perpetuate and try to justify racism.

Henderson is the lead author of “Confederate Monuments and the History of Lynching in the American South: An Empirical Examination,” a study out of UVA’s Department of Psychology, Equity Center, and Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. It was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal.

The study shows a real and persistent correlation between documented lynchings and monuments.

“We find that the number of lynching victims in a county is a positive and significant predictor of the number of Confederate memorializations in that county,” the study says.

Batten School professors Sophie Trawalter, Michele Claibourn, and Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi as well as data scientist Samuel Powers, also contributed to the study, which formally began in February 2020.

“Many people across the country, including myself, have been tuned into the debate surrounding Confederate memorials over the years,” particularly after the Charleston church massacre in June 2015, Henderson said.

That’s when self-avowed neo-Nazi and white supremacist Dylann Roof shot 12 Black people during Bible study at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The church is one of the oldest Black churches in the United States and played an important role in the civil rights movement. Nine of the victims died, including Clementa “Clem” Pickney, the church’s senior pastor and a South Carolina state senator.

“I, like many people, was interested in how these debates were going,” said Henderson, how people, particularly white people, were “supporting Confederate memorials, justifying keeping them in our public spaces. That’s how this started, because supporters brought up history and heritage. We thought it was important to jump in there and understand the history of the Confederate memorial.”