The Newberry Six: A Mass Lynching and Eighty Years of Silence
Near Gainesville, Florida
About twenty miles west of Gainesville on what is now State Road Twenty-Six lies the small town of Newberry. In August of nineteen sixteen, it was the site of the largest known mass lynching in Florida history.
The chain of events began before dawn on August eighteenth, when Alachua County constable George Wynne and a young pharmacist named Lem Harris tracked a Black man named Boisey Long, suspected of hog theft, to a shack in the pine woods outside town. Gunfire was exchanged. Wynne was shot and died on the train to Jacksonville. That was the trigger.
What followed consumed the next two days. A white mob, with the assistance of local law enforcement, rounded up six Black people from the surrounding community. James Dennis, suspected of sheltering Long, was shot dead immediately. Then five others were taken: Dennis's brother Gilbert, his sister Mary, who was pregnant and a mother of four, a woman named Stella Young who was Long's partner, a man named Andrew McHenry, and the Reverend Joshua Baskin, a farmer and pastor. All five were taken to an area outside town locally called Lynch Hammock and hanged.
A grand jury returned no indictments. Nobody was ever punished for any of the six deaths. Boisey Long himself, after a seven-minute deliberation by an all-white jury, was convicted and hanged in the yard of the Alachua County jail on October twenty-seventh, nineteen sixteen.
For more than eighty years, the events at Newberry were almost entirely absent from public memory. The mob had sworn silence, and the silence held. Historians and journalists began documenting the full story only in the early two thousands. A historical marker was eventually placed in Newberry, and the Equal Justice Initiative included the Newberry Six in their national memorial to lynching victims.
The records are incomplete in places. How exactly each victim was seized, what was said, what the mob's full composition was, much of that was deliberately buried. What is documented is who died, and that no one was held accountable.
