Editing Alexander County, Illinois (section)

==History==
Alexander County was organized from part of [[Union County, Illinois|Union County]] in 1819. It was named for [[William Melville Alexander (Illinois politician)|William M. Alexander]], a physician who practiced in the town of [[America, Illinois|America]] (the first county seat).<ref>Perrin 1883, p. 455.</ref> Alexander was elected as a representative to the state House, where he became [[Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives]] in 1822.

The county was initially developed for agriculture and settled by numerous migrants from the Upland South. The county seat was moved to [[Unity, Illinois|Unity]] in 1833, then to [[Thebes, Illinois|Thebes]] in 1843, and finally to Cairo in 1860. America, the first county seat, is now within [[Pulaski County, Illinois|Pulaski County]], which was formed from Alexander and [[Johnson County, Illinois|Johnson]] counties in 1843.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Callary |first=Edward |title=Place Names of Illinois |publisher=University of Illinois Press |year=2009 |location=Urbana and Chicago, Illinois |page=4}}</ref>
<gallery>File:Alexander County 1819.png|Alexander County between 1819 and 1843.
File:Alexander County Illinois 1843.png|Alexander County reduced to its current borders in 1843 with the creation of Pulaski County.
</gallery>

Settled largely by white migrants from the Upland South (who migrated from backwoods areas of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas), southern Illinois had many racial attitudes of the South. As African Americans settled in Cairo to seek jobs on steamboats, ferries, in shipping and railroads, there were tensions between the racial groups. White residents sometimes used violence and terrorism, as well as discrimination, to keep black residents in second-class positions. They excluded them from the city government and the police and fire departments, and relatively few African Americans were hired to work in the local stores.

There were three [[Lynching in the United States|lynchings of blacks]] in Alexander County in the years between Reconstruction and the early 20th century. The county had the second-highest number of lynchings of African Americans in all of Illinois.<ref name="eji">[https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf ''Lynching in America''/"Supplement: Lynchings by County"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171023063004/https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf |date=October 23, 2017 }}, 3rd edition, 2017; Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Institute, 2015/2017, p. 4</ref> The most notorious of these was the lynching of [[William "Froggie" James|Will James]] before a crowd of white spectators estimated at 10,000, in the county seat of Cairo on November 11, 1909. James was accused of murdering a young white woman. Later that same evening, the mob lynched a white man named Henry Salzner, hanging him in the courthouse square for allegedly killing his wife. Neither man had had a trial, nor was anyone ever prosecuted for the lynchings, even though Illinois had passed an anti-lynching law four years earlier.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=McDermott |first=Stacy Pratt |date=1999 |title="An Outrageous Proceeding": A Northern Lynching and the Enforcement of Anti-Lynching Legislation in Illinois, 1905-1910 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2649083 |journal=The Journal of Negro History |volume=84 |issue=1 |pages=61–78 |doi=10.2307/2649083 |jstor=2649083 |s2cid=150209743}}</ref>