Editing Pierce City, Missouri (section)

===1901 lynchings and expulsion ===
On August 19, 1901, a large white mob took three [[African-American]] men from jail in Pierce City and [[Lynching in the United States|lynched]] them. French and William Godley, and Peter Hampton,<ref name="list">[http://cousin-collector.com/projects/index.php/saline-county/history/1754-lynching-in-missouri "Lynchings in Missouri"], Saline County, Missouri: GenWeb Project, n.d.; accessed 12 April 2018</ref> were suspects in the murder of a young white woman. Two of the men were quite aged and were unlikely suspects; none had a chance at a trial. These are the only recorded lynchings in Lawrence County.<ref name="lynching">[https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf ''Lynching in America''/ ''Supplement: Lynchings by County, 3rd edition''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171023063004/https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf |date=2017-10-23 }}, Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015, p. 7</ref>

Unrest continued, and the white mob burned five black homes, and drove "30 families into the woods", affecting the roughly 300 black residents in the town. (It had about 1,000 white residents.) Most of the African Americans lost all their land and property; whites simply took over the empty properties.

This was part of a pattern of violence in southwest Missouri in the early 20th century; there were also large public lynchings in [[Joplin, Missouri|Joplin]] and [[Springfield, Missouri|Springfield]], resulting in many African Americans abandoning the region for less hostile territory. "Monett, Peirce City, Rogers, Ark., and several other towns around here have driven the negros out."<ref>{{cite news
|title=Negroes Lynched
|newspaper=[[Sedalia Democrat|Sedalia Weekly Democrat]]
|date=April 20, 1906
|page=9
|url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/33765278/negros_lynched_in_springfield_missouri/}}</ref> By 1910 only 91 African Americans remained in Lawrence County and their numbers continued to decline.<ref name="harper">[https://books.google.com/books?id=QRR-xMoF0BIC&q=William+Allen,+Springfield,+April+15,+1906 Kimberly Harper, ''White Man's Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909''], University of Arkansas Press (2012), p. 253</ref> The incident has been considered an act of [[ethnic cleansing]].<ref name="PBS">{{cite web |title=Pierce City, Missouri |url=https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/banished/pierce.html |website=Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings |publisher=PBS.org |access-date=2 September 2020}}</ref>

In reaction, [[Mark Twain]] wrote the essay ''[[The United States of Lyncherdom]]'', which was published posthumously.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Berry |first1=Dorothy |title=Pierce City: August 19th, 1901 |url=https://oaahm.omeka.net/exhibits/show/exodus/ozarksraceriots/piercecity |website=Ozarks Afro-American Heritage Museum |access-date=2 September 2020}}</ref>

In the 21st century, some descendants of the people who had been driven out of Pierce City threatened to file a lawsuit for the city's failure to protect their families and to recover the value of their families' properties, but none has been filed. There have been other grassroots efforts to acknowledge these crimes and injustices.