Editing Selma, Alabama (section)

===Post-war period===
Selma became the seat of Dallas County in 1866 and the county courthouse was built there.<ref name=alabama>{{Cite encyclopedia |last=Lewis |first=Herbert J. |title=Selma |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Alabama |date=January 21, 2010 |url=http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1635 |access-date=February 1, 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100621074338/http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1635 |archive-date=June 21, 2010 }}</ref> Planters and other slaveholders struggled with how to deal with freed slaves after the war. Insurgents tried to keep [[white supremacy]] over the [[freedmen]], and most whites resented former slaves being granted the right to vote. As in other southern states, white Democrats regained political power in the mid-1870s after suppressing black voting through violence and fraud; [[Reconstruction Era of the United States|Reconstruction]] officially ended in 1877 when federal troops were withdrawn. The white Democratic state legislature imposed [[Jim Crow laws]] of [[racial segregation]] in public facilities and other means of white supremacy.
[[File:Dallas_County_AL_EJI_Memorial.jpg|thumb|Portion of the [[Weathering steel|corten steel]] monument at the EJI's [[The National Memorial for Peace and Justice|National Memorial for Peace and Justice]] memorializing the Black individuals lynched in Dallas County, Alabama.]]
The city developed its own police force. County law enforcement was run by an elected county sheriff, whose jurisdiction included the grounds of the county courthouse. The county courthouse and jail were scenes of numerous [[Lynching in the United States|lynchings of African-Americans]], as sometimes mobs would take prisoners from the jail and hang them before trial. In February 1892, Willy Webb was put in the jail in Selma after police arrested him in Waynesville. The police intended to save Webb from a local lynch mob, but the mob abducted Webb from the jail and killed him. In June 1893, a lynch mob numbering 100 men seized "a black man named Daniel Edwards from the Selma jail, hanged him from a tree, and fired multiple rounds into his body" for allegedly becoming intimate with a white woman. In the 20th century, African-Americans were also lynched for labor-organizing activities. In 1935, Joe Spinner Johnson, a leader of the [[Sharecroppers Union|Alabama Sharecroppers Union]], which worked from 1931 to 1936 to get better pay and treatment from white planters, was beaten by a mob near his field, taken to the jail in Selma and beaten more; his body was left in a field near [[Greensboro, Alabama|Greensboro]].<ref>[https://eji.org/news/selma-alabama-memorializes-lynching-victims "Selma, Alabama memorializes lynching victims, March 05, 2018"], Equal Justice Initiative News. Retrieved June 11, 2018</ref>