Remembrance Event for Benjamin Thomas
Friday, August 8, 6:30 p.m. (Doors open 6:15)
Shiloh Baptist Church
1401 Jamieson Avenue
Please join us on August 8, 2025 to honor and remember Benjamin Thomas. The keynote speaker for this year’s Thomas Remembrance will be Dr. Steven Hahn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History. Dr. Hahn will speak about this Nation’s long relationship with political violence, racial terror, and the perpetual struggle to fulfill the promise of democracy made in the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
Shiloh Baptist Church was where Benjamin Thomas was baptized just two years before he was lynched. Shiloh Baptist Church was also the site of his Memorial Service that drew more than 600 African Americans from Alexandria and Washington who came to protest the racial violence wielded against their community.
Doors open at 6:15, the program begins at 6:30 and will be followed by a book signing. Hahn’s most recent book, Illiberal America A History, and his seminal work, for which he won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for History, A Nation Under Our Feet, Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration will be available for purchase.
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear one of America’s leading experts on 19th-century history and greatest thinkers on current issues while also, crucially engaging in our memory culture by remembering the lynching of Benjamin Thomas to ensure such acts of political violence and racial terror do not happen again.
Note: This is a secular program being held in a worship center due to its historical connection and importance to the story of Benjamin Thomas, who was lynched in Alexandria on August 8, 1899.
The Lynching of Benjamin Thomas: A Narrative
Around midnight on August 8,1899, a 16-year-old African American teenager named Benjamin Thomas was lynched in Alexandria, Virginia. A white terror mob comprised of Alexandria citizens attacked the city jail on St. Asaph Street, and Benjamin Thomas was dragged half a mile to the southwest corner of King and Fairfax streets, opposite Market Square.
Accused by his next door neighbor’s seven-year-old daughter of assault and arrested on the child’s testimony alone, Thomas never wavered in his assertion of his innocence. In the aftermath, both Black and white Alexandrians believed he was innocent. News of his murder, after local Black leadership warned authorities of a threat to lynch him, caused work stoppages around the region.
On Monday, Aug. 28, 1899, more than 600 people attended a mass meeting at Shiloh Baptist Church for two reasons, to memorialize Benjamin Thompson and to protest his lynching. At the packed event, leaders from churches in Alexandria and the District, called for an economic boycott of any business associated with those who took part in the mob.
The full account of this hate crime was methodically researched by the 13-member Research Committee of the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project.
Alexandria Community Remembrance Project (ACRP)
ACRP is a city-wide initiative dedicated to helping Alexandria understand its history of racial terror hate crimes. ACRP conducts research, education, programs, and events that remember Joseph McCoy and Benjamin Thomas and explores the long-term impacts upon Alexandria’s African American community. Working with the Equal Justice Initiative Remembrance Project, ACRP will receive a steel pillar that memorializes McCoy and Thomas and with it will create a permanent space for remembrance in Alexandria City. The work of ACRP is an effort to establish a welcoming community bound by equity and inclusion for all people.
Benjamin Thomas and Joseph McCoy are the only two documented Alexandria lynchings so far. McCoy was lynched on April 23, 1897. This year is the 125th anniversary of that event. It was commemorated on that date.
Past Memorials for Benjamin Thomas
View previous In Memoriam pages.
Also see In Memoriam pages for Joseph McCoy.
Read the ACRP Newsletter.