The Town of Rolesville and the Wake County Community Remembrance Coalition, in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative, will hold a ceremony unveiling a historical marker dedicated to George Taylor on Saturday, Sept. 7, at 10 a.m. at Main Street Park.
Taylor was lynched in 1918, and it is the only documented lynching in Wake County although there are stories about others.
Why is George Taylor being memorialized? Because we should remember our past. The Wake County Community Remembrance Coalition recognizes victims of racial terrorism to promote healing and reconciliation in the community.
George Taylor was a married Black man living in Rolesville, and Ruby Rogers, a married white woman, lived near the town. She reported being raped by a Black man on Oct. 30.
According to The News & Observer and other newspapers at the time, Rogers said she was assaulted by a Black man who came into her house while her husband was away, threatened to cut her throat if she called for help, knocked her unconscious and raped her.
Three men were arrested, questioned and released. Rogers had originally said her assailant was not Taylor, but after Rogers heard him speaking she changed and said he was the one.
Some Rolesville men had been deputized and were ready to take Taylor to Raleigh to process his arrest. But four hooded men stopped their car and forcefully took Taylor to a nearby ravine.
A mob formed, perhaps 300 men, and Taylor was taken to a crossroads south of Rolesville that was within sight of the Rogers house. His body was found the next morning, hanging by his feet from a tree with gashes and over 200 bullet holes on and in his body. Many of the bullets were not recovered, probably taken as souvenirs. The News & Observer reported he had been tortured. The newspaper also said it was “as far as can be remembered,” as the first lynching in Wake County.
It was widely reported, with newspaper articles as far away as the Midwest, and there was an investigation by Solicitor Herbert E. Norris, who interviewed about 30 witnesses without producing any suspects.
Many details remain mysterious. Rogers would claim she had been assaulted many other times when she was older. Had the assault even happened? Why had she been reluctant to name Taylor?
And then 1919 happened, with Black soldiers returning to a segregated South, remembering how they were treated as equal with whites in France and England. It was called the Red Summer because of all the blood shed.
But time passed as it does, and the memories faded and then died with those people involved. The newspaper articles, local and national, faded and were put on microfiche and stored in libraries.
Until 2017 and 2018, when teachers at two area schools, The Exploris School in Raleigh and Middle Creek High School in Apex, challenged and assisted some of their students to investigate and find out as much as possible about George Taylor and his lynching.
In the intervening years, they and later some adults have searched, researched, visited the lynching memorials in Alabama, the libraries in Wake County and followed every possibility and clue.
And the result is a service that will be held in the Rolesville Park to unveil a tablet that memorializes George Taylor and will hang in the Rolesville Library when it is built. Everyone from the mayor of Rolesville to kindergarten children will be there because everyone in Rolesville knows his name.
###
