‘His blood is in the soil’: the Kentucky group honoring victims of lynchings

People install a marker memorializing the 1924 lynching of Fred Shannon, a Black man who was falsely accused of killing a white man, in Wayland, Kentucky. Photograph: Darryl “Dee” Parker

On 26 October 1924, Fred Shannon, a Black man, was lynched at age 28 by a mob of nearly 200 masked residents in Wayland, Kentucky.

Shannon, a local musician, was falsely accused of killing a white man over a financial dispute. While was he being held at a local jail, the mob broke in, took him out in the street and shot him at least 18 times.