[2] The killing, which became widely publicized, was the last in a long line of extrajudicial murders in the area, and, prompted by the activism of Louis Isaac Jaffe and others, resulted in the adoption of strong anti-lynching legislation in Virginia.
Inside the booming mining town, wages were decent but everything, including housing, food, religion, and social life was controlled by the mining company, and the population was a mix of whites, Blacks, and recent immigrants (the number of Black Kentuckians statewide had dropped, while in Jenkins it rose), while the county itself (like the surrounding counties) consisted mostly of poor white folk, living in a relatively lawless world of high crime fueled by moonshine, turf wars over stills, and guns.
By 1927, however, the coal boom seemed to be ending, and recent "rainstorms of biblical proportions" had made many workers in the region lose their jobs; the county was "fraught with disruption and social change".
[3] As is frequent with lynchings, there is more than one narrative, with the "white" newspaper(s) focusing on a select set of events, and the "Black" sources (aided in this case by the more progressive newspaper Crawford's Weekly, edited by Bruce Crawford, a leftist journalist and writer from Norton, Virginia) providing a different account of what led up to the confrontation that preceded the lynching.
Hundreds of people surrounded the jail, and the sheriff, Morgan T. Reynolds, did little more than ask them "to let the law take its course", before mingling with the crowd—afterwards he said he was unable to recognize anyone in that crowd.
[3] The Whitesburg caravan met up with the Virginians in Fleming, intending to kill Woods at the site where Deaton had been shot, but they were prevented by the police chief, who asked them to go elsewhere and not cause a ruckus on the grounds of the coal company, which feared unrest among the diverse groups of workers that lived there.
Using the platform, where a week and a half earlier Virginia's former governor Elbert Lee Trinkle and a congressman from Kentucky had cut the ribbon to open US 23, Woods was forced to make a final confession, and then was hanged with a rope.
The lynching allowed the white population to exert its supposed moral superiority and its physical strength in a well-organized "sensational and theatrical spectacle".
Why the two women were saved is hinted at in the observation in Kellis's document that one of the two friends who were with Deaton when he was shot (and most likely it was Townsend) asked, after the jail was broken into, that "his woman" not be harmed.
Walter Francis White had just left the NAACP for a year, and then-secretary James Weldon Johnson, who had asked Kellis to write up the report in the first place, may have chosen to focus his energy on Black victims with untainted reputations.
He did, however, use the size and violent nature of the mob, as well as the fact that this was an "interstate" event (which might prompt the federal government to intervene), in his many letters to newspaper editors, and sent a telegram to president Calvin Coolidge, whose Department of Justice, however, said it lacked jurisdiction.
[4]) The grand jury, after hearing a hundred witnesses, came back saying there wasn't enough evidence to support an indictment, and that no positive identifications of guilty parties had been made.
Neither Sheriff Reynolds nor Jenkins Police Chief Privitt had managed to write down a single license plate number from the hundreds of cars involved in the murder.
Officers had arrested Woods for allegedly killing Herschel Deaton, a white man from Coeburn, Virginia, and had taken him to the Whitesburg, Kentucky, jail.
On the day of Deaton's funeral, a white mob numbering in the hundreds broke into the jail and brought Woods close to this spot, where they hanged, shot and burned him.