Lynching of William "Froggie" James

William "Froggie" James, an African-American man, was lynched and his dead body mutilated on November 11, 1909 by a mob in Cairo, Illinois, after he was charged with the rape and murder of 23-year-old shop clerk Anna Pelley.

Stacy Pratt McDermott's 1999 article "'An Outrageous Proceeding': A Northern Lynching and the Enforcement of Anti-Lynching Legislation in Illinois, 1905–1910" analyzes the events leading to James's final moments.

The dogs led authorities to arrest five people: James, Arthur Alexander, Sam Mosby, Georgia Cooper, and another woman identified only by the surname Green.

[10] Hearing plans of the assembling mobs, the police began to increase security by the jailhouse, and even dismissed several groups of would-be citizen investigators from the crime scene.

Alexander County Sheriff Frank E. Davis and Deputy Thomas Fuller attempted to keep the detainees in the jailhouse safe from the impending invasion.

The mob then set James's body on fire and roasted the remains while men, women, and children shouted and cheered.

Some took out their pocketknives and cut off ears and fingers and broke up bones to take as gruesome souvenirs.After James was dead, the mob returned to the jail and kidnapped Henry Salzner, a white photographer who was charged with murdering his wife with an axe.

After the second lynching, shouting matches and minor looting gripped Cairo until the next morning when the Illinois National Guard implemented martial law and restored order in the town.

Governor Deneen responded to the Cairo lynchings by calling the mob violence "an outrageous proceeding and a disgrace to the state of Illinois."

The recently founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the first advocacy group to use James's case as an example of the ineffectiveness of anti-lynching laws.

Nevertheless, Wells continued her campaign to prevent the reinstatement, arguing that if Davis were to remain in his position, it would set a negative precedent for other towns to condone these kinds of attacks.

[6] Davis was not reinstated, and Deneen passed an order mandating that presiding officers be relieved of their job if they failed to protect their prisoners.

[11] The television series American Gods, set partly in Cairo, depicts the lynching of James in its episode "The Ways of the Dead" in its second season.