When Reuben Sims was accused of murder he was never arrested.

He never met with a lawyer.

He never had a chance to provide evidence that he was not, in fact, a killer.

Instead, he was attacked by an angry mob who accused him of murdering a local doctor on April 17, 1904. They whipped him to force him to confess when he maintained his innocence.

Then they hung him from a tree. Some reports say his body was “riddled with bullets.”

On Saturday, a memorial will be placed just outside the courthouse in Bay Minette that Sims was never given access to.

The lynching of Reuben Sims is just one of 4,000 racial terror lynchings that occurred across 12 Southern states between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and 1950.  

The nonprofit, Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), based in Montgomery, serves as a modern-day watchdog for individuals who have been wrongly convicted of crimes, been denied a fair trial, or  who cannot afford effective representation.

In 2017 the Community Remembrance Project was created in Baldwin County to help recognize the thousands of African American men, women and children who were terrorized and killed by mobs. There were 360 lynchings in Alabama though the attack on Sims is the only lynching historians have uncovered in Baldwin County. The group works with EJI to bring awareness and acknowledge the racial injustice of these attacks, many of which have been historically swept under the rug, the group says.  

“It’s vigilante justice,” said Mary Mullins Redditt, the coalitions facilitator. “It’s mob justice. In some cases, victims were taken from jail cells and the people patrolling the jail let them do it. Sometimes people in power let it happen.”

The night Sims was attacked members of the mob claimed he and three other black men were seen in a store the victim owned in Little River, a tiny community in the northern most reaches of Baldwin County.

Two men were released but Sims and another were kept for questioning. The other man admitted to the murder, Sims maintained his innocence. Rather than arrest Sims and give him access to due process proceedings the mob whipped him, forced him to confess and hung him.

Historical records show that the Baldwin County sheriff was out of town that night. Local authorities were asked to track down the mob members, but no one would cooperate with law enforcement, Reddit said. Eventually the case, like many others, was simply abandoned.

On Saturday, Sims’ story will finally be heard.

The story of that night will be retold on a historical marker that will be placed outside of the courthouse in Bay Minette.

When Sims was accused the courthouse was just four years old and since then it has been remodeled twice. Had he lived, Sims may have been in his 90s when the courthouse’s second facelift was completed in 1996.

Rather than post the marker in Little River where he died, EJI prefers the markers be placed somewhere more people will be able to see it, sit and reflect.

While the organizers try to include the victims’ descendants, the story of Reuben Sims began and ended the day he died. There are no records linking modern residents to him, an ending that Redditt says is common for lynching victims.

“At that time when they were reporting these crimes they didn’t care to get the names spelled right and these lives were considered expendable,” she said. “It’s just another one of the tragedies.”