Biography of Joseph McCoy
Biography of Joseph McCoy (with footnotes)
Murdered in 1897, teenager Joseph McCoy lived his entire life in Alexandria. He was born as Reconstruction ended and the era of Jim Crow began. He grew up in The Bottoms neighborhood on South Alfred Street among his extended family of parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles.
The McCoys had deep roots here. More than a half a century before Alexandria’s citizens lynched Joseph McCoy, his grandmother Cecilia McCoy was born a free woman of color in the city. She raised her four children, Ann, Horatio, Eliza and John, while working as a washerwoman.
Ann, the oldest, entered the working world before her fourteenth birthday. That meant leaving her mother and little brothers and sister to work in the household of Benoni Wheat on Prince Street.
By the time she was out of her teens, however, Ann and her new husband Samuel Chase had a home together and began raising the next generation of Alexandrians. They were Harriet, Charles, Rachel, Samuel Jr, and eventually little Joseph, the baby of the family.
When Ann died soon after Joseph’s birth, Cecilia McCoy took the children into her house, just down the block from their father. Joseph’s Aunt Harriet attended school right into her teen years. However, the other children went to work as soon as they were able, working as domestic servants or performing manual labor, as Joseph did for the Lacy family until April 22, 1897, when Richard Lacy accused him of attacking three of the Lacy children.
The Lynching of Joseph H. McCoy: A Narrative
On the evening of April 22, 1897, 19-year-old Alexandrian Joseph McCoy was arrested without a warrant, dragged from his cell by a mob, and brutally lynched at the southeast corner of Cameron and Lee Streets. The full account of this hate crime was methodically researched in 2020 by the 13-member Research Committee of the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project.