In North Carolina, a white, male mob viciously beats a young African-American woman named Phillis Ruffin.

In the north-eastern North Carolina hamlet of Harmon's Crossroads in Bertie County, a crowd of white male residents dragged a young African-American woman in her twenties named Phillis Ruffin out of the school she was attending, took her into the woods, stripped her, and beat her unmercifully for some minutes.  Her offense leading to this punishment of more than a hundred lashes and the ten days of painful incapacitation that followed was that she had resisted blows from a white girl during an argument several days before.  The case drew increasing notoriety across the United States and resulted in the local Second District's military commander facilitating a trial in June 1867 of ten of the men in the mob that resulted in sentences at hard labor for seven of them.  (By John Osborne)