A candlelight vigil in Pierce City, Missouri, remembers 3 Black men killed during 1901 lynchings...

For more than 30 years, a Monett Times reporter has held an annual vigil in the southwest Missouri town marking the night that a mob of white residents killed three Black men — Will Godley, Pete Hampton and French Godley — and forced the rest of the town's Black residents to flee for their lives.
Pierce City, a town of about 1,277 people just northwest of Monett, once had a sizeable African-American population. Murray Bishoff, a writer and longtime reporter for The Monett Times, said the Black residents traced their roots to Judah Godley who was brought to the area as a slave in 1848 along with her five children — the property of Mary Godley Jameson and her husband Achilles.

But that all changed on August 19, 1901.

Bishoff said a young woman, 24-year-old Gisela Wild, was assaulted and murdered the day before in a culvert under railroad tracks in Pierce City, and Black men who lived in the town were blamed.