The Story of Sidney Randolph (b. 1868-1874; d. 1896)

Sidney Randolph, a native of Georgia in his mid-twenties, was lynched in Rockville, Maryland on July 4, 1896 by an officially-unidentified group of white men from Montgomery County. The full story of Sidney Randolph’s murder was connected to the mystery involving an axe-wielding attack on the Buxton family of Gaithersburg in May of that same year, and the subsequent death of the youngest child, Sadie Buxton. Though professional detectives were brought in from both Washington and Baltimore to investigate the case, local residents of Gaithersburg took it upon themselves to find and/or create circumstantial evidence implicating Sidney Randolph, a stranger to the area who had no motive and consistently maintained his innocence. Removed to the jail in Baltimore to avoid an immediate lynching, Randolph survived repeated interrogations while imprisoned from May 25 until July 4, when a masked mob of white men dragged him from his cell in the Rockville jail, brutally beat him, and hanged him from a tree just outside of town along Route 355. His murderers were never identified or brought to justice for this crime.

Below is as complete an account of events related to the Buxton case and the lynching of Sidney Randolph as can be compiled based on a close reading of more than 200 newspaper articles appearing in dozens of newspapers nationwide. Our research has relied heavily on the most local sources to create this narrative, focusing primarily on articles published in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Montgomery County. Currently, they are the only source material from the time on which to base a narrative. However, newspapers– especially at this time–are a problematic source of information that must be read with a high level of skepticism for many reasons. They are full of errors, as well as the biases of the people and the time, and with few exceptions, they are accounts written by white people for an exclusively white readership. It is important to remember that the narrative presented by the newspapers had an agenda, and it’s up to us to realize the limitations of the lens through which we are looking at the past. In the narrative below, newspaper accounts have been verified (and sometimes corrected) using additional primary sources, including court records, death records, census records, marriage records, family and community histories, maps, and obituaries.