Condemned for Love in Old Virginia

Arthur Jordan and Elvira Corder were young and unafraid, but their love was doomed. He was Black, and she was white and this was Virginia in 1880. When Elvira became pregnant, the couple fled Fauquier County to live in Maryland. But her father found them and recruited neighbors to help kidnap them. Four nights later, a mob dragged Arthur from the county jail in Warrenton and lynched him. Elvira, taken to a hotel in Williamsport, Maryland, was never heard from again. Stories of lynching are all too common in the postbellum South, but this one tells a unique tale of a couple who were willing to sacrifice everything to be together-and did. Author Jim Hall tells a classic tale of forbidden love, one of hope crushed by hate.