24. Mill Creek

Raymond Arthur Byrd was a veteran of World War I, who served with the 807th Pioneer Infantry, a segregated unit fighting in France during the last months of combat in the fall of 1918. After the war, Byrd lived with his wife and three children in Black Lick, located just a few miles north of where route 76 crosses Mill Creek and several miles west of Wytheville. Bird worked as a laborer on a farm owned by a local white family. In the summer of 1926, Byrd was accused of inappropriate sexual relations, arrested, and then murdered while he was locked up in the Wytheville jail. In the summer of 2020, a historical marker to the lynching of Raymond Byrd was placed in downtown Wytheville, along Route 76, due primarily to the sustained efforts of local historian John Johnson. Cyclists in southwestern Virginia thus have an opportunity to view, and reflect upon, the complicated history of racial relations that led to this lynching episode and the subsequent efforts to recognize the long term significance of this moment from almost a century ago. This episode explores the lynching of Raymond Byrd in the context of a long history of using racialized violence to maintain structures of white supremacy in law, politics, and society. The episode is connected to the area where the route crosses Mill Creek, located nearly 430 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and just under 130 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia.