This South Carolina historical marker was erected on the site of the post office where Postmaster Baker and his family were attacked in 1898.
LAKE CITY, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s congressional delegation wants a post office to be named in honor of a 19th-century postmaster who was lynched because he was black and refused to resign.
The state’s entire Washington delegation co-sponsored a bill to name Lake City’s post office after Frazier B. Baker.
Baker was a schoolmaster in Effingham when President William McKinley named him Lake City’s postmaster in 1897.
An intimidation campaign began almost immediately, starting with letters warning him to stay out of Lake City. That summer, he was shot after refusing to appoint a white deputy to do post office business.
“He did not give in,” Baker’s great-niece Dr. Fostenia Baker told the newspaper. “He was an educated man, and he believed that he should be able to serve his country as any other man.”
People tried to drive Baker out in January 1898 by burning the post office to the ground. Instead, he moved his family to the city’s outskirts and set up a post office there.
On Feb. 22, 1898, at about 1 a.m., an armed mob of whites set fire to the house and post office, then began shooting into the house.
Baker reportedly told his wife, Lavinia, “Come on, we might as well die running as standing.”
He and his baby daughter were shot and killed before they could get out. Lavinia Baker wife and their other five children barely escaped. AP News
Smithsonian National Postal Museum – In the early hours of February 22, 1898 a lynch mob set fire to the Lake City, South Carolina, post office and aimed their guns at the front door. Postmaster Frazier B. Baker and his family faced running through gunfire on their only escape route from the post office that doubled as their home. The mob shot Baker and his two-year-old daughter Julia dead. Shots injured his wife Lavinia, daughters Rosa and Cora, and son Lincoln, but daughters Sarah and Millie were not hit. Read more