Robert Marshall Beard

On October 12, 1906, Robert Marshall Beard, a 52-year-old White man, was on duty with the Roanoke City Police when a routine piece of police work turned into the city’s next tragedy. Late on the night of October 11 and into the early hours that followed, officers converged on the old Alleghany Institute in the northwest part of Roanoke, moving through the dark corridors of a building that had become a familiar landmark—and, that night, a dangerous one.

Accounts describe Beard as posi ...

Patrolman Robert M. Beard