cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/36172
The increasing prevalence and believability of AI slop, the censorship of Black history, and the rise of anti-intellectualism have left us in a perfect storm of susceptibility to these types of frauds.
Read more via Scalawag: The AI Myth of Solomon Fairfax, the "Grim Reaper" of Charleston.
I recently came across a viral video about a "Grim Reaper" who buried nine slave owners alive in Charleston, South Carolina. As a self-proclaimed gothic nerd, horror connoisseur, and lover of stories of Black resistance and vengeance, I did my research. To say I was eager to find out more about this Grim Reaper—and perhaps learn something new and interesting about the mythology behind the most well-known personification of Death—would be an understatement.
My research led me to another viral video about a man named Solomon Fairfax. In the 1850s, he spent four years exacting revenge on slaveholders, earning the nickname "Grim Reaper". Both videos have over one million views, and hundreds of thousands of likes, shares, comments, and saves. But, unfortunately, Solomon Fairfax doesn't exist.
His story didn't exist before September 2025 and seems to originate from a YouTube channel called Liturgy of Fear that almost exclusively posts AI-generated stories set during U.S. chattel slavery.
The channel boasts other videos that rely on the same revenge narrative formula as the story of Solomon Fairfax. Videos like, "Lazarus's Revenge: The North Carolina Slave Who Burned 9 Masters Alive," and "Big Jacob the Silent: The 7-Foot Slave Who Crushed 9 Masters' Windpipes Without A Word," and "They Called Him 'Devil's White'… The Albino Slave Who Skinned 9 Overseers Alive Georgia 1853." There's even another video that tells a story equivalent to the myth of Solomon Fairfax: "Solomon the Gravedigger: Buried 12 Plantation Owners Alive in Holes He Dug for Others."
The titles are clickbait. The thumbnail images are all derivatives of each other. The stories take advantage of the very real horrors real Black folks experienced on real plantations in order to spin falsehoods that traffick in the most vile imaginings of sexual and reproductive violence, torture, lynchings, and more.
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