Dixie - In Memoriam
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The Glenville Shootout was a series of events of violent acts that occurred in the Glenville section of Cleveland, Ohio, United States, from the dates of July 23—July 28, 1968. The violent acts resulted in the deaths of seven people, and injuries of fifteen others.
The shootout began on the evening of July 23, 1968 in the eastern section of the Glenville neighborhood when two civilian tow truck drivers, wearing uniforms similar to police uniforms, were shot in an ambush by heavily armed snipers while checking an abandoned car. Cleveland police officers were also watching Fred "Ahmed" Evans and his radical militant group, who were suspected of purchasing illegal weapons. The shootout attracted a large crowd that was mostly black, young, and "hostile". When it became clear that the police were ill-equipped to handle the situation, Mayor Carl B. Stokes called in the National Guard. Before the night was over, seven were dead (three of the seven were Cleveland Police officers) and fifteen were wounded.
The following day, Stokes decided to remove all the White police officers from Glenville stationing only African American police officers and community leaders in the predominantly black community, to prevent further rioting and ease tensions in the area. It was the first event in American history in which only African American police officers were sent in to deal with a violent riot or confrontation. While the police and community leaders prevented any more deaths from occurring, there was continued looting and arson throughout the six-square-mile area. On July 25, more police officers and the National Guard entered Glenville and by July 28, order was restored.
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The Omaha Race Riot occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, on 28-September 29, 1919. The race riot resulted in the brutal lynching of Will Brown, a black worker; the death of two white men; the attempted hanging of the mayor Edward Parsons Smith; and a public rampage by thousands of whites who set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse in downtown Omaha. It followed more than 20 race riots that occurred in major industrial cities of the United States during the Red Summer of 1919.
Three weeks before the riot, federal investigators had noted that "a clash was imminent owing to ill-feeling between white and black workers in the stockyards."[1] The number of blacks in Omaha doubled during the decade 1910-1920, as they were recruited to work in the meatpacking industry, and competing workers noticed. In 1910 Omaha had the third largest black population among the new western cities that had become destinations following Reconstruction. By 1920 the black population more than doubled to more than 10,000, second only to Los Angeles with nearly 16,000. It was ahead of San Francisco and Oakland, Topeka and Denver.[2] [3]
The major meatpacking plants hired blacks as strikebreakers in 1917. Hostility against them was high among working class whites in the city, who were mostly Catholic immigrants of southern and eastern Europe, or descendants of immigrants, and who lived chiefly in South Omaha. Ethnic Irish were among the largest and earliest group of immigrants and they established their own power base in the city by this time. Several years earlier following the death of an Irish policeman, ethnic Irish led a mob in an attack on Greektown, which drove the Greek community from Omaha.[4]
With the moralistic administration of first-term reform mayor Edward Parsons Smith, the city's criminal establishment led by Tom Dennison created a formidable challenge in cahoots with the Omaha Business Men's Association. Smith trudged through his reform agenda with little support from the Omaha City Council or the city's labor unions. Along with several strikes throughout the previous year, on September 11 two detectives with the Omaha Police Department's "morals squad" shot and killed an African American bellhop.[5]
Lynching victim Will Brown.
The violence associated with the lynching of Will Brown was triggered by reports in local media that sensationalized the alleged rape of 19-year-old Agnes Loebeck on September 25, 1919. The following day the police arrested 40-year-old Will Brown as a suspect. Loebeck identified Brown as her rapist, although later reports by the Omaha Police Department and the United States Army stated that she had not made a positive identification. There was an unsuccessful attempt to lynch Brown on the day of his arrest.
The Omaha Bee publicized the incident as one of a series of alleged attacks on white women by black men. The newspaper had carried a series of sensational articles alleging many incidents of black outrages.[6] The Bee was controlled by a political machine opposed to the newly elected reform administration of Mayor Edward Smith. It highlighted alleged incidents of "black criminality" to embarrass the new administration.[citation needed]
[edit] Beginning
At about 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 28, 1919, a large group of white youths gathered near the Bancroft School in South Omaha and began a march to the Douglas County Courthouse, where Brown was being held. The march was intercepted by John T. Dunn, chief of the Omaha Detective Bureau, and his subordinates. Dunn attempted to disperse the crowd, but they ignored his warning and marched on. Thirty police officers were guarding the court house when the marchers arrived. By 4:00 p.m., the crowd had grown much larger. Members of the crowd bantered with the officers until the police were convinced that the crowd posed no serious threat. A report to that effect was made to the central police station, and the captain in charge sent fifty reserve officers home for the day.
[edit] Riot
By 5:00 p.m., a mob of about 4,000 whites had crowded into the street on the south side of the Douglas County Courthouse. They began to assault the police officers, pushing one through a pane of glass in a door and attacking two others who had wielded clubs at the mob. At 5:15 p.m., officers deployed fire hoses to dispel the crowd, but they responded with a shower of bricks and sticks. Nearly every window on the south side of the courthouse was broken. The crowd stormed the lower doors of the courthouse, and the Police inside discharged their weapons down an elevator shaft in an attempt to frighten them, but this further incited the mob. They again rushed the police who were standing guard outside the building, broke through their lines, and entered the courthouse through a broken basement door.
It was at this moment that Marshal Eberstein, chief of police, arrived. He asked leaders of the mob to give him a chance to talk to the crowd. He mounted to one of the window sills. Beside him was a recognized chief of the mob. At the request of its leader, the crowd stilled its clamor for a few minutes. Chief Eberstein tried to tell the mob that its mission would best be served by letting justice take its course. The crowd refused to listen. Its members howled so that the chief's voice did not carry more than a few feet. Eberstein ceased his attempt to talk and entered the besieged building.
A crowd of people forming the riot
By 6 p.m., throngs swarmed about the court house on all sides. The crowd wrestled revolvers, badges and caps from policemen. They chased and beat every colored person who ventured into the vicinity. White men who attempted to rescue innocent blacks from unmerited punishment were subjected to physical abuse. The police had lost control of the crowd.
By 7 p.m., most of the policemen had withdrawn to the interior of the court house. There, they joined forces with Michael Clark, sheriff of Douglas County, who had summoned his deputies to the building with the hope of preventing the capture of Brown. The policemen and sheriffs formed their line of last resistance on the fourth floor of the court house.
The police were not successful in their efforts. Before 8 p.m., they discovered that the crowd had set the courthouse building on fire. Its leaders had tapped a nearby gasoline filling station and saturated the lower floors with the flammable liquid.
[edit] Escalation
Shots were fired as the mob pillaged hardware stores in the business district and entered pawnshops, seeking firearms. Police records showed that more than 1,000 revolvers and shotguns were stolen that night. The mob shot at any policeman; seven officers received gunshot wounds, although none of the wounds were serious.
Windows broken out, people climbing the building
Louis Young, 16 years old, was fatally shot in the stomach while leading a gang up to the fourth floor of the building. Witnesses said the youth was the most intrepid of the mob's leaders.
Pandemonium reigned outside the building. At Seventeenth and Douglas Streets, one block from the court house, James Hiykel, a 34-year-old businessman, was shot and killed.
The crowd continued to strike the courthouse with bullets and rocks. Spectators were shot. Participants inflicted minor wounds upon themselves. Women were thrown to the ground and trampled. Blacks were dragged from streetcars and beaten.
[edit] The first hanging
About 11 o'clock, when the frenzy was at its height, Mayor Edward Smith came out of the east door of the courthouse into Seventeenth Street. He had been in the burning building for hours. As he emerged from the doorway, a shot rang out.
"He shot me. Mayor Smith shot me," a young man in the uniform of a United States soldier yelled. The crowd surged toward the mayor. He fought them. One man hit the mayor on the head with a baseball bat. Another slipped the noose of a rope around his neck. The crowd started to drag him away.
"If you must hang somebody, then let it be me," the mayor said.
The mob dragged the mayor into Harney Street. A woman reached out and tore the noose from his neck. Men in the mob replaced it. Spectators wrestled the mayor from his captors and placed him in a police automobile. The throng overturned the car and grabbed him again. Once more, the rope encircled the mayor's neck. He was carried to Sixteenth and Harney Streets. There he was hanged from the metal arm of a traffic signal tower.
Mayor Smith was suspended in the air when State Agent Ben Danbaum drove a high-powered automobile into the throng right to the base of the signal tower. In the car with Danbaum were City Detectives Al Anderson, Charles Van Deusen and Lloyd Toland. They grasped the mayor and Russell Norgard untied the noose. The detectives brought the mayor to Ford Hospital. There he lingered between life and death for several days, finally recovering. "They shall not get him. Mob rule will not prevail in Omaha," the mayor kept muttering during his delirium.
[edit] Siege of the Court House
Meanwhile the plight of the police in the court house had become desperate. The fire had licked its way to the third floor. The officers faced the prospect of roasting to death. Appeals for help to the crowd below brought only bullets and curses. The mob frustrated all attempts to raise ladders to the imprisoned police. "Bring Brown with you and you can come down," somebody in the crowd shouted.
On the second floor of the building, three policemen and a newspaper reporter were imprisoned in a safety vault, whose thick metal door the mob had shut. The four men hacked their way out through the court house wall. The mob shot at them as they squirmed out of the stifling vault.
Flames rage into the night from the Court House
The gases of formaldehyde added to the terrors of the men imprisoned within the flaming building. Several jars of the powerful chemical had burst on the stairway. Its deadly fumes mounted to the upper floors. Two policemen were overcome. Their companions could do nothing to alleviate their sufferings.
Sheriff Clark led his prisoners (there were 121 of them) to the roof. Will Brown, for whom the mob was howling, became hysterical. Blacks, fellow prisoners of the hunted man, tried to throw him off the roof. Deputy Sheriffs Hoye and McDonald foiled the attempt.
Sheriff Clark ordered that female prisoners be taken from the building due to their distress. They ran down the burning staircases clad only in prison pajamas. Some of them fainted on the way. Members of the mob escorted them through the smoke and flames. Black women as well as white women were helped to safety.
The mob poured more gasoline into the building. They cut every line of hose that firemen laid from nearby hydrants. The flames were rapidly lapping their way upward. It seemed like certain cremation for the prisoners and their protectors.
[edit] Lynching
Will Brown is lynched, and his body mutilated and burned by a white crowd.
Photograph taken from a different angle showing the body of Will Brown after being burned by a white crowd.
Then three slips of paper were thrown from the fourth floor on the west side of the building. On one piece was scrawled: "The judge says he will give up Negro Brown. He is in dungeon. There are 100 white prisoners on the roof. Save them."
Another note read: "Come to the fourth floor of the building and we will hand the negro over to you."
The mob in the street shrieked its delight at the last message. Boys and young men placed firemen's ladders against the building. They mounted to the second story. One man had a heavy coil of new rope on his back. Another had a shotgun.
Two or three minutes after the unidentified athletes had climbed to the fourth floor, a mighty shout and a fusillade of shots were heard from the south side of the building.
Will Brown had been captured. A few minutes more and his lifeless body was hanging from a telephone post at Eighteenth and Harney Streets. Hundreds of revolvers and shotguns were fired at the corpse as it dangled in mid-air. Then, the rope was cut. Brown's body was tied to the rear end of an automobile. It was dragged through the streets to Seventeenth and Dodge Streets, four blocks away. The oil from red lanterns used as danger signals for street repairs was poured on the corpse. It was burned. Members of the mob hauled the charred remains through the business district for several hours.
Sheriff Clark said that Negro prisoners hurled Brown into the hands of the mob as its leaders approached the stairway leading to the county jail. Newspapers have quoted alleged leaders of the mob as saying that Brown was shoved at them through a blinding smoke by persons whom they could not see.
[edit] Aftermath
The lawlessness continued for several hours after Brown had been lynched. The police patrol was burned. The police emergency automobile was burned. Three times, the mob went to the city jail. The third time its leaders announced that they were going to burn it. Soldiers arrived before they could carry out their threat.
Infantry deployed to calm the riot
The riot lasted until 3 a.m., in the morning of September 29. At that hour, federal troops, under command of Colonel John E. Morris of the Twentieth Infantry, arrived from Fort Omaha and Fort Crook. Troops manning machine guns were placed in the heart of Omaha's business district; in North Omaha, the center of the black community, to protect citizens there; and in South Omaha, to prevent more mobs from forming. Major General Leonard Wood, commander of the Central Department, came the next day to Omaha by order of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Peace was enforced by 1,600 soldiers.
Martial law was not formally proclaimed in Omaha, but it was effectively enacted throughout the city. By the request of City Commissioner W.G. Ure, who was acting mayor, Wood took over control over the police department, too.
On October 1, 1919 Brown was laid to rest in Omaha's Potters Field. The interment log listed only one word next to his name: "Lynched".
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Joe Coe, also known as George Smith, was an African-American laborer who was lynched in 1891 in Omaha, Nebraska. Overwhelmed by a mob of one thousand at the Douglas County Courthouse, the twelve city police officers stood by without intervening. Afterward, the mayor called the lynching "the most deplorable thing that has ever happened in the history of the country."[1]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 About
* 2 Aftermath
* 3 See also
* 4 External links
* 5 References
[edit] About
Coe was a married man with two children who lived on North 12th Street north of downtown Omaha. On October 7, 1891 Lizzie Yates, a five-year-old white child who also lived in North Omaha, accused Coe of assaulting her. A crowd of men was already gathered at the old Douglas County Courthouse the day when Coe was brought in, to witness an unrelated, scheduled hanging, an official execution.
In the crowd, rumors circulated that the girl had died and the suspect's punishment was only 20 years in jail. Having seen Coe brought in earlier, the crowd decided he was guilty. Rumors flew around Omaha that the girl had died, the guilty party was in jail, and was only going to be punished with 20 years' incarceration.[2]
The next day, a mob of several hundred to 1,000 men formed in downtown Omaha early on Saturday, October 10, and overwhelmed the police at the courthouse.[3] Councilman Moriarty drove his cane through a window and led the men against the courthouse.[4] Leaders drove Coe to the assumed victim's house in the Near North Side neighborhood to be identified by the parents. The mother immediately said she had seen Coe roaming around the house, although she would not swear that it was he.[5]
When the mob brought Coe back to the courthouse to be lynched, James E. Boyd, the governor of Nebraska, and the county sheriff both appealed to the men to disperse. Instead, by midnight a crowd of 1,000 to 10,000 people had gathered at the courthouse.[6] The mob beat Coe and dragged him through city streets. He was probably already dead when he was hung from a streetcar wire at 17th and Harney Streets.[7] Omaha mayor Richard C. Cushing quickly condemned the lynching as "the most deplorable thing that has ever happened in the history of the country."[8]
[edit] Aftermath
Seven men were arrested for the crime, including the chief of police and the manager of a large dry goods store. A mob gathered outside the jail and threatened to destroy it unless the suspects were freed on bail but the County Attorney was determined to refuse them.[9]
The following day when Coe's body was set for public viewing at a downtown mortuary, six thousand spectators filed by. Hucksters sold pieces of the lynching rope as souvenirs.[10]
Ten days after the lynching, the Douglas County Assistant Coroner testified in court that Smith died of "fright", rather than of the wounds inflicted on him by the mob. Those wounds included sixteen wounds to his body and three vertebrae broken in his spine. Despite this, the coroner testified, "[T]he heart was so contracted and the blood was in such a condition that the doctor was satisfied that the man was literally scared to death." County Attorney Mahoney said he would have to modify the charges against the lynchers.[11] The grand jury decided not to prosecute.
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Johnny "Jack" Trice (1902 – October 8, 1923) was a football player who became the first African-American athlete from Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). Trice died due to injuries suffered during a college football game against the University of Minnesota on October 6, 1923.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Background
* 2 The game, Trice's death, and aftermath
* 3 Legacy
* 4 See also
* 5 References
* 6 Further reading
* 7 External links
[edit] Background
Trice was born in Hiram, Ohio in 1902, the son of a former slave and Buffalo Soldier. As a child, Trice was active in sports and demonstrated outstanding athletic skills. In 1918, Trice’s mother sent him to Cleveland, Ohio to live with an uncle. Trice attended East Technical High School where he played football. In 1922, Trice followed five of his teammates, as well as his former high school coach, Sam Willaman, to Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa.
While attending Iowa State, Trice participated in track and football (primarily as a tackle). He majored in animal husbandry, with the desire to go to the South after graduation, and use his knowledge to help African-American farmers. In the summer after his freshman year, Trice married Cora Mae Starland. They both found jobs in order to support themselves through school.
On October 5, 1923, the night before his first college football game, Trice wrote the following in a letter on stationery at a racially segregated hotel in Minneapolis/St. Paul (the letter was later found in Trice's suit just before his funeral):
“ My thoughts just before the first real college game of my life: The honor of my race, family & self is at stake. Everyone is expecting me to do big things. I will. My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly about the field tomorrow. Every time the ball is snapped, I will be trying to do more than my part. On all defensive plays I must break through the opponents' line and stop the play in their territory. Beware of mass interference. Fight low, with your eyes open and toward the play. Watch out for crossbacks and reverse end runs. Be on your toes every minute if you expect to make good. Jack.[1] ”
[edit] The game, Trice's death, and aftermath
On October 6, 1923, Trice and his Iowa State College teammates played against the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was ISU's third game that season; St. Louis refused to play against a black player. On the night of the game, Trice had to stay at a different Minneapolis hotel from his teammates.
During the second play of the game, Trice's collarbone was broken. Trice insisted he was all right and returned to the game. In the third quarter, while attempting to tackle a University of Minnesota ball carrier by throwing a roll block, Trice was trampled by three Minnesota players. Although he claimed to be fine, Trice was removed from the game and sent to a Minneapolis hospital. The doctors declared him fit to travel and he returned by train to Ames with his teammates. On October 8, 1923, Trice died from hemorrhaged lungs and internal bleeding as a result of the injuries sustained during the game.
Trice's funeral was held at the Iowa State College's central campus in Ames on October 16, 1923, with 4,000 students and faculty members in attendance.
As a result of his death, ISU did not renew their contract to play against Minnesota after the 1924 game. They would not play again until 1989.
(to be continued...)
DOES THIS SOUND LIKE A SOCIETY THAT WAS PRACTICING (IN ANY WAY) CIVIL RIGHTS TOWARD BLACK AMERICANS?
