Lynching in America [3]

Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans


. . . Mistreatment of black soldiers and veterans was not restricted to the South. Johnson C. Whittaker, who was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1858, was appointed to the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, in 1876 as one of the first black cadets in the academy’s history. On April 6, 1880, Mr. Whittaker was found unconscious and bloody on the floor of his dorm, wearing only his underwear. His legs had been bound together and tied to his bed, and his arms were tied tightly together at the wrists. He recounted that three masked white men had jumped on him while he slept, tied him up, choked him, struck him in the head, bloodied his nose, broken a mirror on his forehead, and cut his ear lobes while saying, “Let’s mark him like they do hogs down South.”³⁰

Two days before the attack, Mr. Whittaker had received an anonymous note reading, “You will be fixed. Better keep awake.” Rather than condemn the attack, West Point administrators claimed Mr. Whittaker had staged it himself and court-martialed him. The prosecutor relied on notions of black inferiority and argued, “Negroes are noted for their ability to sham and feign.”³¹ Mr. Whitaker was convicted and expelled from West Point.

That same decade, a mob of 50 whites from Sun River, Montana, lynched Robert Robinson, a black soldier stationed nearby at Fort Shaw.³² Mr. Robinson was a member of the 25th Infantry, an all-black unit that had been transferred to Montana from South Dakota just weeks earlier. Mr. Robinson had been arrested for allegedly shooting and killing a man. Before he could be tried, masked men entered the jail, demanded the key, took Mr. Robinson from his cell, and brought him to the alley behind Stone’s Store, where a mob lynched him and left his body hanging over the alleyway.³³

During the lynching era, white mobs regularly lynched black people with total impunity, facing no consequences for committing murder even when the victim was an active duty American serviceman. Black soldiers stationed in unfamiliar and predominately white areas were especially at risk of being presumed dangerous and guilty, accused of a social transgression or crime, and lynched without an investigation or trial.

On August 19, 1898, Private James Neely of the 25th Infantry — an all-black regiment that had just returned from heralded service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War — visited the small town of Hampton, Georgia, on a day pass from his post at Fort Hobson. Newspapers reported that Private Neely came into Hampton wearing his blue uniform and bayonet at his side; yet when he entered the local drug store and ordered a soda at the counter, the white owner told him black customers had to order and drink outside in the rear. Private Neely protested, the two men argued, and Private Neely was thrown out of the store and onto the street outside, where the conflict attracted attention. As Private Neely continued to insist that he had rights as an American and a soldier, a crowd of armed white men gathered and chased him down the road, firing their weapons. Private Neely was later found dead of gunshot wounds. A local coroner’s jury promptly declared that the murder had been committed by unknown parties. According to the Atlanta Constitution, army officials did not immediately respond or make arrangements to retrieve Private Neely’s remains.³⁴

Some lynchings of veterans during this era were public spectacle events — brutal displays of violence attended by hundreds or thousands of white men, women, and children.

After serving at Fort Huachuca, Arizona Territory, Spanish-American War veteran Fred Alexander returned home to Leavenworth, Kansas, where, on January 15, 1901, a mob burned him at the stake. Two months earlier, the murdered body of a 19-year-old white woman named Pearl Forbes had been found in a Leavenworth ravine, stoking local whites’ outrage over recent unsupported rumors about black men raping white women. Though local police’s working assumption was that Ms. Forbes was killed during a robbery gone awry, and a medical examination showed that Ms. Forbes had not been sexually assaulted, a coroner’s jury declared without any basis that she had been strangled “for the purpose of rape.” Local newspapers fanned the flames by running sensational reports that a predator had stalked Ms. Forbes, “forced her down into the ravine, outraged her, and then killed her.”³⁵

As fears of black sexual predators reached a fever's pitch, Fred Alexander was accused of assaulting a different white woman, and before that allegation could be investigated, the authorities charged him with the murder of Pearl Forbes. For several days, a mob of thousands stalked Mr. Alexander as he was transferred from jail to jail. Mr. Alexander refused to confess to murder, but the local press — seemingly determined to fuel the mob’s rage — nonetheless printed unsupported claims that the police had learned during their questioning of Mr. Alexander that a group of black men had choked Ms. Forbes, carried her to a shanty, and taken turns raping her.³⁶

A vigilante committee soon decided to lynch Mr. Alexander. Local officials cooperated with the lynch mob and posted official announcements of the lynching all over the city. When the scheduled time arrived, the mob broke into the jail and attacked Mr. Alexander with a hatchet before dragging him from his cell. In the gruesome lynching that followed, participants mutilated Mr. Alexander; castrated him, likely while he was still alive; and took parts of his body as souvenirs. The mob took the dying man to the ravine, chained him to an iron stake, doused him with some 22 gallons of kerosene or oil, and set him on fire before a crowd of thousands.³⁷

Whites terrorized and traumatized black veterans during the first decades of the era of racial terror in order to maintain the system of racial insubordination that existed during slavery and to carry that deadly ideology into the 20th century.

[to be continued.]

Colored Soldiers of the 369th Infantry who won the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action, 1919.

Colored men at the bar at Palm Tavern on 47th Street, Chicago, Illinois, April 1941 by Russell Lee, from the New York Public Library.