Lynching of Ed Johnson
On March 19, 1906, Ed Johnson, a young African American man, was murdered by a lynch mob in his home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
He had been wrongfully sentenced to death for the rape of Nevada Taylor, but Justice John Marshall Harlan of the United States Supreme Court had issued a stay of execution.
To prevent delay or avoidance of execution, a mob broke into the jail where Johnson was held, and abducted and lynched him from the Walnut Street Bridge.
During Johnson's incarceration there was much public interest in the case, and many people, including court officers, feared a possible lynch attempt.
[2] After the murder, President Theodore Roosevelt made it his goal to have the members of the mob imprisoned by directing the Secret Service to participate in the investigation.
Although police arrested several suspects for these crimes, including the man who admitted to killing the constable (he claimed that he had acted in self-defense), Chattanooga residents made no attempts to lynch the alleged criminals.
[5][6] She lost consciousness during the attack, and afterwards could remember little beyond the fact that her assailant had been a black man who approached her from behind and wrapped a leather strap around her neck.
[5] The next day, he arrested Ed Johnson after receiving a report that he had been witnessed holding a leather strap near the streetcar stop on the night of the attack.
Anticipating such an attempt and desiring to protect the prisoner, Sheriff Shipp and Hamilton County Judge Samuel D. McReynolds had evacuated Broaden and Johnson to Nashville, Tennessee, earlier that day to await trial.
[1][10] During the trial, Taylor said that she recognized Johnson as the man who assaulted her by his voice, face, and size, as well as a hat he had worn on the night of the attack and again in the Nashville jail where she had been brought to identify him.
Although multiple deputies usually guarded the prison each night and Sheriff Shipp's chief deputy recommended that extra guards be posted around the jail to prevent mob violence, Shipp excused all law enforcement officials, except for elderly nighttime jailer Jeremiah Gibson, from duty.
[16] A group of men entered the virtually unguarded jail between 8:30 and 9:00 pm and broke through a set of three third-floor doors using an axe and a sledgehammer, which took nearly three hours.
During this time Shipp arrived at the jail and pleaded with the mob to cease their violence and allow the rule of law to remain in effect.
"[19] Around a dozen men, believed to include some of Shipp's deputies, were actively involved in the lynching, while more spectators gathered around the jail and followed the lynchers to the bridge.
The mob's actions, especially the note addressed to Justice Harlan and Chattanooga law enforcement's lack of prevention or response, directly challenged the Supreme Court's authority over state criminal proceedings.
In a Birmingham News interview following the lynching, Sheriff Shipp explicitly blamed Ed Johnson's death on the Supreme Court's interference.
[27] Ninety-four years after the lynching, in February 2000, Hamilton County Criminal Judge Doug Meyer overturned Johnson's conviction after hearing arguments that Johnson did not receive a fair trial because of the all-white jury and the judge's refusal to move the trial from Chattanooga, where there was much publicity about the case.
