The race riot resulted in the lynching of Will Brown, a black civilian; the death of two white rioters; the injuries of many Omaha Police Department officers and civilians, including the attempted hanging of Mayor Edward Parsons Smith; and a public rampage by thousands of white rioters who set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse in downtown Omaha.

It followed more than 20 race riots that occurred in major industrial cities and certain rural areas 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.

In 1910, Omaha had the third largest black population among the new western cities that had become destinations following Reconstruction and during the Great Migration that started in the 1910s.

[5] The city's criminal establishment, led by Tom Dennison and teamed with the Omaha Business Men's Association, created a formidable challenge for the moralistic administration of first-term reform mayor Edward Parsons Smith.

Following several strikes throughout the previous year, two detectives with Omaha Police Department's "morals squad" shot and killed an African American bellhop on September 11.

[6] Sensationalized local media reports of the alleged rape of 19-year-old Agnes Loebeck on September 25, 1919 triggered the violence associated with Will Brown's lynching.

[9] A political machine opposed to the newly elected reform administration of Mayor Smith controlled the Omaha Bee.

[6]: 157 At about 2 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shots were fired as the mob pillaged hardware stores in the business district and entered pawnshops, seeking firearms.

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.

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.

Two or three minutes after the unidentified men had climbed to the fourth floor, a mighty shout and a fusillade of shots were heard from the south side of the building.

Sheriff Clark said that black prisoners hurled Brown into the hands of the mob as its leaders approached the stairway leading to the county jail.

Major General Leonard Wood, commander of the Central Department, came the next day to Omaha by order of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker.

After a six-week session, the grand jury issued a report that criticized the Smith administration for ineffective leadership and police incompetence.

[13] General Wood initially blamed the disturbance on the Industrial Workers of the World, as part of the Red Scare then prevalent in the U.S.

John Albert Williams, editor of a Black newspaper called The Monitor made the clearest and most direct public allegations against Dennison.

In more recent times, according to local historian Orville D. Menard in 1989, Dennison fomented the riot in the Gibson neighborhood near South Omaha.

The riot "was not a casual affair; it was premeditated and planned by those secret and invisible forces that today are fighting you and the men who represent good government.

In the fall of 1920, Dr. George E. Haynes, an educator employed as Director of Negro Economics at the U.S. Department of Labor, produced a report on that year's racial violence designed to serve as the basis for an investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

[21] In 1998, playwright Max Sparber had his play about the riot produced by the Blue Barn Theatre in the rotunda of the Douglas County Courthouse.

State Senator Ernie Chambers condemned the play for using the device of fictional African-American blackface performers as the story's narrators.

In 2007 the New Jersey Repertory Company presented Sparber's Minstrel Show or the Lynching of William Brown in Long Branch.

In an open letter to the people of Omaha, Hebert described his feelings behind his effort: It is a shame that it took these deaths and others to raise public consciousness and effect the changes that we enjoy today.