Can the United States hold local officials accountable for failing to stop a lynching?
In 1906, the city of Chattanooga was electrified by a rape dubbed the crime of the century. A young white woman named Nevada Taylor had been attacked in a cemetery. Though she initially wavered on the race of her attacker, saying she remembered only his calm, warm voice, Taylor eventually declared that the rapist was a Black man. There was only one piece of evidence in the case, a leather strap, and the local sheriff, a proud Confederate veteran named Joseph Shipp, was under great pressure to locate a suspect; he was up for re-election in a few weeks.
Soon, there was an apparent break in the case: a white man seeking a reward for providing information claimed he had been across the street from the cemetery and saw a Black man hanging around a short time before the crime. He later identified the man as Ed Johnson, a handyman at a local church who also delivered ice to homes in the area. Johnson had a persuasive alibi, having been in a local saloon at the time of the crime in the view of a dozen people. But those witnesses were Black, and the levers of justice in Chattanooga were controlled by whites.
Within hours, a mob of hundreds of whites gathered at the local jail, vowing to take justice into their own hands. The local judge showed up on the scene and promised an immediate trial. The trial was, by all meaningful accounts, a travesty. The victim refused to make a definitive identification, breaking down in tears on the stand. In the midst of all the frenzied emotion, a juror stood up in the box and vowed to kill Johnson by himself. The judge failed to declare a mistrial, and didn’t even remove the juror. Soon after, Ed Johnson was sentenced to be hanged.
Thousands of local Black people rallied to Johnson’s side, as ministers baptized him and prepared him to meet his death. Refusing to give up, his Black attorney journeyed all the way to Washington to beg the Supreme Court to intervene. The lawyer, Noah Parden, showed up at the home of John Marshall Harlan, who was reviewing circuit petitions. After hearing the lawyer’s story, Harlan did something momentous for the time: He issued a stay of execution, vowing to review the fitness of the trial under Ed Johnson’s right to due process under the U.S. Constitution. Up to that moment, the Supreme Court had been notoriously resistant to confronting the issue of shoddy legal procedures in the South, and few people expected a white judge to credit the arguments of a Black lawyer.
Sheriff Shipp was stunned and outraged at this turn of events. So were thousands of other whites, who vowed vengeance. That night, Shipp did a curious thing; he let all the guards take the night off except for one watchman in his 70s. Hundreds of white men converged on the jail, breaking into the cells, grabbing Ed Johnson, and carrying him to the city’s most famous location, the gleaming new Walnut Street Bridge. There, amid a sea of thousands of white people, Ed Johnson was hung and shot multiple times, telling the crowd, “God Bless you all. I am a innocent man.” The crowd affixed a note on Johnson’s dead body: “To Chief Harlan. Here is your Negro. Thanks for your kind consideration of him. You can find him at the morgue.”
Struck with horror, Harlan vowed not to allow Chattanooga’s show of contempt for the Supreme Court to go unremedied. He persuaded the other justices to bring charges against Sheriff Shipp and leaders of the lynching party. For the first and only time in its history, the Supreme Court would sit as a jury in a criminal case. After a lengthy trial, Shipp and five other defendants were declared guilty and sentenced to prison.
Eight decades later, the great civil rights attorney and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declared that the Shipp case was the first time that African Americans saw the Supreme Court act on their behalf, and he credited Harlan for the breakthrough.