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Do NOT read this post until after you have voted
The situation as I outlined it actually happened in 1911. Those of you who went to the lynching will have witnessed the following firsthand, those who stayed at home will have heard it through neighbour eye witness accounts and in the local newspaper.
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Zachariah Walker, 1911
Zachariah Walker, a black man from Virginia, had traveled to Coatesville, Pennsylvania to work in the Worth Brothers Steel Company. As was common among the factory workers - European-born immigrants and migrant blacks alike - Walker passed the afternoon of Saturday, August 12, 1911 drinking alcoholic beverages in downtown Coatesville with his coworkers. While walking back to his temporary lodgings to get some sleep, Walker was probably somewhat inebriated when he took out his pistol and fired it in the general direction of two Polish steelworkers who were approaching him on the road from the opposite direction. Although his shots failed to strike either man, Edgar Rice, a security guard employed by the Worth Brothers factory -- heard the shots and came out to apprehend Walker. A scuffle ensued. It soon escalated, with both men drawing their weapons. Walker got his shot off first, killing Rice, before heading off drunkenly in a homeward direction. Not making it, he slept in a neighboring barn until the next morning.
Rice's body was soon discovered. After the Polish immigrants helped establish Walker as his probable murderer, search parties began the hunt for him. Two men from the search party found Zachariah Walker early the next morning. Sober again, he'd been walking down a dirt road heading out of town. Climbing into a cherry tree, the terrified Walker eluded capture for several hours as he watched men passing beneath the tree and doggedly searching for him. Giving up all hope of survival, Walker attempted to commit suicide. Shooting himself in the head, he succeeded only in shattering his own jaw, and was carried to the town hospital after falling from the tree and being discovered.
When Walker awoke at the hospital, he confessed to the killing of Edgar Rice in self-defense. A deputy was left to guard him at the hospital. (Contained by a straitjacket and bound by shackles -- Walker's left ankle was chained to the footboard of his hospital bed.) The town sheriff, Charles Umsted, a big man of six foot three and over 250 pounds, was familiarly known as "Jumbo" or "Jummy" and had a reputation for toughness and a well-honed facility for surviving the fiercely contested elections for town police chief. Umsted was up for re-election in September, and on the night of August 13, as the crowd around him grew, he saw a chance to earn a few votes. Taking care to speak loudly enough for bystanders to eavesdrop, he avowed that Walker had boasted about killing Rice, and he made no mention of Walker's claim of self-defense. Before concluding his staged monologue, with an increasingly roused crowd gathered around him, Umsted virtually promised the mob that he would not intervene in the event of a lynching. "I would be the devil if somebody should happen to go after that fellow -- Gentleman, allow me to say that I am not going to get hurt."
Encouraged by such prompting, a mob broke into the hospital and kidnapped Walker. His ankle, still chained to the bed, dragged the footboard behind him. The mob dragged Walker toward a farmhouse near the outskirts of town. When Umsted arrived at the hospital, Walker's agonized screams were still audible in the distance, but he made no effort to follow them. Instead, he walked casually back to town. Writes Robert F. Worth, a descendant of the steel mill owning family, in the Spring 1998 issue of The American Scholar: The mob's leaders dragged Walker half a mile, stopping in a clearing bordered by split-rail fences just beyond the Newlin farmhouse. It made a good theater, and the all-white crowd -- now nearly four thousand strong -- poured up from the road to take their places. As men ran back and forth from the barn with dry straw and firewood, Walker shouted from the fence railing: "For God's sake, give a man a chance! I killed Rice in self-defense. Don't give me no crooked death because I ain't white!" But the fire was soon blazing up, illuminating the faces not only of men but also of women and children, who had been drawn by the commotion on the way home from church.
Within minutes, Walker was hurled onto the pyre, his body quickly enveloped in flames. The crowd roared its approval, and those close to the fire hunched forward, according to a newspaper report, "eagerly watching the look of mingled horror and terror that distorted his blood-smeared face." As the flames scorched his skin, Walker let out a series of awful screams that were heard, according to later testimony, almost a mile away. He seemed close to death when he managed, somehow, to crawl out of the fire. Still breathing, he reached the fence, his back -- as one boy later testified -- "all raw with burns. The onlookers paused in shock for a moment; no one had anticipated this. Then several of them beat him or pushed him with fence rails back into the flames. Shrieking with pain, Walker managed to struggle out a second time, still shackled to the burning footboard. According to witnesses, when he was pushed back in again, his flesh was visibly hanging from his body. To the crowd's amazement, Walker struggled out of the fire a third time. This time they allowed him to crawl almost to their feet, astonished and horrified by what one reporter called "the revolting spectacle his maimed and half-burned body presented to them." Finally, several men swung a rope around his neck, holding it taut at both ends, and pulled him back into the coals. His resistance gone, Zachariah Walker gave one last terrible scream and collapsed. His body was soon obscured by a wall of fire, and the smoke carried the smell of roasting human flesh into the night sky.
The following day, the Coatesville Record remarked on the politeness of the crowd: "Five thousand men, women, and children stood by and watched the proceedings as though it were a ball game or another variety of spectator sport." Boys had stopped for cold soda afterward at the Coatesville Candy Company to retell the story. Many returned to the site the next day to gather fragments of bone and charred flesh as souvenirs.
Source: americanlynching.com
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The sad truth is that probably half if not most of us would have attended this atrocity. I hope most of you will be shocked to find out the true atrociousness of a lynching, and will be strengthened in the notion that mob "justice" inherently is wrong.
Let's devote this thread to respectful discussion regarding lynchings.
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