Chattanooga, 1906: One Lynching, Six Convictions, Ninety Days

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The Supreme Court tried six men for a killing at this bridge. It convicted them of contempt of court.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The man they killed was named Ed Johnson, and his appeal was already docketed in Washington when they did it.

So the Attorney General of the United States filed an information in contempt against the sheriff of Hamilton County, Tennessee, and twenty-six other men.

Six of them were found guilty, and the heaviest sentence was ninety days.

Eighteen of the twenty-seven were dismissed before the hearing. Nine were tried. The six convicted were the sheriff, his night jailer, and four men from the mob.

Ninety days is the longest punishment anywhere in this record, and the Court was not punishing the killing. It could only reach the part that was aimed at itself.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1902 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Chattanooga sits on a bend of the Tennessee River under Lookout Mountain, in the southeast corner of the state.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

These photographs were made by the Detroit Publishing Company, most of them in nineteen-oh-seven. The year after all this happened.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The colours are a machine's estimate. The originals are black-and-white glass negatives, and they are free at the Library of Congress.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

This is one of the avenues going out of town. A stone wall along the sidewalk. Big porches raised up above it.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1920 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A manufacturing district spreading along the water.

Two daily papers served the city. The Times in the morning, The News in the evening, both with a large circulation.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1905-1915 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Hold on to those two papers. They do more work in this story than any lawyer does.

On the twenty-third of January, nineteen-oh-six, a white woman was raped in or near Chattanooga.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1902 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Two days later Sheriff Joseph Shipp and his deputies arrested a Black man named Ed Johnson and charged him with it.

That same afternoon a judge ordered him taken out of the county. First to Dayton, then to Nashville. The finding on why runs to eight words. Because of fear that he would be lynched.

That night a large mob attacked the jail where he was supposed to be.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Three deputies were there. The police came, and so did the chairman of the city's safety committee. They held them off.

The mob appointed a committee to walk through the jail and satisfy itself he was not in it. Even after that committee reported back, it took force to clear the yard.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1902 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The militia was called out twice in those weeks. The county bought guns to defend the jail.

Johnson was brought back on the sixth of February and put on trial the same day. On the ninth he was convicted and sentenced to death.

Three lawyers had been appointed to defend him. They did not appeal.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1902 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

One of them published a statement in the Chattanooga Times explaining why, and the Supreme Court copied it into the record. It is the strangest thing in the case.

He had asked the judge to appoint three more lawyers to share the responsibility. Six of them sat down together and discussed the recent mob uprising and the state of unrest in the community.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1902 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Their judgment was that the life of the defendant, even if the wrong man, could not be saved.

He must die by the judgment of the law. Or else, if his case were appealed, he would die by the act of the uprising of the people.

They explained the right of appeal to him. They also told him they feared an appeal would cause mob violence against him.

He said he did not want to die by a mob, and that he would do as they thought best.

The same lawyer ended his statement by begging every peace officer in the county to keep looking for further light on whether the man was guilty at all.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1915 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The execution was set for the thirteenth of March. The governor moved it to the twentieth.

On the third of March, two other lawyers went to the federal court instead and filed a petition for habeas corpus. It said every Black citizen had been excluded, illegally, from the grand jury and from the trial jury.

That his counsel had been deterred from raising it. Deterred from asking for a change of venue. Deterred from asking for a delay to let the excitement subside.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900-1920 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Deterred, the petition said, by the fear and danger of mob violence.

On the sixteenth the Chattanooga Times told its readers that a Black attorney had gone to Washington to get an appeal.

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The record never gives his name.

On the tenth of March the federal circuit court turned the petition down. But it ordered Johnson held for ten days, so that he could appeal.

On Saturday the seventeenth the appeal was presented in Washington to Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentuckian, who allowed it that day.

On Monday the nineteenth the full Court allowed the appeal, ordered all proceedings stayed, and the clerk wired the sheriff of Hamilton County.

Justice Harlan sent a second telegram, to the federal judge in Chattanooga, with the statute attached.

The statute said that while the appeal was pending, any state proceeding against the prisoner was null and void.

At about two o'clock the judge who had tried Johnson told Shipp face to face that the case was stayed, and that Johnson was now a federal prisoner.

Shipp understood that. The finding says so in six words.

At four o'clock The News put it on the street under a headline. An appeal is allowed. Ed Johnson will not hang to-morrow.

The story under it began: the gallows in the Hamilton County jail has again been disappointed.

The same paper ran an editorial that evening. All of this delay is aggravating to the community.

The jail was four storeys, two of them below ground. An iron door, then a stair, then a revolving steel door, then the cell.

Sometime that evening the only other prisoner on the top floor, a white man, was moved off it. He had been moved the same way on the night of the first attempt.

Around half past eight, men walked in and went straight to the door of Johnson's corridor. It took them over an hour, with a sledge and an ax, to break the bolts on it.

About twelve men did the work. A crowd gathered to watch them do it.

The Court counted the guns in that mob. One rifle, in the jail office. One pistol, shown to a reporter.

The jail's own rifles, bought two months earlier for exactly this, were in a show case in that office. The mob took them out and unloaded them.

The militia was drilling in the armory three blocks away, between eight and half past ten. Nobody called them.

No alarm bell was rung at the court house.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

It had been rung on the night of the twenty-fifth of January, and it had brought a big crowd out.

In January the chairman of the board of safety had walked four or five blocks to the jail and picked up sixteen men on the way to put the mob down.

Nobody walked anywhere on the nineteenth. Asked afterwards to go and identify the men, the sheriff said it would be dangerous and foolish.

Johnson was brought out a little after ten, with his arms tied.

They took him to the county bridge over the Tennessee River. The Court measured the distance from the jail. About six blocks.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The engineers' survey calls that bridge the Walnut Street Bridge. It was finished in eighteen ninety-one, and it is still standing.

Beyond an arc light, they put a rope around his neck and threw it over a beam. About ten minutes passed between the mob reaching the bridge and Ed Johnson being dead.

The Court's own words for it. A dangerous portion of the community, seized with the awful thirst for blood which only killing can quench.

They were so impatient for his blood, it said, that they utterly disregarded the act of Congress as well as the order of this court.

Two months later, at a meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, Shipp gave an interview to a reporter from the Age-Herald. It ran the next morning, and it convicted him.

I am frank to say that I did not attempt to hurt any of them, and would not have made such an attempt if I could.

He said the Supreme Court of the United States was responsible for this lynching. He said he had looked for no trouble that night. He had looked for it, he said, the next day.

The Court read all that as a man who resented its order as an alien intrusion.

And there is one more line in the findings. Shipp was standing for re-election, and he had been told that saving the prisoner in January would cost him his place.

He answered that he wished the mob had got him before he did.

The Court held that the riot was the direct result of opposition to the administration of the law by this court, and was understood to be.

Its finding against the sheriff is one sentence long. Shipp not only made the work of the mob easy, but in effect aided and abetted it.

The night jailer fell under the same condemnation, under less responsibility.

Three of the nine were cleared. A deputy named Galloway, and two men named Justice and Ward, because the evidence against them was not enough.

And then the reason the Court gave for being in this at all. If the life of any one in the custody of the law is at the mercy of a mob, the administration of justice becomes a mockery.

Rule discharged as to Galloway, Justice and Ward. Made absolute as to Shipp, Gibson, Williams, Nolan, Padgett and Mayse.

Three justices dissented, and their first paragraph is the most important thing in the case.

Justice Peckham wrote that everyone who knew the facts agreed it was murder, without one extenuating circumstance to relieve its atrocious character.

And then, in the very next sentence: the important question, however, is whether the sheriff is guilty of the charge made against him in this proceeding.

That is the shape of the whole thing, written down by the men who lost the vote. Every justice on that bench believed a murder had been done. The only question in front of them was contempt.

Peckham found no evidence of any conspiracy, and no man in Chattanooga standing better as a citizen than Shipp.

He would have discharged the rule against the sheriff, and against the jailer too.

On the fifteenth of November, nineteen-oh-nine, six men stood at the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Chief Justice said the Court need not dwell on what it would mean to let this pass into a precedent for unpunished contempt.

Shipp, Williams and Nolan, ninety days. Gibson, Padgett and Mayes, sixty days. In the jail of the District of Columbia.

Two days later the marshal filed a return that the judgment had been executed according to the tenor thereof. That is the last line of the case.

There is one more entry, a few pages later in the same volume. Ed Johnson against the State of Tennessee. Number two. Docketed the nineteenth of March, nineteen-oh-six.

Case abated on account of death of appellant. On that day, the report says, the appellant was killed.

The Court had already said what it thought of that appeal. Writing in nineteen-oh-six, Justice Holmes said its grounds could not be regarded as frivolous, or a mere pretence.

The facts that might have been found, he wrote, would have required the gravest and most anxious consideration before the petition could have been denied.

And then, flatly, in the United States Reports. The murder of the petitioner has made it impossible to decide that case.

Nobody in these volumes is charged with that murder.

The Court was careful about why. It is not a party, Holmes wrote. There is nothing that affects the judges in their own persons.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Their concern was only that the law should be obeyed. A killing in Chattanooga belonged to Tennessee, and Tennessee is not in these books.

The record names one lawyer for Ed Johnson on that appeal. E. M. Hewlett, of Washington.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1902 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The two Chattanooga papers the Court quotes have never been digitised. Their words survive because a federal reporter typed them into a book.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

In February of two thousand, ninety-four years on, the Criminal Court of Hamilton County heard the case again and set the conviction aside. That is outside these four opinions, and it is the only part of this that anybody went back and fixed.

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Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1907 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Everything you have seen is four opinions on one shelf in any law library, and all of it is free online. The citations are in the description. If you read one thing, read the dissent — it is where the law says out loud what it could not do.