INTRODUCTION
One morning in the spring of 1985, I drove along a country road in Alabama to the Tuskegee Institute, one of America’s oldest and most venerated Black colleges. I was researching a book about the 1964 murder of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner in Mississippi and had heard there was a folder on the case in a collection at Tuskegee, then known as “the lynching archives.” When a librarian led me to the room where the materials were kept, I was surprised to see not a solitary cabinet, as I’d expected, but dozens of containers and cardboard boxes, sixty-three in number. She explained these held a century’s worth of newspaper clippings and other published accounts of the many thousands of lynchings in the United States, most of African Americans.
This substantial repository, overseen by the pioneering Black sociologist Monroe Nathan Work in the years 1912–1935 and maintained for decades by students and staff, had defied lynching’s code of impunity and silence. It had done this by refusing to allow the stories of what the crusading Black journalist Ida B. Wells called “America’s national crime” to be forgotten and die along with its victims. Notably, I was told this archive held only the known cases, those recorded by the press or civil rights groups, but that an immeasurable number still remained unknown or unsubstantiated.
It was my encounter with the Tuskegee collection and its unavoidable truth—that lynching was not a series of random, aberrational incidents but an institutionalized form of white terror—that led me to write the book At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, which was published in 2002.
The chronological accounts in the Tuskegee collection, although drawn from all over the country, chiefly concerned the Southern states, where historically most lynchings took place. But incidents of racialized mob violence occurred in the North as well. There, given their infrequency, and because they tended to reveal the hypocrisy of the region’s vaunted superiority as a place of assured civic authority and respect for the rule of law, they often attracted greater notoriety.
Several years ago, I was drawn to examine one such case. It occurred in Port Jervis, New York, on June 2, 1892, and claimed the life of a young Black man named Robert Lewis. It was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward. There had been a sharp rise in the reported number of Black people killed in this manner in recent years—74 in 1885; 94 in 1889; 113 in 1891. The year 1892 would see the greatest number, 161, almost one every other day. The nation’s newspapers were rarely without news of a lynching somewhere, a crime that emerging Black activists described as driven by the impulse to thwart African Americans’ social and economic advance toward equality and full citizenship, by the presumption that Black people were inherently criminal, and by white men’s insecurity about Black male sexuality and threats to male hierarchy generally.
What perplexed white Port Jervians and other New Yorkers was why a lynching had occurred in a village just northwest of New York City with a modest African American population of roughly two hundred men, women, and children, or 2 percent of its approximately nine thousand residents. Although the town was hardly free from the common social and economic inequities of the era, and its normalized racism, it had no flagrant history of racist mob violence.
The man put to death by the Port Jervis mob, Robert Lewis, was a twenty-eight-year-old teamster, or bus driver, for the town’s leading hotel, the Delaware House, who had allegedly beaten and sexually assaulted Lena McMahon, a young white woman. Lewis, before being killed, was reputed to have confessed to the crime but had also named McMahon’s white boyfriend as an accomplice.
Sensational news stories of violent crime in the streets of large cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago might have been consumed by readers and as quickly forgotten. Not so with the troubling bulletin of a lynching at Port Jervis. Because such incidents reported then occurred almost exclusively in the South, the fact that a lynching had taken place in a community only sixty-five miles and a two-hour train ride from Manhattan, and had been witnessed by two thousand people, brought immediate national condemnation. Situated at the confluence of the Delaware and Neversink Rivers, where the states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet, Port Jervis was a largely peaceful, orderly burg, surrounded by water and mountains, attractive to city folk who came in summer to fish for trout, canoe in the scenic Delaware, or enjoy a breeze on the verandas of the local boardinghouses.
(Collection of the Minisink Valley Historical Society)
In recent years, due to the efforts of a small group of current and former residents, and the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been new interest in the lynching of Robert Lewis at Port Jervis, arguably the most troubling incident in the city’s past. But decades of aversion to the subject have left many residents, Black and white, substantially unfamiliar with it. This collective lack of remembering (or remembrance) has been determined and willful, a result of the town’s profound shame over the lynching itself, as well as the ensuing humiliation when, after vowing to punish those responsible, the community failed to do so. Lingering resentment at being singled out for censure and the lack of overt efforts by whites to mend relations with fellow Black citizens have been exacerbated by a far more slow-motion calamity—the loss by the middle of the twentieth century of Port Jervis’s prominence as a Northeast rail, industrial, and commercial hub.
The yellowing pages in the Tuskegee archive derive their authority from the irony that the very aims of lynching—the denial of due process, the oblivion of the act itself, and the lasting anonymity of participants—were undone by the reality that such crimes made for scandalous newspaper copy. A white woman violated, a Black man accused, a gallant posse in pursuit, the “people’s” righteous vengeance attained—such elements fed multiple days of headlined coverage wherever lynching occurred, from initial alarm and outcry to the ultimate barbaric spectacle.
White-reported and -published newspapers are often the chief historical sources of these incidents. Contemporary Black newspapers, such as the New York Age, Washington Bee, and Richmond Planet, never failed to register their severe condemnation of lynching but usually offered little in the way of locally sourced information. The killing of Robert Lewis at Port Jervis occurred a generation prior to the development of thorough methods of inquiry by anti-lynching crusaders or organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); as a result, there are no known accounts of what occurred at Port Jervis from the vantage point of the local Black community, except what can be discerned from public actions. A public coroner’s inquest was held, involving numerous witnesses, but a copy of the original transcript, if one ever existed, has vanished. It is helpful that it was the practice of contemporary reporters to copy down such legal proceedings verbatim, although different published versions can vary slightly in tone and nuance.
This, then, will be the story the book attempts to tell—an alleged crime, a lynching, a misbegotten attempt at an official inquiry, a past unresolved. What factors prompted such a spasm of racial violence in a relatively prosperous, industrious small New York town? What meaning did the country assign to it? And what did the incident portend?
The commercial district of Port Jervis today retains its low-rise, storefront appearance, with eaves and cornices out of the Victorian era. A twenty-minute walk will take one by many of the places involved in the Robert Lewis lynching, from the home of Lena McMahon to the banks of the nearby Neversink, where she was allegedly attacked; to the now-abandoned Delaware & Hudson Canal, along which Lewis was pursued and captured; and to the lynching site on East Main Street, where merchants, railway workers, lawyers, doctors, hoteliers, and factory workers, most of whom knew one another, and many of whom knew Robert Lewis, saw him repeatedly beaten and then hoisted by a rope until he was dead. On a quiet summer morning, when no cars are about, it can seem that a portal to the past might open for a moment and beckon one through.
I believe it is necessary that we take that step and revisit this place and time, to consider the event’s not insignificant legacy and weigh how it reflected, and in turn influenced, late nineteenth-century American ideas about race, gender, and justice. Some details of the story remain elusive; nonetheless, my aim is to help place it, even with its lingering mysteries, in our communal history.
The books on civil rights history I have written since the 1980s have been to a great extent guided by a confidence in the forward advance of racial progress, a faith never unanimous among citizens of the United States but for many years broadly assumed. While no one seriously believed Barack Obama’s presidency would usher in a post-racial nation, there was a sense that the successes of the modern civil rights movement and the laws and policies it inspired, though not comprehensive and not attained without suffering and immense struggle, had at least moved the country to a place of enlarged racial understanding and opportunity.
Today, instead of guarded optimism, there is a weary pessimism that, as the Port Jervis lynching signaled in its time, the assault on and devaluing of the lives of Black Americans are neither a regional nor a temporary feature but a national crisis and, for the foreseeable future, a permanent one. Much like at the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, when post–Civil War idealism was supplanted by Southern whites’ bare-knuckle tactics of exclusion and intimidation, so now do we find ourselves confronting the abandonment of hard-won gains from the New Deal, the civil rights and environmental movements, and other progressive causes. Voting rights, gained courthouse to courthouse by Black Southerners and civil rights workers, have been gutted by the Supreme Court, and conservative forces continue to seek creative new ways to curtail and impede them, targeting Black people and other minorities, as one North Carolina judicial opinion noted, “with surgical precision.” Each fortnight brings a new report of the killing of a Black person by police. “Jim Crow,” a term once seemingly relegated to the nation’s past, has found new purpose in expressing the harsh conditions of post-prison life for those formerly incarcerated, as well as large-scale efforts by states to make voting inaccessible to Blacks and other minority citizens, while seizing ever-greater control of whose votes are counted. These elements of racism and white supremacy that refuse to die have for decades contributed to the perversion of our politics. It is essential they be challenged and addressed in the name of moral decency, and to preserve the future of American democracy.
Nor can we look away from the connection between the nation’s lynching legacy and the recent resurgence of armed vigilantism in America. The crowds of whites who once amassed outside Southern courthouses demanding that sheriffs relinquish Black prisoners, or who forced their way inside to abduct them, have as their twenty-first-century counterparts the open-carry white militiamen, the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys, who invade statehouses and the Capitol in Washington, plot the kidnapping of elected officials, and seek to intimidate voters, legislators, and peaceful protesters. This “mobocratic spirit,” a phrase Abraham Lincoln used as early as 1838 to describe vigilantism’s corrosive effect on America, frightfully insinuates that mob violence is a legitimate means of effecting political change.
These issues remain as deserving of our concern as they did 130 years ago, when America turned its gaze to Port Jervis.
Nothing illustrates the need to revisit this unfortunate history more than the opening in 2018 of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which honors the memory of more than four thousand African Americans killed by lynch mobs between 1877 and 1950. Lynching has for too long been associated exclusively with the South, of which Montgomery is a historic capital, and with images of Ku Klux Klan night riders and angry white crowds gathered outside rural courthouses. While the Southern lynching epidemic did not replicate itself fully in the North, as some feared, Port Jervis proved an augury of early twentieth-century white-on-Black terroristic violence in places as diverse as New York City, rural Pennsylvania, Chicago, southern Illinois, and Duluth, Minnesota. And it is impossible not to see lynching’s vestiges in the biases of our own times: racial profiling and police brutality, the continuing presumption of Black criminality, and a willingness to subject Black people to summary justice, as well as prejudice in the courts and in the nation’s penal system, including the use of the death penalty.
Today parts of the country are engaged in an effort to redefine the nature of policing, with the particular goal of stopping the far-too-numerous instances of deadly force used against African Americans by officers of the law as well as vigilantes. We say the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, and many others because it is long past time white America educated itself about the methods and presumptions responsible for their deaths. We must also acknowledge the traumatic and terroristic toll such murders and their endless online video repetition have on Black citizens. Accordingly, this book will, as it narrates the story of a great injustice and provides historical context, seek to be at all times respectful in quoting words of intolerance or depicting scenes of graphic violence.
On June 10, 2020, in the immediate aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, a peaceful, locally organized Black Lives Matter march took place in Port Jervis, attended by hundreds of Black and white residents and protected by local police. At the same event, members of a committee called the Friends of Robert Lewis spoke with marchers about the effort to establish in Port Jervis a memorial plaque and signage bearing details about the 1892 Robert Lewis lynching, as one step in an ongoing commemorative and educational effort.
“There is no hero in this story,” Ralph Drake, the group’s white founder, who grew up in Port Jervis, observed of the long-ago tragedy. “The town must become the hero, in confronting its legacy.”
The Black Lives Matter march through the streets of Port Jervis, the work of the Friends of Robert Lewis group, and the Montgomery memorial itself, like the Tuskegee archives, remind us that it is a national reckoning that is due, and that the historic confidence of any section of the United States in some immunity to racial injustice remains, as it was in Robert Lewis’s time, a false faith indeed.