The lynching of William Brown, or when Red Summer came to my hometown
There are two known photos of William Brown, who died 100 years ago this past fall. In the first, he wears a fedora and what looks like a chambray work shirt. His face is serious, unsmiling. His eyes, cold, stare off into the distance. He looks every bit the day laborer he was.
In the second, he is in front of a smiling crowd of perhaps three dozen white men, as what’s left of his body burns in the foreground.
That man, and that body, like those of all human beings who were lynched, suffered beyond measure. Beaten. Strung up and hung from a traffic tower. Repeatedly shot while hanging. Tied to a car, then dragged several blocks. Doused with motor oil, then burned until it was unrecognizable as human. Dragged again through the streets, then ultimately buried in an unmarked grave in a potter’s field.
About Brown’s life little is known. He lived in my hometown of Omaha, where he worked in a packinghouse, or perhaps in a lumberyard, or perhaps shepherding coal from trucks to cellars, or perhaps some combination thereof. When he died he was unmarried, around 41 years old. He was a “good time boy,” as playwright Beaufield Berry put it when we talked, performing hard labor by day and gambling and drinking in his off hours. It was a life, as wondrous and as ordinary as any other, until he was convicted by an unruly mob — estimates range from 5,000 to 20,000, at a time when Omaha’s population numbered just 191,000 — of raping a 19-year-old white woman at gunpoint.
Never mind that his supposed victim later confessed to being unsure whether he was guilty of the crime or not. Never mind that, as detailed in late historian Orville D. Menard’s definitive history of the lynching, a physical examination showed Brown was “too twisted by rheumatism to assault anyone.” Never mind that the boyfriend of his supposed victim, and the alleged crime’s only other witness, was in the employ of Tom Dennison, the city’s powerful political boss. Dennison in turn had strong ties to the Omaha Bee, a paper that labeled Brown a “black beast” and spurred on the rioters with sensationalist headlines.
The mob claimed other victims. Reformist mayor Edward Smith, Dennison’s rival, attempted to stop the lynching, and was rewarded with a rope around his own neck, spared at the last moment but hospitalized after being left unconscious. One rioter was shot to death by accident, as was a bystander. Dozens of black Omahans were beaten that Sunday night, as were white people who tried to intervene. The courthouse where Brown had been held prior to the lynching was burned, sustaining nearly $1 million in damages (nearly $15 million today).
That courthouse, the Douglas County Courthouse in downtown Omaha, still stands. In fact, you can retrace Brown’s last steps, almost exactly 100 years later, without realizing you are shadowing the darkest day in my hometown’s history. Indeed, the lack of meaningful consequences is a century-long tradition at this point; while more than 100 people, including a 12-year-old, were arrested in the aftermath of the lynching, only two people were charged with murder. Both were found not guilty.
Indeed, one of the only tangible remains of that day is the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Omaha World-Herald — the only one the paper has ever won for writing — for an editorial, entitled “Law and the Jungle,” written in the aftermath of the lynching. It was through reading that editorial in my late 20s that I learned about the lynching for the first time, despite being born and raised in Omaha.
Which got me wondering: Why hadn’t I heard about it before randomly Googling whether my hometown paper had won a Pulitzer a few years ago? And if it was new to me — a curious student fascinated by history, educated by caring teachers at some of the city’s best schools — who else didn’t know about it?
There are, I think, three reasons I didn’t learn about the lynching until after I left Omaha. First and foremost is my skin color. For black Omahans, such stories are part of growing up, a sort of warning about what it means to grow up a person of color in a segregated, predominantly white city. My skin is white; growing up in the suburbs, I thought of Jim Crow as something that happened in the past, and in the South, almost a separate country from the Nebraska of my young mind.
The second is the community itself. No plaque marks where Brown suffered his final moments. No marker or monument honors his memory. The only memorials have been fleeting, by nature. Two plays have been staged about Brown’s life and death, including Red Summer by Beaufield Berry, which debuted at the city’s Bluebarn Theatre one day before the 100th anniversary of Brown’s lynching. And for a few years, an artist named Matthew Dehaemers created a sidewalk chalk memorial following Brown’s final movements.
The third is the education system itself. Unlike in other states where I have lived, including New York and Texas, where local history is a constant presence that you can inhale with every breath, Nebraska history is treated as something long-ago, as past. There were native people, then there were pioneers, and hey, here we are. Nebraskan students are only required to learn state history during fourth grade, when they’re much too young to grasp the nuances of our conflicted past, let alone the horrors of a lynching.
There are glimmers of correcting these wrongs. At least two high school teachers I know of have incorporated the Brown tragedy into their American history courses, localizing the Red Summer of 1919, in which more than 200 black men, women and children were murdered across the country, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. There’s Berry’s play. And then there’s a possible monument, thanks to a partnership with the EJI. That process began with a soil-gathering at the site of the lynching, which was attended by the mayor, local leaders from the NAACP, and hundreds of others.
But is it enough? That same mayor is a Republican in a Republican-dominated state, which means she’s a member of the same state party that recently made headlines by threatening to kick out a member for tweeting that “The Republican Party is enabling white supremacy” by ignoring President Donald J. Trump’s Dennison-like inflammatory rhetoric. It’s a reminder that, at a moment when political leadership is once again allied with friendly media outlets to foment division and hatred, we are not so far removed from a time when, as Dr. George Edmund Haynes put it at the time, “a trivial incident can anticipate a riot.”
A monument is a step in the right direction, as is the work of a few enterprising teachers, but making this history mandatory for students — along with political leaders taking steps to reverse the city’s enduring segregation, and condemning the obvious racism coming from the president — would better honor Brown’s memory. We should also remember that the lynching was inspired, in large part, by a politically endangered demagogue who saw stirring up racial animus as a last, desperate way of holding onto power. (It worked, by the way; Dennison’s machine won Omaha’s next mayoral election.) The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men in that gruesome photo are part of Omaha’s social and political fabric today.
That Pulitzer-winning editorial included a euphoric phrase: “It’s over now, thank God!” But if history has taught us anything, it’s never over. Indeed, there is one permanent memorial to Brown already. A few years back, a California man learned about the lynching while watching a special on Omaha native Henry Fonda, which included a passing mention of the tragedy. He donated the money to erect a gravestone. It bears a simple message: “Lest we forget.”
