President minimizes horror of lynchings

More than 100 years ago, dozens of white men dragged 19-year-old Ed Johnson from his jail cell in downtown Chattanooga. They brutally beat him. His family and friends would be next, they said. Johnson was taken to the second span of the Walnut Street Bridge high above the Tennessee River.

A noose was placed around Johnson’s neck.

“There’s nothing you can do to save your life,” leaders of the mob screamed. “You might as well confess.”

“God bless you all,” responded Johnson, who faced false charges that he had raped a white woman and whose case had been stayed on the order of the U.S. Supreme Court. “I am a innocent man.”

That sent the crowd into a fury, and his body was lifted about 18 feet off the ground for roughly three minutes. But he wasn’t dying fast enough. The crowd opened fire. He was shot more than 50 times. A bullet pierced the rope and his body fell to the ground.

A deputy sheriff walked up, reloaded his pistol and shot Johnson five more times in the head. The deputy then pinned a note into Johnson’s chest.

“To Justice (John Marshall) Harlan and the Supreme Court,” it read. “Here’s your Negro now. Try to save him.”

For three decades, politicians and others have used the term “lynching” to claim they have been victimized.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas famously said he was the target of a “high tech lynching.” Congressional Democrats accused Republicans of having a lynch mob mentality during the impeachment of President Clinton. Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, supporters of Bill Cosby and R&B artist R. Kelly have used the term to push back against accusers.

On Tuesday, President Trump became the latest in a message on Twitter: “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching.”

Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., quickly upped the ante, telling reporters the impeachment inquiry “is a lynching in every sense.”

The use of the word to describe political or even legal opposition is outrageous. These so-called leaders, whatever their party, are woefully ignorant of the reality of actual lynchings. Nothing should ever be compared to the Holocaust or American lynchings. There is no comparison today.

The term is used so much that there is danger that it will lose its true meaning, its impact, its historical significance in America.

Two decades ago, I spent two weeks at Tuskegee University in Alabama researching “Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching that Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism,” a book on the Ed Johnson case that Iwrote with Chattanooga attorney Leroy Phillips.

Tuskegee has files on every reported lynching that took place in the U.S. between 1882 and 1944 — 4,708 of them. Tuskegee’s curator, Daniel Williams, and I went through each file. In Texas, there were at least 335 documented cases where an African American was a victim of racially-motivated lynching, the third most of any state. Last month, Harris County Commissioners Court voted to erect a historical marker in Houston’s Quebedeaux Park to memorialize the four documented cases of African Americans being lynched in the county.

The stories and photographs in those Tuskegee files are real. They reveal a terrifying evil, a hatred demonstrated on a demonic level —all because of the color of the person’s skin.

The case of Ed Johnson is the perfect example. He was 19 and had no criminal record. He dropped out of school in the third grade. He could neither read nor write. He held two jobs.

On Jan. 21, 1906, a white woman named Nevada Taylor was attacked and raped. She did not see and could not identify her attacker. But a paid informant testified he saw Johnson at the scene of the crime. The judge in Johnson’s case told his lawyers to not work hard to defend him. An all-white jury — one of whom tried to attack Johnson in the middle of the trial — found him guilty. The judge sentenced him to death and ordered his lawyers to persuade their own client to waive his rights to an appeal, which they did.

Two courageous black lawyers — Noah Parden and Styles Nutchins — stepped forward and took Johnson’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued its first-ever stay of an execution in a state criminal case. They argued Johnson’s rights had been violated under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses.

Before the Supreme Court could order Johnson be freed, an all-white mob — aided by the sheriff and his deputies — lynched him. The two lawyers? The mob burned their homes and both men fled Chattanooga with their families and never returned.

Johnson and the other 4,707 victims of lynchings in those Tuskegree files were far different from President Trump, Democrats in Congress and Justice Thomas: They had no ability to fight back. They had no freedom of speech to voice objections. They had no power at all. No one came to their defense. They had nothing. If they spoke up, they knew the lynch mobs would go after their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters.

The Sunday after Johnson’s lynching, First Baptist Church of Chattanooga Pastor Howard Jones took the pulpit. He preached from Galatians 6:7: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

“Take your place in the gray dawn of that fatal Friday outside the Pretorium, where Pontias Pilot stands before the fury of the mob and presents the only sinless one who ever lived,” Jones preached. “Hear that hoarse cry of that awful creature, the mob, as it answers back. ‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him.’ Now stand forth and tell me if you hope by force and fury of the mob to accomplish anything but destroy the best and crucify the holiest.”

Surely, no one who understands even the slightest bit of the brutal history of lynching in our nation’s history would feel comfortable comparing the impeachment inquiry in the House to the terrorism that struck down so many thousands in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Curriden is founding editor ofthe Texas Lawbook, a legal-news publication with journalists in Dallas, Houston and Austin. He is speaking to lawyers on Nov. 11 in Houston about his book, “Contempt of Court.” For more details, email him at mark.curriden@texaslawbook.net.