The lynching of Will Brown at the Douglas County Courthouse
28 September 1919Douglas County Courthouse, Douglas County, NE
A mob burned the Douglas County Courthouse, nearly hanged the mayor of Omaha for trying to stop them, and lynched Will Brown from a lamppost. A grand jury returned 189 indictments; no one was convicted of the killing.
Note: Describes a lynching, the mutilation and burning of a body, and the sale of souvenirs.
Will Brown was a packinghouse worker of about forty, in poor health, living in Omaha. On 25 September 1919 Agnes Loebeck and Milton Hoffman were assaulted as they walked home from a late film; they identified Brown as the attacker. He was never given the chance to answer the charge.
On Sunday 28 September a crowd gathered outside the Douglas County Courthouse where Brown was held. Estimates of its size range from several thousand to more than ten thousand. The mob set the courthouse on fire, scaled its outside walls and cut the hoses when firefighters tried to douse the blaze. Mayor Edward P. Smith came to the courthouse about half past ten to face them down; the mob put a rope round his neck and strung him from a lamppost, and he was cut down alive by a rescuer. Two others died in the gunfire that night: Louis Young, a sixteen-year-old white youth who led the charge up the courthouse stairs, and a white businessman killed a block away. The mob reached Brown's cell, dragged him into the street, hanged him at 18th and Harney, shot his body, dragged it behind a stolen police car and burned it at 17th and Dodge. Pieces of the rope were sold as souvenirs.
The riot had a political author as well as a racial one. Tom Dennison's machine had run Omaha for twenty years until reformers took city hall in 1918, and Dennison and his allies at the Omaha Bee had spent the following months printing a steady diet of alleged Black assaults on white women - violence that served to discredit the reform mayor the mob nearly killed. Dennison's slate was back in office two years later. Federal troops restored order overnight. A grand jury returned 189 indictments; the few cases that reached trial were mostly minor charges, and Ralph Snyder and Claude Nethaway, the two men tried for Brown's murder, were acquitted after a short deliberation.
Will Brown was lynched; two white men, one of them sixteen, were killed in the gunfire. Estimates of the crowd run from several thousand to more than ten thousand.
Sources
- Omaha Race RiotEncyclopedia of the Great Plains, Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraskaplainshumanities.unl.eduOrville D. Menard, University of Nebraska at Omaha: Brown's age, Agnes Loebeck's identification, the near-lynching of Mayor Smith, and Tom Dennison's role.
- Lest We Forget: The Lynching of Will Brown, Omaha's 1919 Race RiotNebraska History 91 (2010): 152-165, History Nebraska (2010)history.nebraska.govOrville D. Menard's full account, including the grand jury's 189 indictments and the acquittals.
- The US Army and the Omaha Race Riot of 1919Nebraska History, History Nebraska (1991)history.nebraska.govThe federal intervention, and the three deaths that preceded it.
- The Omaha Courthouse Lynching of 1919BlackPast.orgblackpast.orgThe course of the lynching, the burning of the body, and the Omaha Bee's coverage in the months beforehand.