Omaha's Riot in Story & Picture [cover title]

Omaha: Educational Publishing Company / Beacon Press, 1919. About very good.. [32]pp. Profusely illustrated with photographs. Original wrappers printed in blue, stapled. Some staining and soiling to wrappers, minor edge wear. Text tanned, occasional minor thumb-soiling. A rare and sympathetic account of one of the worst moments in Nebraska history - the 1919 lynching of an African-American man named Will Brown and the riot that broke out after his murder. The tragedy also took place during the "Red Summer" of 1919 when dozens of race riots broke out across the United States. As with the Tulsa Race Riots two years later, the incident in Omaha began when Brown was accused of improper relations with a white woman (an all-too-common lie which often resulted in race riots in the Jim Crow era). Brown was arrested and held at the Douglas County Courthouse. Soon enough, an angry mob of about 10,000 people gathered outside the building and demanded Brown be handed over to them. The city's newly-elected progressive mayor, Ed P. Smith, and his police force refused to hand over Brown for quite some time, barricading themselves and Brown inside the fourth floor of the courthouse. The "rioters" referenced in the title refers to the mob that eventually overcame the city officials, dragged Brown outside, hanged him from a light pole, and riddled him with bullets as he suffocated to death.

After they murdered Brown, the mob tied his corpse to a car, dragged him four blocks, burned the body using lamp oil from the streetlights, then "hauled the charred remains through the business district for several hours." The mob thereafter engaged in a gun battle with the police, set fire to the courthouse, and hanged Mayor Smith within an inch of his life before he was cut down and rescued by his own police force. Two members of the white lynch mob were killed (one of whom was a young boy), and as the crowd swelled to about 20,000 people, the ensuing riot left significant parts of Omaha looted or burned. Following this series of tragic events, 120 rioters were indicted, though none of them was ever convicted or served any prison time for anything.

The photographs illustrating the text include shots of the mob outside the courthouse, members of the mob climbing the courthouse to get to Brown, a portrait of Will Brown himself, the pole from which he was hanged, "part of crowd surrounding the burning body of Will Brown," the courthouse in flames, and several scenes of vandalized buildings. The foreword states that "the purpose of this book is educational" and that the "story of the riot has its lessons for all thinking citizens." The text positions the events, rightfully, as a tragedy, and properly describes Brown as a sympathetic victim.

A rare and important account of a Nebraska lynching and the resultant Omaha Race Riot of 1919. Not in Work, nor in the Library Company's African-Americana Collection. OCLC lists just six copies, at Yale, Duke, NYPL, Northwestern, Clements Library, and the Lincoln City Libraries.