Will Brown

People

Will Brown (subject)

Outcome

Lynching

On September 28, 1919, Will Brown, a 41-year-old Black man accused of raping a white woman, was lynched by a mob of thousands in Omaha, Nebraska, in one of the most notorious incidents of the "Red Summer" of 1919. The mob, estimated at between 5,000 and 15,000 people, attacked the Douglas County Courthouse where Brown was being held, setting the building on fire. When Mayor Edward P. Smith attempted to disperse the crowd, he was beaten, had a rope placed around his neck, and was strung up from a lamppost. He was cut down before he could die. Brown was dragged from the burning courthouse by the mob. He was hanged from a lamppost, his body riddled with bullets, then tied to a police car, dragged through the streets, and burned at a major downtown intersection. Fragments of the rope used in the lynching were sold as souvenirs for 10 cents apiece. Photographs of the lynching, including one showing grinning white men posing behind Brown's charred body, circulated worldwide and became iconic images of Red Summer violence. An estimated 20,000 people witnessed the lynching, making it one of the largest individual spectacles of racial violence in American history. The riot occurred against the backdrop of the Great Migration, which had doubled Omaha's Black population in a decade, and rising racial tensions stoked by sensationalist newspaper coverage. The Omaha Bee, allied with political boss Tom Dennison, had published inflammatory reports of alleged crimes by Black men. Federal troops were deployed to restore order, with soldiers manning machine guns in downtown Omaha and the Black community of North Omaha. On October 1, Brown was buried in Potter's Field with only one word listed next to his name in the interment log: "Lynched." One hundred twenty indictments were handed down for involvement in the riot, but no one served prison time. Among the witnesses to the lynching was a young Henry Fonda, who later recalled it as "the most horrendous sight I'd ever seen."