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Source of sheet music photos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_song
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18826048
Sales of sheet music for “Coon Songs” soared nationwide in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Coon, Coon, Coon” was advertised as the most successful song of 1901. (A “honey gal” lived with her man in unmarried sin.) Lower right: Irving Berlin as a young immigrant composer – the man who became one of America’s greatest songwriters was among many who wrote popular “Coon Songs” for public consumption.
To the civil rights committee’s shock, the high court decided Plessy v. Ferguson seven-to-one against them. The panel of jurists that rejected the claim that the Separate Car Act violated the Fourteenth Amendment included a proud member of the Pickwick Club Mardi Gras Krewe and of the militant White League who had been raised on a slave-owning plantation. Louisiana Justice Edward D. White joined six other justices who put the blessing of the highest court in the land behind enforced segregation of mixed-blood or Negro citizens so long as the accommodations were called “equal.” Covered by that fig leaf, discriminatory Jim Crow laws proliferated in the South and emboldened physical abuse of blacks throughout the land.
In 1905, Chattanooga, Tennessee, maintained a significantly better civil rights record than most other Southern cities. The industrial city of 60,000 included many transplanted Northerners as well as a substantial middle class among its 20,000 black residents. The city had not held a lynching since 1896 – the same year the Supreme Court of the United States decided the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Back in 1887, Chattanooga had elected a black lawyer, Styles Hutchins, to represent the district for one term in the state legislature. Progressive religious leaders fought bigotry and lobbied for peaceful resolution of all conflicts.
As of 1905, publisher Adolph Ochs still owned the Chattanooga Times, though the Jewish philanthropist had already moved to Manhattan to oversee his more recent acquisition, the New York Times. Despite the city’s progress, fifteen percent of Chattanooga’s adults couldn’t read. A large number of whites held dead-end, menial jobs and increasingly resented the growing prosperity of the city’s black professionals. In Tennessee, new Jim Crow laws made race hatred far more contagious. It went viral in Chattanooga that winter.
Since early December of 1905, the papers had been reporting a wave of burglaries, rapes and robberies by Negro men, including a girl attacked in her own bed in an orphanage and another on a downtown street. On Christmas Eve tension rose dramatically when a notorious black gambler, Floyd Westfield, barricaded himself in his house with a gun when a white constable headed a posse sent to arrest Westfield for disturbing the peace in his neighborhood by shooting off fireworks. When the constable and his men broke the door down, Westfield fired, killing the constable. The day after Christmas, Ochs’ often Progressive Chattanooga Times captured the widespread fear: “Desperadoes Run Rampant in Chattanooga; Negro Thugs Reach Climax of Boldness.” The paper blamed the climate of fear partly on the sheriff for not being tough enough. A month later, vigilantes impatiently waited for Westfield’s murder trial to reach its foregone conclusion. Given their druthers, they would have already strung the gambler up to send the Negro community a strong message about respect for law and order.
When locals heard what happened after dark on Tuesday evening, January 23, 1906, to twenty-one-year-old Nevada Taylor, all many could think about was vengeance. Someone jumped the popular office worker from behind and brutally raped her as she approached the cemetery gate near her home in the city’s St. Elmo District. The pretty blonde still lived with her widowed father, a groundskeeper at the Forest Hills Cemetery, and commuted daily by trolley to her job downtown. Whoever had assaulted her shortly after 6:30 p.m. had almost choked her with a leather strap around her throat and left her unconscious.
Hamilton County Sheriff Joseph Shipp jumped on the case Tuesday evening as soon as Nevada’s father contacted him. The sixty-one-year-old diehard Rebel was tall and thin with receding white hair, moustache and goatee. Though he only had a seventh grade education, since his arrival in Chattanooga from his home state of Georgia, the Civil War veteran had done quite well for himself in a furniture business and through real estate investments. After he and his wife raised their seven children, Shipp decided to run for sheriff. The Confederate veteran had all the qualities of a lawman the county’s white male voters could trust – a hard-drinking, cigar-chomping, poker-playing champion of Southern womanhood.
Shipp’s bloodhounds sniffed the scent from Nevada’s torn dress and quickly found the abandoned black leather strap. City newspapers featured the shocking details on Wednesday together with a $50 reward, almost two months’ wages for many workers. By day’s end, the reward would grow to $375, a sum larger than many residents earned annually. Nevada had told the sheriff that she did not get a good look at the man who grabbed her from behind and threw her over the fence as she cried out for help. But she heard his oddly gentle voice. At first, she could not specify his race, but said he was dressed in black, wore a hat, was athletic and shorter than average. He might have been five-foot six.
After talking with the sheriff, Nevada became convinced her attacker was Negro. Under the law, that made the rape a capital crime, which it was not if committed by a white man. Sheriff Shipp was up for reelection to a second two-year term at the end of March. He realized that if he identified the rapist quickly, he could get the suspect tried, convicted and executed well before the election. In a newspaper interview on Wednesday, the sheriff made a solemn promise to his constituents: “I know the people thirst for judgment of the Negro who did this. I can assure the people that all at the courthouse agree and will be satisfied with nothing less. I am confident we will find this beast and he will feel the vengeance of our community upon him.”7
What underlay that desire for vengeance was white Chattanoogans’ underlying terror once again being exploited by newspapers and political candidates – as it had been cultivated among white Americans generally from colonial days by preachers, civic leaders and journalists.8 Despite his boast, Shipp knew he could be thrown out of office if he did not quickly solve the sensational crime that had the city of Chattanooga in an uproar. That same day, the sheriff and his deputies arrested a twenty-five-year-old grocery deliveryman, James Broaden, who worked in the area and fit the general description of Nevada’s assailant. Sheriff Shipp subjected Broaden to tough questioning, but kept the investigation open. The next morning, the sheriff was home eating breakfast when he received a call from a man named Will Hixson who worked near the cemetery. Hixson’s first question was whether the reward was still available. When told it was, Hixson met with the sheriff and described a black man he claimed to have seen at the St. Elmo trolley stop ten minutes to six on Tuesday evening “twirling a leather strap around his finger.”9
Tuesday evening had been particularly dark and gloomy, but Hixson said he had offered the same man a light on Monday and believed he could identify the stranger if he saw him again. Late Thursday morning, Hixson called the sheriff to say he spotted the man and learned his name, Ed Johnson. Shipp rushed over to the run-down colored neighborhood on Chattanooga’s south side to the shack on Higley Row occupied by Skinbone Johnson and his wife. Their twenty-four-year-old son Ed was not there. The sheriff ransacked his parents’ home and that of Johnson’s sister who lived nearby, but found no evidence relating to the crime. Shipp had no warrant. Under state law, he didn’t need one.
On a hunch, the sheriff hid around the corner and followed Johnson’s sister a few minutes later. She flagged down her brother as he rode on the back of an ice wagon. Sheriff Shipp pounced. He had his deputies handcuff Johnson and take him to the