WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

      While Czolgosz remained in pretrial custody, locals from the Buffalo area stormed the jail twice looking to lynch him for his attempt on the president’s life. Whites were not alone in thirsting for immediate vengeance. Big Ben Parker had already bragged to the newspapers that, when he tackled Czolgosz, he was bent on cutting the assailant’s throat on the spot like the vigilante justice Parker had witnessed when he was growing up in Georgia. Just the week before, an angry lynch mob of African-Americans in a Kentucky town had made headlines. White jailers stepped aside to let the mob rush the jail and hang several black men arrested for the murder of one of their community’s respected elders. In Parker’s view, Czolgosz deserved no better.

      Educator and orator Booker T. Washington read with great alarm the accounts of mobs storming Buffalo’s police headquarters bent on lynching the anarchist. In early 1901, Washington had published his best-selling autobiography Up From Slavery. A pragmatist, Washington drew support from both African-Americans and Progressive whites by accepting segregation as the best path forward to economic prosperity for his race. For the last twenty years, Washington had headed the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, attracting generous support from philanthropists to turn the Tennessee campus into a prestigious industrial college. By the turn of the century, Washington was recognized as the most influential African-American in the country.

      Washington seized upon the frenzied response to the attack on the president as a teaching moment. In a widely-published opinion letter to a Montgomery newspaper, he compared self-proclaimed anarchists like Czolgosz to the ubiquity of lynch mobs in America. Washington asked his readers to consider: “Is Czolgosz alone guilty? Has not the entire nation had a part in this greatest crime of the century?”⁹ At the time, a black man was lynched somewhere in the South every few days. Washington made a point of tracking grim statistics gathered by the Chicago Tribune recording more than 2500 lynchings in the past sixteen years. He estimated that on average fifty people participated in each lynching during that period totaling “nearly 125,000 persons.” Washington concluded: “We cannot sow disorder and reap order . . . One criminal put to death through the majesty of the law does more . . . to prevent crime than ten put to death by lynching anarchists.”¹⁰

      Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Czolgosz

       Leon Czolgoz

      Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Benjamin_Parker

       James Benjamin Parker

      Source of photo: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96521677/

      Top left: Leon Czolgosz, the unemployed anarchist who shot President McKinley. Top right: “Big Ben” Parker, the former slave who wrestled Czolgosz to the ground as depicted (above) in this 1905 drawing by T. Dart Walker reconstructing the scene of the shooting at the Pan-American Exposition on Sept.6, 1901. Parker’s heroism was soon obscured by the government crediting a Secret Service agent with tackling Czolgosz instead.

      Editorials in other African-American newspapers echoed Washington’s plea. But it was more likely the eyes of the world on Buffalo that ensured a jury trial for Czolgosz. Desire for quick revenge remained intense. The district attorney put the despised social outcast on trial for his life just nine days after President McKinley died. The judge rejected Czolgosz’s attempt to plead guilty. Czolgosz refused to cooperate with the lawyers appointed to represent him. The prosecution presented all of its testimony in two days, and Czolgosz’s defense lawyers called no witnesses to back up a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity. One of Czolgosz’s court-appointed lawyers told the jury that even though anarchists did “not believe in any law” they still merited “the form of a trial.”¹¹ Half an hour later, the jury came back with the expected verdict of first degree murder.

      Within a month after the jury voted for the death penalty Czolgosz was electrocuted. Cameras focused on the outside of the prison as background for a ghoulish filmed reenactment of his death distributed widely a few weeks later. Czolgosz had not made any statement at his trial, but he had told the arresting officer, “I done my duty,” and admitted he was an anarchist.¹² As he was about to be placed in the chair he elaborated: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”¹³

      His only regret was not being able to say good-bye to his father. After his electrocution, his body was dissolved in acid to prevent medical experts from seeking to reexamine his brain and to dissuade souvenir hunters from digging up his remains.

      A doctor who analyzed the case in 1902 had serious doubts about Czolgosz’s sanity. In a later era, a jury determined that John Hinckley, Jr., was insane when he attempted to assassinate President Reagan. In the first decade of the century, national outrage against Czolgosz would permit no such dispassionate analysis even had evidence been offered to support the insanity plea his court-appointed lawyers had raised at trial. Defendants without status or resources commonly received short shrift in the courts. In this instance, the lawyers were prominent members of the bar, but given no time to prepare. Czolgosz got as little due process as the system could then pass off for justice –- a rush to the electric chair Booker T. Washington recognized as an instance of “legal lynching.” He was familiar with many municipalities that used the trappings of the law to make preordained hangings less seemingly barbaric.¹⁴

      Less than three weeks after Czolgosz was sentenced, but before his execution, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine with the first family at the White House. Washington had been a trusted advisor of Roosevelt back when T. R. had been Governor of New York. The President now welcomed Washington’s advice on prospective appointees in the South. When news of the private dinner leaked out, blacks and Progressives applauded Roosevelt’s egalitarian gesture. Southern Democrats exploded in rage.

      On occasion, Presidents had welcomed black leaders to the White House before. Lincoln had opened that door by warmly greeting abolitionist Frederick Douglass at a reception late in the Civil War. But no president had ever sat down at the first family’s dinner table with a black man. Roosevelt’s violation of strict segregation spawned angry opinion letters and vulgar political cartoons. A Memphis paper called it “the most damnable outrage ever perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.”¹⁵ As far as most Southern whites were concerned, President Roosevelt might just as well have signaled his approval of intermarriage of the races, which some states had prohibited since colonial days and still prosecuted as a felony.

      Source of photo: http://www.philosophersguild.com/blog/?p=2003 Library of Congress / Contributor Editorial #: 640486723 Collection: Corbis Historical

      Artist portrayal of Booker T. Washington dining with new President Theodore Roosevelt in October 1901 -- first African-American ever invited to join the First Family for dinner in the White House. The backlash was so powerful that no president invited another black person to dine at the White House for another three decades.

      Source: Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division digital ID cph.3c04434

       Benjamin