The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  As for Ida Wells, the ruling went on, “we think it is evident that the purpose of the defendant was to harass with a view to this suit, and that her persistence was not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for the short ride. Judgment reversed, and judgment here for the plaintiff.”

  The court ordered Wells to pay $200 in court costs.

  * * *

  The reversal left Wells shattered. She believed the appeal had been decided not on the merits, but on the basis of her race, and the inconvenience of her complaint to such a huge, white-owned business. Her new attorney on the appeal, James Greer, argued that the “personal prejudices” of the Tennessee Supreme Court justices had led to a blatantly unjust verdict. The irony for Wells was that, in the months before the first trial got under way, Chesapeake Ohio had repeatedly tried to get her to settle the case for money. “I indignantly refused,” she later wrote. Had she settled, “I would have been a few hundred dollars to the good instead of having to pay out over two hundred dollars.”

  As hard as the reversal was on Wells financially, the sting of injustice was far worse. She felt “utterly discouraged,” she wrote. “I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I have been shorn of the belief.” She felt aggrieved not only for herself, but for all blacks.

  “If it were possible,” she lamented, “I would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them.”

  Wells understood that all the legislative upheaval regarding America’s color line had, in the two decades since the Civil War’s end, not secured anything resembling actual equality for America’s black population. “The South wanted the Civil Rights Bill repealed,” she concluded, “but did not want or intend to give justice to the Negro after robbing him of all sources from which to secure it.”

  Just as the death of her parents had hardened Wells, her loss in court would transform her again. The quality that the Tennessee Supreme Court had chosen to disparage as inauthentic and not in good faith—Wells’s “persistence”—would become, going forward, her calling card, her greatest strength. “The characteristic of heroism is its persistency,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote right after the Civil War. “All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.”

  Despite the loss in court, the case gave Wells something that was systematically denied black men and women in the post–Civil War South—it gave her a voice. The case made her someone to listen to.

  Still young and unsure and wounded enough to lament, “Oh God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us?” Wells would soon find her full voice, and use it to fight the most extreme and violent injustice of all, a horror that blocked out the sun—the extrajudicial lynching of black Americans by the thousands.

  It would be her persistence in this fight, over the years and decades, that would one day connect her to Tom Williams.

  CHAPTER 11 A Negro’s Crime

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  Up in his cell in the Asbury Park jail, Tom Williams heard the men clamoring on the street below, calling for his blood. He listened as they crashed through the outer door and barreled into the station. He could not have expected Police Chief Smith and his officers, who made no secret of their belief in his guilt, to protect him from the coming mob. More likely, he must have thought they would let the men pass and stand by as they dragged Williams to his death, as so many sheriffs and law officers had routinely done throughout the South for years.

  Earlier that day, before the full mob had assembled, Williams underwent hours of interrogation. The original plan had been to transport Williams from Asbury Park to the jail in the town of Freehold, the seat of Monmouth County, some seventeen miles west, and have him officially questioned there. That was the order received from County Sheriff Clarence E. F. Hetrick. But with rumors of a forming mob going around town—and small groups of men already gathering outside the police station by midday—Hetrick revised his order and instructed that Williams not be moved until later, when it was deemed safe. In the meantime, the suspect would be questioned in Asbury Park.

  Sheriff Hetrick gave the job of lead interrogator to County Detective Elwood Minugh.

  A lean, handsome man with black hair and a wide curled mustache, Minugh was the county’s enforcer. He took the hardest assignments and handled the trickiest arrests. He chased after horse thieves and men who deserted their wives and so-called midnight marauders—crooks who broke into stores late at night. Minugh was the one who would not only impound an illegal slot machine but also break it open at the station to get at the change inside. In 1908, he was sent to the Fireman’s Hall in Highlands, a town north of Asbury Park, to follow up a tip about an illegal boxing match. Minugh, working undercover, watched the fight for one round before climbing into the ring and arresting both boxers, nearly causing a riot among the three hundred mostly drunken fans in the hall.

  Beyond his fearlessness, Minugh was known for wrangling confessions and leads out of suspects. He famously sweated two twelve-year-old black suspects, Fred Hohman and Irving Reeves, and got what he needed to solve a series of robberies in Red Bank in 1908. A local paper wrote that Minugh extracted his information through “the administering of the celebrated third-degree”—a reference to a relatively new investigative practice involving physical force and psychological browbeating. “The Sweat Box Method” was another term for it.

  On Monday, November 14, Minugh arrived at police headquarters in Asbury Park and waited for the latest suspect to be brought to him.

  * * *

  Police Chief Smith took Williams out of his cell and brought him to his office for the questioning. Detective Minugh was already there. Minugh began with some basic questions—where Williams was born, details about his family—before zeroing in.

  “You quite a drinker?” he asked.

  “Well, I do drink sometimes,” Williams said.

  “Did you ever do anything under the influence of liquor that you didn’t know about?”

  “No.”

  “If you should have committed a crime while under the influence of liquor, who would have done it?”

  “It would be Tom Williams.”

  “It would not have been the liquor that would have done it?”

  “No, it would be me.”

  “Was any of your family ever insane?”

  “No they were not.”

  “Last Wednesday there was a little girl named Marie Smith missed. She was found in the woods on Sunday. She had been murdered and foully treated, and I believe you are the man who committed the crime.”

  “Well, you accuse me very wrong,” Williams said, his tone suddenly defiant. “I swear before God and man that I am innocent.”

  “You know this girl Marie Smith very well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever speak to her?”

  “No, I never did. I never had occasion to.”

  The line of questioning, tight and repetitive, went on for two hours. Williams did not crack. Three other detectives, Thomas Broderick, Edward Hankinson, and William Ireton, took their turns with Williams, too. As the questioning went on, the crowd on the street below grew larger and louder.

  Meanwhile, the town undertaker, Fred E. Farry, made his way through the mob and headed to the police station.

  A funeral director and licensed embalmer who had lost his own infant son to disease, Farry worked out of a modest parlor on Main Street, next to a barbershop. He handled funeral services for the wealthiest families in town, and also buried the indigent for a twenty-five-dollar fee paid by the county. He had opened his parlor for an autopsy of Marie Smith’s body the afternoon she was found. Now Farry took the two-block walk from his parlor to the police station, carrying something in his outstretched arms that was covered with a
black blanket. The steady sleet iced the top of Farry’s bowler hat and the blanket. Once inside the station, he was led down to the basement.

  Not long after Farry’s arrival, Detective Minugh took Tom Williams by the arm and led him out of Chief Smith’s office, down past the Wesley Company fire engines that shared space in the building.

  Minugh brought Williams to a room just off the basement jail cell. The other detectives were already there. The room was bare except for a table. The lights were off and the room was pitch black when Minugh walked Williams inside.

  Someone switched on an electric lantern and aimed the bright beam at the table.

  There in the shaft of light was the small body of Marie Smith.

  She resembled a child in size and shape only; otherwise, she was ghostly. Her round face was pale and sunken, discolored by her injuries—purple bruises, lacerations, a black burn mark. Minugh took hold of Tom Williams and walked him closer to the table, until Williams was no more than a foot from the cold body.

  “Swear that you did not murder this child,” Minugh demanded.

  Williams did not hesitate.

  “I swear to God I didn’t touch the girl,” he said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  Minugh took Williams’s head and pushed it toward the body.

  “Get down and look into her face!” he yelled.

  Williams was inches away from Marie. Minugh held his head down and waited for a reaction. Williams, forced to look into the child’s lifeless eyes, stayed silent for a moment. Then, unprompted, he placed his hand gently on Marie’s face, as if blessing her.

  Slowly, he said, “I thank God I can say I didn’t do it. I am sorry for her and for her family, but I didn’t do it, so help me God.”

  Minugh kept Williams by the body for thirty minutes, but the suspect did not break. Finally, the interrogation ended. Minugh took Williams to the basement cell and locked the metal bars. Fred Farry covered Marie’s body with his black blanket and carried her back to his parlor.

  * * *

  At the same time, in a municipal chamber just above the jail, town officials held a meeting to determine the amount of a reward for information that would help convict Marie Smith’s killer. They settled on five hundred dollars.

  Outside the station, as the sleet turned to snow, more men gathered. A little earlier, a train from Freehold had delivered a black prisoner, escorted by four police officers, to the Asbury Park train depot, one block west of the police station. Some of the men in the crowd saw the black prisoner and ran toward him, believing he was Tom Williams. In an instant, a crowd surrounded the depot. The officers desperately yelled, “This isn’t him! This isn’t the man!” In fact, the prisoner was James Hickson, arrested for purse snatching.

  Somehow the officers convinced the men to let them pass. But there was no mistaking the situation now. The purpose and passion of the horde was clear. This was a lynch mob.

  By then, Police Chief Smith knew this was the case. He could see the crowd on the street below steadily growing until the entire block was filled with angry men. Smith ordered his entire police department, every last officer, to report immediately to the station. Calls were made and all across town off-duty officers got in their uniforms, got out their nightsticks, and hurried to Mattison Avenue.

  They were not fast enough. Around 9:00 p.m., the crowd around the police station surged forward. Led by the men from the Whitesville section—who had broken into a mason’s store and armed themselves with picks and sledgehammers—the mob tore away the latticed gate guarding the front door of the police station, and pushed through the entrance and down the stairs, headed to Williams’s basement cell.

  This was it. The crowd numbered some six hundred men, and the police officers were badly outnumbered.

  Still, somehow, the officers held their ground.

  In the stairwell, rather than let the men pass, a handful of officers pushed back at them with the hard points of their nightsticks. More officers arrived, and joined in the push and pull, and the police forced the charging men back up the stairs and out of the station.

  “The officers emerged from the jail entrance and, spreading out in fan fashion, made a determined attack on the crowd,” reported the Asbury Park Press. “How they stopped the mob without bloodshed, the police themselves never knew.”

  Chief Smith’s small force—no more than twenty men—managed to push the mob two blocks back from the station, before cordoning off all of Mattison Avenue. Many men gave up and went home, and the cold and snow further thinned the crowd, but there were still many dozens of men in place as midnight passed. Chief Smith couldn’t be sure the mob would not reassemble. He saw the bad weather and the late hour as his best chance to end the standoff, and he devised a plan.

  Chief Smith came out of the police station and stood on a box placed in front of the remaining men. He said he had an announcement, and the crowd quieted down. Then Smith told a lie in the service of good. Tom Williams, he said, had produced a credible alibi. Now it was up to the coroner’s jury to determine if he was guilty or innocent. No justice would be administered at this hour or in this place. It was time for the men to go back home to their families.

  “Let no one be able to say that the citizens of Asbury Park have no respect for law and order,” Smith preached in his midnight speech. “Let the law take its course. I appeal to you not to be hasty but to return home and to help us preserve order. You may rest assured that we shall do all in our power to bring the slayer of the child to justice.”

  While the police chief addressed the crowd in front of the station, an unmarked car pulled up behind it.

  The driver stopped at the station’s back door, but kept the engine running. Detective Minugh came out of the station, holding tight to Tom Williams. He rushed Williams to the car and pushed him down on the floor in the back, and climbed in behind him. The driver gunned the engine and with a loud screech the car tore away at top speed.

  Once the car was out of town, Minugh sat Williams up in the backseat. The driver took a circuitous route, staying off the main roads. Williams was worried about running into a lynch mob, and asked Minugh for a smoke to calm his nerves. Minugh told him he had no tobacco.

  Sometime after 2:00 a.m., the car arrived in Freehold. There were two hundred men waiting at the Freehold train station—they’d gotten word of the transfer and believed Williams would arrive by train. But there were no men outside the Monmouth County jail, and Minugh walked Williams inside without incident. For the moment, he was safe.

  Yet he was still the main suspect in the murder of Marie Smith, and his ordeal was just beginning. There was no reason for anyone to believe his story, and any new evidence, most were convinced, only further suggested his guilt. Alvin Cliver made sure that the reports of how strongly Williams had maintained his innocence were interpreted as proof of how evil he was. “A man who could gaze upon the mutilated body of a child… and swear that he was innocent without a tremor in his voice,” Cliver wrote, “could be capable of almost any crime.”

  Even Chief Smith, who had saved Williams’s life by holding off the mob, was heard to call the murder “a negro’s crime,” and say “there is no doubt in my mind but that Black Diamond is the guilty man.”

  The police chief also had one especially disturbing bit of evidence.

  It was a story related by Martha Coleman, who lived on Springfield Avenue in Asbury Park. Coleman knew Tom Williams and had spent time in his company. When police questioned her, she said she’d heard Williams make a startling claim a few days before the murder, and she swore others heard him say it, too.

  Williams, she said, had told her there was a little white girl in town he planned “to get next to.”

  CHAPTER 12 The Secret Plan

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  A day after Fred Farry carried the body of Marie Smith to police headquarters, the undertaker moved her again, this time to the home of her grieving parents on West Mon
roe Avenue.

  It was the first time Peter Smith and his wife, Nora, had been reunited with their daughter in their home since she walked out the door and set off for school six days earlier.

  There would be no service or memorial for Marie in Asbury Park, just a small wake, for friends and family only, in the Smiths’ home. Father Thomas A. Roche, of the Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit, presided over the wake. Nora Smith remained in a terrible state, barely eating or sleeping, but somehow she made it through the speeches and prayers. Afterward, she collapsed. A doctor examined her and said she was in “a precarious condition from shock.” He expressed a fear she might die.

  The next day, Peter Smith got on a train and accompanied his daughter’s body from Asbury Park to New York City. He chose the 7:17 a.m. train to avoid crowds at the station. His wife did not make the trip.

  In New York City, Smith went to a brief 10:00 a.m. requiem mass in St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the Hamilton section of Brooklyn, where the Smiths lived before moving to Asbury Park. Smith’s father and mother were there. The next day, the Smith family crossed under the arched stone gates of the Holy Cross Cemetery in Flatbush. They stood in a line and watched as caretakers lowered Marie into Plot 23 in row D, off to the side of a small white chapel on the western edge of the cemetery, not far from the section where the city’s paupers were buried in graves dug hastily three feet down.

  Marie’s casket was set atop the small casket that already occupied the plot. That casket held the remains of Marie’s brother John, dead at eighteen months from poisoning. The caretakers shoveled dirt over both wooden boxes, and the simple ceremony was done.