September Twenty-Eighth, Nineteen Nineteen

What happened at the Douglas County Courthouse on September twenty-eighth, nineteen nineteen, was part of a pattern. The summer of nineteen nineteen was called the Red Summer, a name given afterward to the wave of racial violence that swept across American cities that year, from Washington D.C. to Chicago to Elaine, Arkansas. Omaha was not an exception. It was one of the most severe instances in a terrible season.

Will Brown was a forty-one-year-old Black packinghouse worker. He had been arrested on September twenty-sixth after a nineteen-year-old white woman reported being attacked. The identification was disputed. Brown himself, according to his account relayed by police, said she had not been certain. The Omaha Bee, a newspaper controlled by interests opposed to the city's reform mayor, ran a series of inflammatory front-page stories about the case, framing it as one of many alleged assaults by Black men on white women.

On the afternoon of September twenty-eighth, a group of white youths gathered near a South Omaha school and marched toward the courthouse. By the time the crowd reached the building it had grown to somewhere between five thousand and fifteen thousand people. The courthouse was set on fire. When the mayor, Edward Smith, came out to address the crowd, he was seized and hanged from a nearby pole. He was cut down before he died and taken to a hospital.

Will Brown was taken from the jail inside the burning building. He was lynched, his body burned and dragged through the streets. He was buried three days later in the city's potter's field. The burial record listed one word beside his name: Lynched.

One hundred and twenty indictments were eventually issued. No one served prison time. No one was ever convicted of Will Brown's death.

In the century since, Omaha historians and community members have continued to document the events of that day, including the role the Bee's coverage played in provoking the mob. The paper's proprietors were never held to account either.