Ed Johnson and the Supreme Court That Tried a Sheriff

In February of nineteen oh six, a Black man named Ed Johnson was convicted in Hamilton County of the rape of a white woman and sentenced to death. His attorneys, Noah Parden and Styles Hutchins, filed appeals arguing that his constitutional rights had been violated. They argued that Black citizens had been systematically excluded from the jury, and that the threat of mob violence had prevented his original lawyers from mounting any real defense.

On March seventeenth, nineteen oh six, United States Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan granted a stay of execution and agreed to hear Johnson's appeal. The entire Court ratified the stay two days later. A telegram was sent to Chattanooga informing Sheriff Joseph Shipp that Johnson was under federal protection pending the appeal.

That night, a mob entered the Hamilton County jail. Sheriff Shipp and his chief jailer did not resist. Ed Johnson was taken to the Walnut Street Bridge and hanged. His body was left on the bridge. Someone pinned a note to it reading words too vile to repeat in full, addressed to Justice Harlan, making plain that the mob regarded the Supreme Court's authority as nothing.

The United States Department of Justice prosecuted Shipp for contempt of the Supreme Court. The case, United States versus Shipp, became the only criminal trial in the Supreme Court's history. In a decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Court found that Shipp had, in effect, aided and abetted the mob. Shipp and five others were convicted and sentenced to prison terms. Shipp served ninety days and returned home to Chattanooga, where crowds welcomed him as a hero.

Ed Johnson's two Black attorneys, who had done the near-impossible in getting the Supreme Court to intervene in a Southern capital case, were forced to leave the state under threat of violence and never returned. In two thousand, a Hamilton County judge posthumously exonerated Johnson. His grave is in Chattanooga.