Maurice Mays and the Red Summer of 1919

The summer of nineteen nineteen is remembered in American history as the Red Summer, the season when racial violence erupted across at least two dozen cities, from Chicago to Washington, D.C., to Longview, Texas. Knoxville joined that summer in late August.

On the morning of August thirtieth, a white woman named Bertie Lindsey was shot and killed in a house on Eighth Street. A police officer suggested questioning Maurice Mays, a well-known mixed-race political figure in the city. Mays operated a cafe, cultivated political connections, and was widely believed by both Black and white Knoxvillians to be the illegitimate son of a prominent white Democratic official. These connections made him visible. Visibility made him a target.

Mays was arrested. By nightfall, a white mob had gathered outside the county jail. Unable to find Mays, who had been moved, the mob broke into the jail, seized guns from the weapons rack, and moved toward Knoxville's Black neighborhoods. The Tennessee National Guard arrived and dispersed the crowd, but not before firing machine guns indiscriminately into a predominantly Black residential area. Residents had armed themselves and barricaded the Vine and Central intersection; the guard dispersed the rioters, but the damage to the neighborhood and to the community's sense of safety was done.

Mays was tried before an all-white jury and convicted of the murder. He was executed by electric chair at Tennessee State Prison on March fifteenth, nineteen twenty-two.

In August nineteen twenty-seven, five years after his death, a white woman named Sadie Mendil signed a written confession stating that she had committed the murder. She told police she had dressed in men's clothes and blackened her face on the night of the killing, motivated by jealousy over her husband's relationship with Lindsey. Police officials publicly discredited the confession, and days later a man identifying himself as her husband said she had made it falsely while in mental distress; no prosecution of her followed. The state of Tennessee never exonerated Maurice Mays.

The history of the nineteen nineteen riot remained largely unacknowledged in Knoxville's civic narrative for most of the twentieth century. The Red Summer, across all its cities, claimed dozens of lives and injured thousands. In Knoxville, one man was executed for a crime another person later confessed to. His name was Maurice Franklin Mays.