Chattanooga Dedicates Memorial to Ed Johnson, An Innocent Man Sentenced to Death on False Rape Charges and Lynched After U.S. Supreme Court Stayed His Execution

On September 19, 2021, com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers in Chattanooga, Tennessee ded­i­cat­ed a memo­r­i­al to Ed Johnson, an inno­cent Black man wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1906 for alleged­ly rap­ing a white woman and lynched by a white mob after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order stay­ing his exe­cu­tion. The memo­r­i­al also hon­ors the two lawyers who worked to save him.

Eric Atkins, vice chair of the Ed Johnson Project com­mit­tee, which spear­head­ed the cre­ation of the memo­r­i­al, said, ​“Hopefully with this memo­r­i­al … we can have a changed heart. An open heart, where we are all free and we all have rights and we can all advance the way that the coun­try is sup­posed to advance.”

Johnson was arrest­ed in January 1906 on charges of rap­ing Nevada Taylor, after a white man false­ly accused Johnson so he could claim a $375 reward (equiv­a­lent to about $10,000 today). Despite ali­bi tes­ti­mo­ny from a dozen wit­ness­es who said Johnson had been work­ing at a saloon on the night of the attack, an all-white, all-male jury con­vict­ed him and sen­tenced him to death. Two pio­neer­ing Black attor­neys, Noah Parden and Styles Hutchins, took up the case on appeal, risk­ing threats of vio­lence for their efforts to over­turn Johnson’s conviction.

Parden was able to arrange a 10-minute meet­ing with U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who had been the lone dis­senter in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that estab­lished the sep­a­rate-but-equal doc­trine. Harlan issued a stay on March 18, 1906, to allow the Court to hear Johnson’s case. On March 19, a mob broke into the jail where Johnson was being guard­ed by one 72-year-old sheriff’s deputy. They kid­napped Johnson and took him to the Walnut Street Bridge, where they demand­ed he con­fess to the crime. He told the mob. ​“God bless you all. I am a innocent man.” 

The mob attempt­ed to hang Johnson, but when their hang­ing attempts failed, they shot him to death. A note was placed on Johnson’s body, addressed to ​“Chief Harlan,” which told the jus­tice, ​“Thanks for your kind con­sid­er­a­tion of him. You can find him at the morgue.”

Johnson’s lynch­ing was fol­lowed by an unprece­dent­ed crim­i­nal tri­al at the Supreme Court, with the jus­tices act­ing as jurors. To this day, it remains the only crim­i­nal tri­al held by the Court. The jus­tices tried 25 men for con­tempt of court for their defi­ance of the Court’s stay of exe­cu­tion. Six men, includ­ing Hamilton County Sheriff Joseph Shipp, were con­vict­ed. Shipp and two oth­ers were sen­tenced to 90 days in jail, the three oth­ers to 60 days. They were wel­comed back to Chattanooga by a crowd of 10,000 peo­ple and a band play­ing ​“I Wish I Was in Dixie.”

Atkins said that the Supreme Court’s reac­tion was part of what made Johnson’s case stand out. ​“I think we can look to the Ed Johnson case and see that some­one actu­al­ly gave a damn about it and some­thing was actu­al­ly done about it, even though it was in con­tempt of court and it wasn’t about the lynch­ing,” he said. ​“But you could see that because of the Supreme Court and the instances around the lynch­ing, you could see that some­one paid a debt that they owed even though they were small prison terms.”

Atkins said the memo­r­i­al was a step in reck­on­ing with the racist his­to­ry of the United States. ​“We’ve done a lot of work to keep our good name as a nation, while there are many folks out­side and with­in that know we have a com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry,” he said. ​“And I think the more we deny the things — how we got the land, how my fam­i­ly got to this coun­try — the more we deny those things, I think the less capa­ble it makes us of actu­al­ly deal­ing with the fault lines that persist today.”

Efforts to cre­ate a memo­r­i­al began in 1999 when LaFrederick Thirkill orga­nized a cleanup of the his­toric Black ceme­tery where Johnson is buried. Upon learn­ing of Johnson’s case, Thirkill wrote a play, ​“Dead Innocent: The Ed Johnson Story,” and met with oth­er groups around the coun­try that were work­ing to address racist vio­lence. Thirkill used pro­ceeds from a per­for­mance of the play to start the Ed Johnson Memorial Scholarship Fund. With the memo­r­i­al, Thirkill said, the Walnut Street Bridge now ​“can be a place that doesn’t bring so much sad­ness. This memo­r­i­al can be a place that brings some heal­ing, for some, and some hap­pi­ness for oth­ers, some vin­di­ca­tion, final­ly some sat­is­fac­tion that [Ed Johnson’s] name is being rec­og­nized in such a beautiful way.”

In 2000, Pastor Paul McDaniels suc­cess­ful­ly peti­tioned the Hamilton County Court to over­turn Johnson’s con­vic­tion. In 2016, the Tennessee House adopt­ed a res­o­lu­tion hon­or­ing Johnson and call­ing his lynch­ing ​“unjus­ti­fi­able.” At the ded­i­ca­tion of the memo­r­i­al, Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly issued a procla­ma­tion ​“apol­o­giz­ing to Mr. Ed Johnson to the mis­car­riage of jus­tice that occurred on March 19^th, 1906.” 

Donivan Brown, chair of the Ed Johnson Project com­mit­tee, described the memo­r­i­al as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to move for­ward in the dif­fi­cult process of heal­ing. ​“If I burn your house down and then build a mon­u­ment of your house, we’re not going to be healed,” he said. ​“There are some things I may have to engage with you on if I actu­al­ly want to get to a place of heal­ing. I actu­al­ly might need to rebuild your house. Now, we can’t rebuild Ed Johnson’s body. We can’t re-import his spir­it into a mon­u­ment, but the best thing we can do is some­thing that is emblem­at­ic of his life and the lega­cy that this case had and his lawyers.”