(CN) — As umbrella-holding onlookers watched, students removed the white cloths shrouding the three statues in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the centerpiece of a memorial designed to confront the reverberations of a lynching that occurred just steps away.
The new memorial sits next to one of the city’s most prominent landmarks: the pedestrian-only Walnut Street Bridge that spans the Tennessee River, a spot that attracts bicyclists, photographers and dog walkers.
But some of the city’s residents, such as LaFrederick Thirkill’s parents, have stayed away, seeing instead a dark history of the bridge with blue girders, seeing it as the ground where Black people were lynched.
Among the several hundred people at the dedication ceremony, Thirkill, a principal at a local school, had worked for more than two decades to tell the story of Ed Johnson, a Black man killed by a mob on a span of that bridge in 1906.
A singer performed “Strange Fruit,” the song popularized by Billie Holiday to protest the lynching of Black individuals, at the dedication of the monument. The statues depict Ed Johnson walking away from the site of his death, his two attorneys standing behind him. At some point, flowers were placed on the wet ground at the statues’ feet.
The monument dedication, Thirkill said, “was another step on a long journey” in the effort to make known the plight of Johnson.
The bridge, Thirkill said, 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 his name is being recognized in such a beautiful way.”
It is the latest monument in the South seeking to remember and confront a history of racial terror, which included about 4,743 lynchings from 1882 to 1968, according to the NAACP. But Ed Johnson’s case is different in one respect: The U.S. Supreme Court at the time tried to do something about it.
In February 1906, a Tennessee jury found Johnson, a laborer, guilty of the rape of a white woman despite 10 witnesses saying they saw him working at a saloon when the attack occurred. He was sentenced to death.
However, Johnson’s attorneys appealed. Not only were no Black residents allowed to sit on the jury, the threat of mob violence tainted the proceedings, the attorneys argued in federal court. Johnson was held outside Chattanooga over concerns a mob would storm the jail and lynch him before the trial and those fears of mob violence prevented his attorneys from making a series of motions during trial, such as asking to move the trial out of the city or to delay the proceedings.
When the federal circuit court denied Johnson’s writ of habeas corpus, his attorneys took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court where on March 19, 1906 Justice John Marhsall Harlan ordered a halt to Johnson’s case so the high court could consider his appeal.
The news zipped to Chattanooga through telegraph wires where the local papers reported the order.
In response, Sheriff Joseph Shipp withdrew his deputies from the jail before a mob broke in and dragged Johnson a few blocks away to a bridge spanning the Tennessee River.
“God bless you all, I am an innocent man,” Johnson reportedly told the mob before he was hung and shot.
Despite an order from the United States Supreme Court, Johnson was dead.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, did something it had never done before and has never done since: It sought to hold Shipp, one of his deputies and some of the members of the mob in contempt of court.
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