Ed Johnson Memorial

In early twentieth-century Chattanooga, a growing black community that had once helped elect black civil servants and state politicians faced disenfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation, and terror from white supremacists, including lynchings on the Walnut Street Bridge, where white mobs killed Alfred Blount in 1893 and Ed Johnson in 1906 to intimidate black residents of Hill City. Johnson, a young black day laborer and church builder, was falsely accused on January 25, 1906, of raping Nevada Taylor after a local man blamed him to collect a reward, and although Johnson maintained his innocence and witnesses later confirmed he had been working elsewhere at the time, he was arrested, moved briefly to Nashville for safety, returned, and then tried before a hostile all-white jury. Sheriff Joseph Shipp and Judge Sam McReynolds, both facing re-election, sought a conviction, Johnson's poorly prepared court-appointed lawyers could not mount an effective defense, the jury rejected credible alibi testimony from numerous black witnesses, and Johnson was sentenced to death. Black attorneys Styles Hutchins and Noah Parden, convinced of his innocence, appealed unsuccessfully to the Tennessee Supreme Court and then petitioned the United States Supreme Court, which on March 18, 1906, stayed Johnson's execution and ordered Sheriff Shipp to protect him while the case was reviewed. The next night, enraged by federal intervention, a white mob stormed the Hamilton County Jail, seized Johnson, dragged him to the Walnut Street Bridge, hanged him, and shot him repeatedly, while Shipp failed to protect him despite warnings and the Court's order. In the first and only criminal trial in its history, the United States Supreme Court later held Shipp and five others in criminal contempt for disobeying its order; they served brief prison terms, yet Shipp returned to a hero's welcome from many white Chattanoogans and was re-elected. Black Chattanoogans responded with protest and mourning, more than 2,000 people attended Johnson's funeral, and Hutchins and Parden, later driven from Chattanooga by death threats, became recognized as legal pioneers whose work in Johnson's case and in United States v. Shipp helped lay foundations for modern civil rights litigation.

Chattanooga, Tennessee · United States