Ed Johnson Lynching Case

A historically disenfranchised group, African-Americans for most of United States history lacked basic rights and had minimal legal protection. United States v Shipp was the first criminal court case heard by the Supreme Court. Its significance helped African-Americans in their fight for civil rights going forward. Lynching is a terrible punishment in by which a public mob hanged an individual from rope. According to the Tuskegee Archives, over 3,000 Black people between the years of 1882-1968 died in U.S. due to the heinous and inhumane method. An African-American man from Chattanooga, Tennessee named Ed Johnson died because of lynching. Accused of raping a white woman, his hasty trial concluded in a death sentence. Johnson’s appeal to the

Supreme Court caused a stay on his case, yet, a mob lynched him. The
Supreme Court’s victory in charging those responsible for his death with criminal contempt help increased their power. In establishing a precedent in using federal ruling to overrule state ones, it proved beneficial to the courts in later more consequential legal cases. By exploring the history of lynching and examining Ed Johnson, a Black man in proper historical context, it helps in understanding United States v Shipp legal case because it reveals how the Supreme Court caused unwilling states to enforce the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; furthermore aiding African-Americans in the legal sphere.
I am an innocent man. Countless African-Americans men muttered those words before they meet their untimely demise. The people’s popular method of punishment was death by lynching. It was a cruel public event in which, regardless of a person’s guilt, that individual died. In the Antebellum era, White Americans used lynching’s in suppressing slave rebellions. After the Civil War, it evolved into a method of intimidation against African-Americans in an effort to re-subjugate them. While lynching was not exclusive to one race, it killed Black men at disproportionate rates. An accusation of raping a white woman as a Black man was enough to make mobs want to lynch them to prevent hearing testimony from the victim. America’s fascination with race and sex shaped public opinions of certain groups. Black men lack legal protection from lynching and some groups such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) campaigned unsuccessfully to criminalize the act. Until then, for those of Ed Johnson elk, they continued to meet their doom at the end of a rope.
On the night of January 23, 1906, an attack occurred involving a twenty-one-year-old white woman, Nevada Taylor in a cemetery on her way home.

Knocked unconscious for 10 minutes, after Taylor reawaken she went home to tell her father and brother of the crime. As quoted in The Chattanooga News the following day, “he accomplished his terrible purpose and there he left his victim unconscious, choked into insensibility.” Later notified as a victim of sexual assault, Taylor could not recall much about the violent attack. However, in conversation with Hamilton County’s Sheriff Joseph Shipp, she described her attacker as an African-American man. For Shipp and his deputies, the cursory search for suspects ended with two Black men: James Broaden and Ed Johnson. In that era, any African-American man satisfied Taylor’s description. A local White male shop clerk who collected a handsome reward for his information identified Johnson. There is speculation as to whether the person saw Johnson that night. Johnson was an illiterate twenty-two-year-old man who got by doing odd jobs the clock was ticking on his life. The Chattanooga Times reported a mob presence at the Sheriff’s jail, more importantly numerous participants seeking to lynch a Black man in revenge. The public believed they got their man. Typical of the Jim Crow South era’s sentiment, an African-American man was guilty by default when accused of crime by a white person. Simply put, presumption of innocence did not apply to people of color. Unfortunately, for the crowd, a different prison location held Johnson and the crowd dispersed following pleas from a local

judge.