The Lynching of Will Brown
Graphic Photos Within, If You Don’t Want to See Them, Turn Back Now
When selecting a cover photo, I try to pick a picture I have the copyright rights to use that best depicts the story I wish to tell. Even when telling a story about lynchings, I don’t generally shy away from the pictures as they are critical to telling the whole story. This is one circumstance where the images are so graphic that the audience must be warned.
The scene is Omaha, Nebraska, on September 28, 1919, at the Douglas County Courthouse. The date is important because it was at the end of the Red Summer, in which America had seen racial unrest in over three dozen major cities and a rural Arkansas county. There was already tension in the atmosphere and it took little to set something off.
The Omaha Race Riot had been brewing for a few weeks. Omaha depended on the meatpacking industry, and white workers had gone on strike multiple times in the past two years. The Union Stockyards were the third-largest in the country and would soon become second. Owners brought in Black workers as strikebreakers. The Black population doubled between 1910 and 1920; with 10,000 Black people, it was second in the West only to Los Angeles.
The most powerful ethnic group in Omaha was the Irish. They had previously decimated the…
