After the Civil War, thousands of defeated rebel soldiers returned home. There was one clear intention among whites in the South and that was to make sure that the freedman, the newly freed slaves, were kept in their place and for many, that place was somewhere near hell. In the years after Lincoln’s assassination, the South was a lawless place where terror was the law and lynching was king. For the Klan, the redeemers, regulators and other whites who sought a white South, it was a public spectacle.
The man from Ohio who won the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant, sent federal troops commanded by federal generals like Buckeyes William Sherman and Phillip Sheridan to the South to protect the freedmen. President Grant asked for and got the KU KLUX KLAN Act in order to arrest whites guilty of lynching. He also used martial law to bring order to many areas of the South.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, in post-Civil War Ohio there were 16 lynchings from the 1870s to 1932 of Black men and one woman. By comparison, Mississippi had 539 in the same period. Among these victims were Simeon Garnet, in 1877; William Taylor, 1878; Christopher C. Davis, 1881; Frank Fisher, 1882; Fanny Graham, a Black woman, but authorities identified four prominent members of the community and convicted them of her murder; Henry Howard, 1885; Peter Betters,1887; Henry Corbin, 1892; Roscoe Parker, 1894; Seymour Newlin, 1894; Noah Anderson, 1895; and Charles Mitchell, 1897.
With the encouragement and help of Marcus Hanna, Ohio Republican president maker, Harry Smith was elected to the state legislature in 1893 and worked tirelessly to get an anti-lynching bill passed. He got a Civil Rights act passed in 1894 and in 1896 the toughest anti-lynching act in the United States, the Smith Act. In 1897, “Click Mitchell” was lynched in Urbana after allegedly assaulting the widow of a prominent citizen. After the lynching, Mitchell was proved innocent. Under the Smith Act, his relatives sued the community and won $10,000. The Smith Act became a model for other states.
The federal government, despite over 200 attempts and thousands of lynchings, until earlier this month never passed an anti-lynching bill because of Southern resistance. A federal act is necessary — remember that the state prosecutor in the Ahmaud Arbery murder declined prosecution even after reviewing the tapes that showed his brutal, unprovoked killing was a lynching.
The Smith Act did not stop all Ohio lynchings or white on Black violence such as the Springfield riots, but it put Ohio in a class all of its own in speaking up for racial justice.
David Madden is a retired trial attorney, a mentor at the University of Dayton Law School and a spokesperson for the ACLU.
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