A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age

Award-winning author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Philip Dray reveals the history of an 1892 lynching in New York state--an event that forced the North to reckon with its own racism and inspired Stephen Crane's powerful novella The Monster.

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was cruelly lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting the beautiful but mysterious Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, then a "Southern Scourge" surging uncontrollably below Mason-Dixon, was about to extend its tendrils northward. What factors prompted such a spasm of racial violence in a relatively prosperous, industrious upstate New York town, attracting the scrutiny of Black journalist Ida B. Wells, just then beginning her courageous anti-lynching crusade? What meaning did the country assign to it? And what did the incident portend?

Today, it's a terrible truth the assault on the lives of Black Americans is neither a regional or temporary feature, but a national crisis. Each fortnight brings a new report of a Black person murdered by police and "Jim Crow" has found new purpose in describing the harsh conditions of life for the formerly incarcerated, as well as large-scale efforts by states to make voting inaccessible to Black people and other minority citizens. The crowds of white people who once amassed outside Southern courthouses demanding that sheriffs relinquish Black prisoners have as their twenty-first century counterparts the open-carry white militiamen who invade statehouses and the Capitol in Washington. This "mobocratic spirit," a phrase Abraham Lincoln used as early as 1838 to describe vigilantism's corrosive effect on America, frightfully insinuates that mob violence is a viable means of effecting political change. These issues remain as deserving of our concern as they did a hundred and thirty years ago, when America turned its gaze to Port Jervis.

An alleged crime, a lynching, a misbegotten attempt at an official inquiry, and a past unresolved. In A Lynching at Port Jervis, acclaimed historian Philip Dray revisits this time and place to consider its significance in our communal history and to show how justice cannot be achieved without an honest reckoning.

Includes black-and-white images