The Douglas County Courthouse on Farnam Street was finished in 1912, and county business still goes on inside it. Since June 2021 a marker on its front lawn has named the man a mob took from its jail on the night of September 28, 1919. His name was Will Brown. He was a Black packinghouse worker, forty-one years old and suffering from acute rheumatism, and he never had a trial.
The accusation
Late on September 25, a nineteen-year-old white woman reported that a Black man had robbed her and her companion near Bancroft Street and raped her. The next day the Omaha Bee called her attacker a "black beast." The Bee was aligned with the political machine of Tom Dennison, which wanted the reform mayor, Edward P. Smith, out of office, and it had been running a series of stories about Black men attacking white women. About four hundred armed men followed a neighbor's tip to Brown's house on South Fifth Street, where police found him and took him to the courthouse jail.
The courthouse
On Sunday afternoon a crowd of white youths began to march on the courthouse. By evening it numbered somewhere between five and fifteen thousand. Rioters took more than a thousand guns from pawnshops and hardware stores, soaked the lower floors in gasoline and set the building on fire with the sheriff and his deputies inside. Mayor Smith came out to face them; they hanged him from a traffic signal tower at Sixteenth and Harney, and he lived only because detectives cut the rope. Inside, as the mob closed in, Brown told the sheriff, "I am innocent, I never did it." They took him anyway, hanged him from a pole at Eighteenth and Harney, shot him, burned his body and dragged it through the streets for hours. Photographs show men grinning beside the fire. A sixteen-year-old rioter, Louis Young, and a businessman, James Hiykel, were also killed that night.
Soldiers from Fort Omaha and Fort Crook arrived about three in the morning, and General Leonard Wood brought 1,600 troops to hold the city. A grand jury returned some 120 indictments. Nobody went to prison. Omaha was one of more than twenty cities hit by racial violence in the Red Summer of 1919, and the city that came out of it was harder: the Ku Klux Klan organized in Omaha in 1921, and redlining and restrictive covenants pressed Black families into North Omaha, where Klansmen soon threatened the household of Earl Little, whose son was born there in 1925 and became Malcolm X.
Lest we forget
Brown was buried in a pauper's grave on October 1, 1919, with one word, "Lynched," entered beside his name in the interment log. In 2009 an engineer from California paid for a headstone on the grave. It reads "Lest we forget." Bullet holes from the riot are still visible inside the courthouse, and the marker, unveiled before about five hundred people, stands near the front steps, a short walk from where he was killed.