A lynching at Port Jervis Race and reckoning in the Gilded Age

On June 2, 1892, the town of Port Jervis, NY, was rocked by racist violence when a mob lynched Robert Lewis, a Black man suspected of sexually assaulting a young white woman named Lena McMahon. Although lynching was all too common in the era, it was considered a uniquely southern crime, and white residents of Port Jervis seemed more dismayed by the damage done to their city's reputation than by the extrajudicial murder of one of their citizens. Historian Dray (At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 2003) examines the crime and its aftermath in the contexts of industrialization; local, regional, and national race relations, the anti-lynching activism of figures like T. Thomas Fortune and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the temperance movement, and even American literature: the brother of writer Stephen Crane was one of the few white people who tried to free Lewis from the mob. A Lynching at Port Jervis paints a vividly disturbing picture of northern racism in the Gilded Age, reminding readers of the pervasiveness of anti-Black terrorism and its lethal consequences for Black Americans.

The shocking 1892 lynching of a Black man in a small town 65 miles northwest of New York City is recounted in this vivid and well-researched chronicle from historian Dray (There Is Power in a Union). "Seen as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward," the case helped spark an antilynching crusade, according to Dray. He meticulously reconstructs the events leading up to the murder, detailing how Lena McMahon, the manager of a local confectionery, was seen struggling with a light-skinned Black man on the bank of the Neversink River; how hotel worker Robert Lewis, who was apprehended on a "slow-moving coal barge" headed out of town, allegedly told his captors that Lena's white boyfriend, Philip Foley, had "urged him to commit the act"; and how a mob "wrested control" of Lewis before he could be turned over to the police, and slipped a noose over his head "within seconds." Dray also delves into the history of Port Jervis, profiles bystanders who tried to stop the lynching, recounts the inquest that acquitted eight men of assault and incitement to riot, and doggedly sorts through theories about what really occurred between McMahon, Foley, and Lewis. The result is an illuminating and distressing look at America's history of racial violence. (May)

An award-winning historian investigates a shocking incident of "spontaneous vigilantism" that "was seen as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward." In his latest, Dray--the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America and other works of American history--offers a cleareyed, powerful account of the lynching of Robert Lewis, a Black man, in the railroad town of Port Jervis, New York, amid a riot on June 2, 1892. As the author shows throughout his riveting text, while the heinous crime "lacked the ritualistic staging typical of many Southern lynchings…it was grounded in the same white insecurities that characterized the practice in warmer climes." Although only White (mainly newspaper) accounts of the lynching and aftermath remain in the record, the actual story, as the author unravels, was yet another example of a horrible mishandling of justice regarding a Black citizen. Lewis, who had worked in town as a respected laborer, was accused of sexually assaulting a local young White woman, and Dray chronicles how Lewis would suffer the consequences of the toxic stew of rumors, gossip, and deeply ingrained racism that existed in Port Jervis. After his death, the town's citizens unfurled a host of justifications, but the author is diligent and rigorous in his depiction of the racial animosity undergirding the entire ordeal. In the second part of the book, Dray examines the shameful legal ramifications and the crusading anti-lynching work of journalist Ida B. Wells and other activists as well as the fiction of Port Jervis--born Stephen Crane, whose brother had tried to intervene in the mob that lynched Lewis. In his later work, Crane would confront an essential question: "How should a conscientious white person respond to the most egregious forms of racial prejudice?" An important historical study of a topic that remains sadly relevant. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.