“This photograph was taken the morning after [Black steel mill worker] Zachariah Walker’s execution by a lynch mob. Despite strong evidence against the accused, local juries found none of the local men and teenage boys guilty.”
Lynching was never just a Southern phenomenon and didn’t always involve a noose, as the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission can tell you:
As an angry mob dragged him from the hospital, Zachariah Walker is said to have cried, “For God’s sake, give a man a chance! I killed Rice in self-defense. Don’t give me no crooked death because I’m not white!” His pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. In a field just outside the borough of Coatesville, Walker was thrown into a hastily constructed fire. Three times he attempted to crawl out, only to be pushed back in until he moved no more. A crowd estimated between 3,000 to 5,000 men, women, and children witnessed Walker’s ordeal with a calm resolve.
After it was over, the crowd politely dispersed, though some lingered to collect body parts and other souvenirs before going back into town. The lynching occurred on a Sunday-“that quiet Sabbath evening,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote scornfully. Within days, the area surrounding the site had been picked clean of the body, fence posts, ashes, and even blades of grass, and community leaders were calling for a return to normalcy.
The lynching of Zachariah Walker in 1911 personifies what historians call a “spectacle lynching,” a mob execution that included the most barbaric indecencies one can imagine. Though the geography of a northern industrial town seems not to fit our understanding of lynching, the episode is freighted with significance. Among its many layers is the web of racial and ethnic tensions that were present in Coatesville and other industrial towns during an era of sustained migration. Though the lynching was highly unusual, the pattern of social frictions that pervaded Coatesville, a prosperous steel town forty miles west of Philadelphia, was not uncommon…
These cac's dont care about sins or how they look ....This is what they do. they been prepared for the hell they going to receive
And fools over here talking about peace?? How you gonna talk peace with literally demons??
