Bleak Look Back

n February 23, 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced placement of plaques memorializing Robert Lewis and Robert Mulliner, Black men lynched in the New York towns of Port Jervis and Newburgh in the late tells Lewis’s story. He was accused of assaulting Lena McMahon, a White woman, on June 2, 1892, on the banks of the Neversink River. Several White Port Jervis residents sought to ensure Lewis’s trial by due process, but that night a mob seized, tortured, and hanged him from a tree in the front yard of a White judge, who also attempted to intervene.