Coatesville and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker: Death in a Pennsylvania Steel Town

By Dennis B Downey and Raymond M. Hyser

“A compelling narrative that moves crisply through the murder, the lynching, and the cover-up by silence that local residents thereafter affected.”—The Journal of American History
 
On a warm August night in 1911, Zachariah Walker was lynched—burned alive—by an angry mob on the outskirts of Coatesville, a prosperous Pennsylvania steel town. At the time of his very public murder, Walker, an African American millworker, was under arrest for the shooting and killing of a respected local police officer. Investigated by the NAACP, the horrific incident garnered national and international attention. Despite this scrutiny, a conspiracy of silence shrouded the events, and the accused men and boys were found not guilty at trial. More than 100 years after the lynching, authors Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser bring new insight to events that rocked a community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781625841032

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

During the first week in August 1911, an itinerant African American minister preached a religious revival at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. His name was Prophet Andrew Jones, the colored prophet, according to the local newspaper, and nothing is known of him except this: he claimed that God had ordained him with the gift to foretell the future. Jones informed the all-black congregation that he had correctly predicted such diverse tragedies as the Johnstown flood, the Baltimore fire and the San Francisco earthquake. Now, in the closing moments of his weeklong crusade, the evangelist said he had a special message for the black citizens of Coatesville. A great misfortune was about to fall on the town, he predicted, and in this time of trial and tribulation they would do well to remember that the meek shall inherit the earth. The Coatesville Record reported that Jones counseled local blacks to make no attempt at violence although they would be sorely tested.

Little more than a week later, on a warm Sunday evening, a black man named Zachariah Walker was murdered on the edge of town, burned alive as a crowd of several thousand people looked on fascinated by the spectacle. Three times he attempted to free himself, only to be pushed back onto his funeral pyre by young men closest to the flames. No one stood against the mob, and some spectators waited hours for the ashes to cool so they could retrieve souvenir bone fragments. Walker’s last words were a mournful plea to his captors: Don’t give me no crooked death because I’m not white. The next morning, young boys sold pieces of Walker’s body on downtown street corners.

Not surprisingly, the death of Zachariah Walker focused national and international attention on this Pennsylvania steel town and its nearly twelve thousand inhabitants. Commentators familiar with the commonplace nature of racial lynching in turn-of-the-century America remarked on the brutal manner of death and on the oddity of this incident’s geographic location in a northern industrial town rather than the American South. Former president Theodore Roosevelt was among the host of critics who rebuked townsfolk for their failure to prevent the lynching. In the midst of blistering criticism, Coatesville’s residents joined ranks in what a county judge criticized as a conspiracy of silence that thwarted the efforts of prosecutors to bring the perpetrators to justice. On the first anniversary of the lynching, social reformer John Jay Chapman traveled to Coatesville to conduct a memorial service, commemorating what he called an American tragedy. No more than a half dozen people attended the gathering.

Published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Zachariah Walker’s death, this narrative seeks to tell the story of what happened and why it is of enduring significance. In some respects, the present work is a substantial revision of our earlier work entitled No Crooked Death, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1991. That earlier book, no longer in print, represented a more detailed and scholarly approach to the subject, seeking to place the Coatesville lynching in the context of the developing scholarly discourse on lynching and racial violence in American history. As a scholarly case study, No Crooked Death has held up well and received its own notoriety over the past two decades.

In this revised and substantially altered text, however, we have attempted to update and make more accessible to a general audience the compelling and controversial saga of Zach Walker’s brief life and tragic death in a Pennsylvania steel town. We have retained the basic narrative found in No Crooked Death, but we have omitted intentionally some of the detail and recast portions of the larger contextual analysis while retaining the sense of historical drama found in this individual historical event. Local controversy surrounding the 2006 dedication of a historical marker, which we discuss in the Afterword, provides fresh evidence of how the death of Zachariah Walker has been interwoven in the fabric of community relations in Coatesville and the surrounding area.

Ask big questions of small places, historian Charles Joyner once advised. As in the earlier work, that is our intention in this version of the story. In many respects, the lynching of Zachariah Walker is freighted with meaning—for the residents of Coatesville and for others interested in the American past. Walker’s death at the hands of a mob typifies what historians now call a spectacle lynching. Mobs of thousands watched grotesque rituals of violence that were often accompanied by unusual and stylized acts of mutilation and human desecration. Not only did some bystanders wait hours to retrieve relics, but others took photographs to remember the event long after it had passed. Perhaps Michael Pfeifer put it best when he observed that lynching was a form of rough justice that reveals important features of individual and community sentiments on matters of race and rights. Lynching was a crime, a form of extralegal violence that rarely was punished. While its proponents could defend the practice as understandable and even necessary, its critics more often condemned the practice of mob violence with impunity as a betrayal of democracy and any sense of decency. Too often in the history of lynching, due process under law received little respect as the mob stirred to action. Not too many years before the Coatesville incident, Mark Twain struck at the heart of the matter in an essay entitled The United States of Lyncherdom, when he castigated those who lacked the moral courage to stand against the mob.

This narrative tells the story of one death by lynching in one Pennsylvania steel town at the dawn of the twentieth century. It also offers an assessment of the social world in which this episode of mob violence occurred. Contrary to expectations, Coatesville was not a small town in the rural South, the accustomed locale for such events. Rather, Coatesville was a prosperous northern steel town riding the crest of the Industrial Revolution and material progress. As in other industrial towns across America, over the previous decade Coatesville had experienced a massive influx of newcomers, southern and eastern European immigrants and black migrants from the American South. Zachariah Walker was one such newcomer from rural Virginia, and he had few formal ties to the larger community, a place divided along class, ethnic and racial lines. All of these factors are relevant in the drama that played out that quiet Sabbath evening, to borrow W.E.B. Du Bois’s phrase, one hundred years ago.

In a very particular sense, the Walker lynching and its aftermath redefined community in Coatesville. Without wishing to sensationalize what remains a sensitive subject, our hope is that readers will find in this narrative both a compelling story and rich insights into the complexity of human experience in early twentieth-century America. At the heart of this story is a social drama in one place at one time. But this is a story that continues to reverberate and lend meaning to our understanding of the human condition. History is, after all, something that happens to people, and the human condition is the heart of historical significance.

Chapter 1

THAT QUIET SABBATH EVENING

Zachariah Walker was lured from his home in rural Stanardsville, Virginia, by the availability of jobs for unskilled workers and the general industrial prosperity of the North. Numerous labor agents, working to recruit blacks for the steel mills, also portrayed the area as idyllic, a heaven on earth. Another enticing feature was the absence of Jim Crow segregation laws, which led Walker, and so many other blacks, to believe that there was a greater sense of freedom in the North. By 1911, he had found work as a laborer, an obscure lever-puller, in the Worth Brothers Steel Company, located in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Walker would soon learn, however, that his new home was hardly the Promised Land he sought.

Coatesville is situated along the west branch of the Brandywine Creek in Chester County, approximately forty miles west of Philadelphia and twenty miles north of the Maryland border, surrounded by some of the best farmland in the country. It was established as a post office in 1812 and took its name from the Irish Quaker postmaster, Moses Coates, who owned a large tract of land from which the town developed. In 1818, an iron foundry was built along the creek, and throughout the nineteenth century, Coatesville developed into a small industrial community.

Although the iron mills flourished in the valley, they were closely tied to the ebb and flow of the new economic order and eventually converted to steel production, a rapidly expanding industry. Coatesville never approximated the size of Pittsburgh or Bethlehem, remaining a middling steel town to this day. Two sprawling steel mills dominated the local economy and social relations in 1911. The Worth Brothers Steel Company was the largest, employing nearly 1,500 workers. The Lukens Steel and Iron Company, significantly smaller, was nonetheless the second leading employer in the borough. Both companies had their operations along the banks of Brandywine Creek, with Lukens headquartered within the borough and Worth Brothers situated in East Fallowfield Township, just beyond the southern limits of Coatesville. Brandywine Creek formed a north–south axis that bisected the borough; Main Street, sometimes called the Lincoln Highway, formed an east–west axis. The steel mills, long the focal point of community life, literally towered over the landscape. Steel was the lifeblood of Coatesville, and it could be seen, heard and smelled in every corner of the town. Local residents felt reassured when black, sooty smoke hung in the valley, for it meant the mills were running and times were prosperous.

A copy of the first known land draft, Lukens Steel in Coatesville, 1810. Courtesy of the Lukens Archives and the Chester County Historical Society.

A view of the Lukens Rolling Mill, Coatesville, circa 1882. Courtesy of the Lukens Archives and the Chester County Historical Society.

Workers assembled at a Lukens mill site, Coatesville, circa 1870. Courtesy of the Lukens Archives and the Chester County Historical Society.

Old mill at Lukens Steel, circa 1887. Courtesy of the Chester County Historical Society.

By the summer of 1911, Coatesville had some pressing problems. Although a few of the borough’s streets were paved or macadamized, most were dirt with a trap rock dressing spread over the top. A stretch of several hundred yards along Main Street was known as the flats and became flooded after each rainstorm, and during the winter, the streets became impassable rutted quagmires. In the summer, even on the hottest days and despite the efforts of the Washington and Brandywine fire companies, which sprinkled water on the streets, residents were compelled to keep their doors and windows closed to prevent clouds of dust from settling inside their homes and businesses. If the streets were going to be repaired or oiled, local residents would have to pay the entire expense—which they were apparently unwilling (or unable) to do. Automobiles, so novel in Coatesville that to drive one on a town street guaranteed a newspaper headline, created havoc, as most drivers went too fast, disobeyed street courtesy and terrorized pedestrians and those on horseback. The police could do little to control the mayhem.

Another problem was the borough’s woefully inadequate supply of drinking water, which was often brown with dirt, forcing residents to let foreign particles settle before they could quench their thirst. In the spring, they had to contend with live tadpoles and small fish flowing with the water from the faucets. More serious than the water shortages was the constant threat of typhoid fever epidemics due to inadequate filtration and treatment facilities. Also, garbage was left to accumulate in the alleys and side streets, attracting packs of dogs. Once a year, the police embarked on a hunt, tracking down and killing all unleashed dogs in the borough.

Despite these problems, Coatesville enjoyed the beginnings of an economic resurgence during the summer of 1911. For the first time since the Panic of 1907, which had practically crippled the town’s steel productivity, the mills were operating at near capacity. There also seemed to be a strong community bond and an increase in local boosterism. Coatesville touted its electrically lighted White Way, a stretch of Main Street in the downtown business district that was, in the opinion of local residents, better lighted than Broadway in New York. The Harvest Home Festival, a weeklong series of activities, was scheduled for mid-August to celebrate the coming agricultural harvest as well as the revival of the steel mills. Shops, businesses and banks were closed on Thursday, August 10, as the business community hosted a special day of events. Thousands attended a parade, complete with automobiles, and there were various athletic contests (including a tug of war between the two fire companies), an automobile race and musical productions. Someone even thrilled the crowd by parachuting out of a hot air balloon as it floated over the town.

Zachariah Walker may have worked in Coatesville, but he did not live there. Rather, he coexisted with recent European immigrants and fellow southern blacks in the Spruces, a collection of shacks that passed as homes on a bluff overlooking the sprawling steel mills. The Spruces was located just beyond Brandywine Creek in East Fallowfield Township, nearly one mile from downtown Coatesville. Inhabitants of this area purchased food and supplies in Bernardtown, a cluster of small stores at the foot of the hill, except on Saturdays, when they flocked to the taverns and stores in the borough. On August 12, the final day of the Harvest Home Festival, Walker and his friend Oscar Starkey were in Coatesville. The two men milled around Main Street near the Smith Hotel, drinking gin for most of the day. This was a common Saturday occurrence among immigrants and blacks, especially after the ghost walked on Friday (the steelworkers’ term for payday). The throngs were often so large that pedestrians and vehicles could barely pass along Main Street and First Avenue. Drunks jeered and made gestures at passersby, and fights broke out with the slightest provocation. Native white residents, angered by the decline in civility and the increase in arrests, violent crime and property damage, avoided the shopping district after noon (much to the chagrin of shopkeepers). The six-man Coatesville police force was hard-pressed to maintain some semblance of order. On Saturday nights, the town lockup, sometimes affectionately called Fort Jumbo in honor of the portly police chief, was usually filled with men sleeping off their daylong drinking binges. The town newspapers protested the usual Saturday behavior, particularly when inebriated workers carried concealed firearms and threatened the borough’s respectable citizens, but by the summer of 1911 the ritual was firmly in place.

As twilight fell on that Saturday in August, an intoxicated Zachariah Walker parted company with Oscar Starkey, stopped by the Smith Hotel for more liquor and then staggered down First Avenue toward his shack in the Spruces. Just across the covered bridge that spanned Brandywine Creek beyond the Worth Brothers mill, he came across two Polish workers. By his own admission, Walker was feeling pretty good, and he decided to have some fun with the two foreigners. He removed a revolver that was tucked into his pants and fired several shots in their general direction. Although