As the summer draws to a close, six student interns, who have spent nine weeks investigating close to 100 cases of racially motivated homicides, presented their findings and proposed avenues for further research before CRRJ team members and associates.
The students – Jeanne Renee Gilliard (Temple ‘25) Gianna Grant (UChicago ‘24) Fiorella Villacrés (NUSL ‘24) Halle Snell (Vassar ‘25) Kaitlyn Dehais (NUSL ‘26) Takiyah Gabby Watson (Vassar ‘27) Julia Parham (Bates ‘25) and Sharon Ng’ang’a (NUSL ‘24) – delivered presentations and answered questions from staff and faculty in two lunchtime sessions on July 31 and August 1, 2024.
“In addition to these case investigations, these students have supported our interdisciplinary projects and research into historical police killings, and conducted research for our federal reparations project,” said Malcolm Clarke, CRRJ’s Elizabeth Zitrin Justice Fellow, who supervised the students throughout the summer.
“I feel very fortunate to have seen the growth of these students over the course of the summer, and how capable they demonstrated themselves to be,” said Clarke. “I have appreciated having the opportunity to work with them and look forward to seeing what they do in the future.”
The group also worked closely alongside CRRJ Director Professor Margaret Burnham and Faculty Co-Director for the Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) Professor Deborah Ramirez, both of whom attended the presentations.
Two students investigated cases involving Black railroad workers killed in the 1930s. In the fierce competition for jobs during the Great Depression, Black trainmen were targeted, chased off the jobs and sometimes killed by white workers, particularly in the South.
On July 31, Watson presented the case of Will “Willie” Harvey, a 29-year-old firefighter for the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad from Vicksburg, Mississippi, who was killed in a drive by shooting on May 22, 1932.
Harvey was leaving work at around 4 a.m. when a car pulled up opposite him and a person from within the vehicle shot Harvey three times with a shotgun, leaving him for dead. A witness later testified that they heard someone in the car say “I got him,” just before they drove away.
Grant then presented her findings on the killing of Edgar Scott, a 53-year-old father of four, who was beaten to death on July 10, 1932, on the Southern Railway line near Atlanta, Georgia.
Like Harvey, Scott was a railroad worker, employed by Southern Railway as a brakeman at the time of his murder.
It was reported that his killer was a homeless man, and the incident was considered a robbery because his watch was missing when his body was found. No legal action was taken and local officials stated that it was outside of their jurisdiction.
“Despite not having a ton of information on him,” said Grant, “I thought it was important to at least highlight some personal details that I found.”
Grant and Watson then described how these two killings belong to a broader narrative of economic and social unrest, following the Great Depression, and discussed the rise in attacks on railroad workers during the first half of the 1930s, and the emergence of The Mystic Order of United Workers.
“Our suggestions for next steps would be to create a new project that delves into the killings of each of the trainmen who are listed in our files and expand our search to before the 1930s,” said Watson.
Following their presentation, Burnham said the Harvey and Scott cases represented those that fall “between the cracks” between the jurisdiction of civil rights organizations, such as the NACCP, and labor unionizing efforts emerging at the at the beginning of the 20th century. Burnham also noted that these incidents, and the ensuing community responses, were important precursors to the significant organizing by railway workers during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
A few students also investigated cases of historical homicidal racial violence affecting non-Black communities.
Snell presented her work on a subset of these cases that fall outside the scope of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. These focus on the lynchings of Native American, Latino, and Asian victims from 1885 to 1965.
“The ultimate goal of this project was to research cases where the federal government was aware of federal law violations but refused to protect the victims,” Snell explained.
Snell researched the case of Hong Di, a 17-year-old cook who lived and worked in the home of the Billiou family, in Colusa, California. Di witnessed his employer cheating on her husband with the ranch foreman, who threatened to kill Di if he told anyone about the affair.
On April 17, 1887, Di entered the Billiou family’s dining room with a gun, shot his employer, and fled the scene. He was later captured by local police.
While his motive remains unclear, Di admitted to being drunk at the time of the shooting and had not intended to kill his employer, whom he said had been teaching him to read and write in English.
Almost three months later, following a jury trial, Di was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison.
On July 11, an angry mob of 150 men, led by the ranch foreman, broke into Di’s prison cell, dragged him to the railroad yard and hanged him, while more than 2,000 Colusa community members watched on.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century during westward expansion, Chinese presence had begun to stir the anxieties of white Americans, heightened by the civil war and the violence of the post-reconstruction period. White workers saw the Chinese as competition, first for gold and then later for jobs, said Snell. The Workingmen’s Party of California, a white led Labor organization, coined the phrase “the Chinese must go,” while in 1871, a mass lynching of 18 Chinese men occurred in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
Snell said that Di’s lynching was meant to warn the Chinese community to “mind the color line.”
“Although this work is outside the scope of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive,” said Snell, “I believe it is still useful for CRRJ’s research and wider mission. White supremacist sentiments have manifested in the lynchings of Black Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans and Latinos at the border, and the expulsion of Asian Americans from their communities. Recognizing these histories of racial violence help us understand how we can build coalitions.
Acknowledging our many histories of racial violence is the first step in dismantling the biased systems of policing and border control they created.”
Snell suggested future researchers investigate federal involvement in the cases she identified, and efforts be made to contact descendants of these victims.
Snell and Watson also produced an investigate report into the many letters written by women — mothers, daughters, sisters of victims — contained in the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. “These women wrote about relatives who went missing and were feared to have been killed by whites, police brutality, and Southern mob lynchings. The letters reveal their determination to access the legal system on behalf of their families and a sophisticated appreciation for how the levers of power operated,” wrote Snell and Watson. Read the report here.
Police killings in Florida
On August 1, Parham presented the case of James Jerome “Cracker” Johnson, known as “the Bolita King of West Palm Beach.”
Johnson, who was unable to read or write, became a cabin boy on a freighter in Savannah and he landed in Florida for the first time at the age of 21. His first solo business was in the production of moonshine in 1899. Johnson grew his fortune during the late 1910s and 1920s and continued to run Bolita games, an early form of lottery, long after the end of prohibition in 1933. He then used his illegally earned fortune to invest in property and other legitimate businesses. Most of his property empire was in the Black neighborhoods of West Palm Beach. It was reported that Johnson was wealthy enough to loan the city of West Palm Beach $50,000 after the housing market collapsed during the Great Depression.
It was outside his restaurant, the Florida Bar Cocktail Lounge and Grill, that Johnson was shot and killed on July 2, 1946. The case was quickly closed with no real investigation into the death.
“Modern reports and Johnson family lore is that he was killed by a hired killer of a white mob, who was interested in breaking Johnson’s financial hold on Palm Beach County,” said Parham. “However, this is speculation as I was unable to find any concrete evidence.”
Finally, students investigated cases where the African American subjects were criminally charged and executed without due process – under circumstances that call for restorative justice.
Guillard presented the North Carolina case of John Gause. Gause had been sentenced to 15 years’ labor on a chain gang for second degree burglary. With a month left of this sentence to serve, Gause left the chain gang on what is today the North Carolina Highway, on September 26, 1923.
Local papers in North Carolina reported that Gause made his way to Precious Creek near the town of Spruce Pine, where he allegedly encountered a white woman, Alice Thomas, who would later go on to accuse Gause of sexually assaulting her at knife point, threatening to kill her if she called for help.
A posse was quickly organized by Thomas’ husband and their sons, and the white citizens of Spruce Pines banded together to force African American laborers from the town. The Spruce Pine Riots – mobs of more than 100 white citizens terrorizing African American men, women and children – forced families to leave town at gunpoint, loaded them onto freight trains, and told them never to return.
On September 28, North Carolina’s Governor Cameron A. Morrison called in the National Guard, an attempt to ensure protection for African American workers. The NAACP addressed a telegram to Gov. Morrison demanding reassurance that the state of North Carolina would protect its African American citizens.
On September 29, Gause was found and arrested near Catawba County, North Carolina.
His trial began almost a month later, lasted less than two hours, and Gause was found guilty after five minutes of deliberation. He was executed in the electric chair on December 7, 1923.
After his death, Gause’s body was given to Wake Forest University School of Medicine without his consent.
“There is a noteworthy amount of exploration left surrounding the unethical donation of John Gause’s body, and it’s something that CRRJ’s Donated Bodies project needs to uncover,” said Guilliard.
Donated Bodies of Deceased Prisoners and the Wrongfully Executed
This summer, Burnham and Professor Kris Manjapra — Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) Fellow, and Stearns Trustee Professor of History and Global Studies — launched the “Donated Bodies of Deceased Prisoners and the Wrongfully Executed: A Pilot Project in Ethics, Law, Human Remains and Memory.” The project seeks to evaluate the ethical concerns raised by the widespread U.S. practice of disposing of executed and deceased prisoners’ remains by donating their bodies to science, medicine or archival purposes.
“Next steps would be to pursue genealogical research into John Gause and his legacy, beyond his identity as a prisoner,” said Guilliard. “I was unable to locate any living descendants of John Gause, but I think this would be crucial research.”
“This case is key to understanding where North Carolina fits within the national practice of exploiting the death of executed black people to benefit the state’s medical schools,” said Burnham. “Gause highlights how medical science was entwined with the racial injustices of the criminal legal system.”
The session was concluded with brief presentations from Villacrés and Ng’ang’a. Villacrés has spent much of her summer developing a comprehensive history of Boston’s discriminatory public housing. Her research will be central to CRRJ and CLEAR’s contributions to the ongoing work by the City of Boston’s Reparations Task Force.
Ng’ang’a, who worked on the Criminal Justice Task Force’s Gun Liability Insurance project, under Ramirez’s direction, spoke of the draft proposal she has penned. In it, she said their work offers a solution to “the dual issues of inadequate firearm screening, and lack of assistance in compensating victims of gun violence.”
We are grateful to all of our interns and their tremendous efforts, investigating cases and developing our other significant projects. Their work, like that of all the students who pass through CRRJ, will make significant contributions to the correction of the historical record of anti-Black violence, and ensure that the voices of these victims are no longer unheard or overlooked, but preserved in perpetuity.
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