The Lynchings in Duluth. MIchael Fedo
stormed into the sleeping cars and began jerking drowsy workers from their racks. “Get out of here, you black sons of bitches!” they snarled, poking nightsticks into the cots of the sleeping men or rudely rolling them to the floor.
Max Mason, a twenty-one-year-old hand from Decatur, Alabama, and at five feet four inches one of the shortest of the blacks employed by the circus, was lifted from his rack and dropped on the floor. “Goddamn you! Get out of here!” roared the cop.
Mason, who had been sleeping heavily, reached for his shoes as a blast of chilled air swept through the open car door. He grunted and mumbled incoherently. An officer grabbed his leg and twisted him back to the floor. “Get over there, you black son of a bitch! And don’t you talk back!” Shoeless and without his shirt, Mason was pushed outside and thrown in a line with nearly one hundred and twenty other black workers. And in the cold gray of morning, his teeth chattered; he apprehensively looked around at his shivering, bewildered mates, some of whom gingerly fingered bruises or leaned over retching, the results of nightsticks rammed into unsuspecting bellies.
Officers angered both by the alleged crime and at having been ordered from their beds then swung their lanterns close to the blacks. Mason would later remember how he envied them in their blue jackets and thought perhaps he made a mistake by leaving Alabama, where a body wouldn’t freeze half to death in the middle of June.
A uniformed officer paced up and down in front of the line. “There was six of you niggers raped a white girl on the circus grounds last night. We’ll have every one of you in jail in ten minutes if we don’t find those six. So you boys that know something better start talking.”
A foreman and several other officers interrupted him, and they conferred, talking in muted voices. Finally, most of the blacks were released and returned to the warmth of their cars, while about forty others were kept in the line. “Only those boys might of been around the menagerie tent at the time,” a rangy foreman said. “Just them that worked in the big top or waited tables.” The foreman returned to his coach, while the workers were left to shiver in the dawn on a West Duluth hill overlooking the slumbering city.
P. B. and James Sullivan were brought out then, and the boy was asked to identify the assailants. Looking up and down the line, walking slowly, pausing to examine black faces, Jimmy turned toward Murphy and said, “They look pretty much alike to me. I don’t know for sure.”
The officer exhorted him to try again, telling Jimmy that the charge and the crime are very serious matters and “it would be terrible to arrest the wrong people.” But the young man still could not, or would not, make positive identifications.
Moments later, Irene and her father were ushered to the scene in a police vehicle, and after it was determined that the girl was not in shock, she was asked if she might identify her attackers. She appeared hesitant but calm as she examined the lineup, but said the faces weren’t too clear to her. Nevertheless, she identified five whose general size and physique seemed to resemble those who supposedly attacked her.
Meanwhile, Murphy and Schulte, with a blistering crossfire of questions, continued grilling other blacks. Some of the blacks, puzzled or intimidated, gave incoherent or vague accounts of their whereabouts in an attempt to veil the crap game. A few blacks apparently suspected the game was the reason for their detention, and fearing loss of jobs and wages, wished to avoid any confrontation with the law. But from this interrogation, Murphy held eight more men for arrest.
After placing all thirteen under arrest, Murphy released the circus train, which continued on to Virginia. The blacks were loaded into police cars and driven to the jail at the downtown headquarters.
During the next two hours, Duluth officers and the arrested suspects were engaged in an exhaustive questioning intended to coerce blacks into incriminating testimony. There was no such testimony, and seven of the thirteen were released.
Of the six who remained in custody, Chief Murphy believed that five—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, Nate Green, Loney Williams, and John Thomas—might have been involved in the alleged rape. The sixth man, Isaac McGhie, was being held as a material witness. These six, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, had joined the circus in Peru last April before the troupe’s northern swing.
McGhie was placed in a cell in the boys’ division on the station’s second floor because there was not enough available cell space in the main floor men’s department. The others were locked up just after 7 AM, the morning of June 15.
Chief Murphy, Fiskett, and Schulte remained at headquarters after dismissing other officers called out for the emergency. All three, drained by the session, had misgivings about the case and weren’t sure that all men who might have been implicated were in jail. They sat in the outer office, a room which might have been described in a detective novel as having that remote, heartless, not quite dirty, not quite clean, not quite human look and smell such rooms always seem to have. There was that sameness of nondescript hues of gray-greens and washed-out blues on walls and ceilings, accented by sterile, carpetless floors.
Finally, Murphy said that the girl and young Sullivan were too shaken to make positive identifications, and some of the stories he’d heard from the blacks didn’t quite make sense. Just in case, he ventured, they had better round up some of those they’d questioned again. It was agreed that the three would drive the sixty miles to Virginia later in the morning to make more arrests.
After Schulte and Fiskett had gone, the chief remained in the office another fifteen minutes, contemplating the crime. It was the most deplorable he’d encountered in his long service as a police officer. The thought of the assault revolted him, and his sympathy unquestionably rested with the Tusken family. What Murphy found particularly galling was the fact that should the blacks be convicted, as they no doubt would be, they’d receive no more than thirty years in the state penitentiary at Stillwater; the poor girl would have to endure the horror for the rest of her life. Sometimes, it seemed to the troubled chief, justice was not served, even when justice was done.
Like many officers of his time, Murphy felt capital punishment should not have been abolished. Even death itself wasn’t stern enough for thugs who violated innocent young girls.
At 8:15 AM on June 15, Dr. David Graham, concluding breakfast at home, received a call from Mrs. Tusken. She told him something awful had happened to Irene last night, and could he please come right away. He asked that she take the girl directly to the hospital, but the woman refused and insisted that Dr. Graham make a house call.
He arrived at the Tusken home shortly after 9 AM and found the family in a state of minor hysteria. No one seemed able or willing to state precisely what had happened, but from their nervous chatter, Dr. Graham deduced that the girl had been assaulted, and he prepared for an immediate examination.
The doctor was somewhat surprised that the girl apparently felt no pain or tenderness as he conducted both a speculum and digital exam. He found normal conditions present, though the girl seemed highly agitated. Dr. Graham believed Irene might have been suffering from a slight case of nervous exhaustion. That something had occurred was quite apparent to the doctor, but whatever that something was, Dr. Graham privately concluded that it probably was not rape.
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