Visit the Ed Johnson Digital Exhibit in the UTC library’s Special Collections to see more.
On March 19, 1906, an angry mob saw to it that Ed Johnson was hanged from Chattanooga’s Walnut Street Bridge.
On Sept. 24, 2018, about a dozen people stood quietly on the bridge and listened as Eric Atkins recalled the lynching that took Johnson’s life more than 100 years earlier. “The age of lynching,” Atkins called it—when 4,500 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, he said.
Atkins is part of a group, the Ed Johnson Project, committed to making sure history remembers and society learns from what happened in 1906.
And what happened was that Johnson was unjustly convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. His attorneys, Noah Parden and Styles Hutchins, included the first African American to serve as lead counsel in bringing a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which intervened and ordered a stay of execution.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, a mob of white people including local law enforcement stormed the jail, took Johnson from it and to the Walnut Street Bridge, where they hanged him.
Johnson’s case marked the first time in history the Supreme Court issued a stay of execution and the first and only time the court held a criminal trial, which ended with Hamilton County Sheriff Joseph F. Shipp being held in contempt of court, reported the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Justices said Shipp failed to keep Johnson safe, according to the book, “Contempt of Court,” by former Chattanooga Times reporter Mark Curriden and the late attorney Leroy Phillips.
Johnson’s last words, now etched onto his tombstone, were: “God bless you all, I am a innocent man.”
Atkins recalled the history for a small group of UTC students and others on a guided visit to the site as part of a September collaboration between the University of the South and the UTC history department and Africana Studies program and the Ed Johnson Project. The entities joined in presenting a series of educational events on the lynching and the history of racial violence in the United States.
In his talk to the group who joined him on the Walnut Street Bridge, Atkins said Johnson’s case continues to have lessons for contemporary society.
“All across the United States right now, there is a movement to recognize some of these social ills,” he said. “We are a far better society when we are together than when we are apart, and America must not be so divisive. We know what the ugly nature of being divided is.
“And we have a duty to move and advance society in the country in the way that it should be going. That really is the charge of American democracy: To build a more perfect union.”
On the 2018 anniversary of the lynching, March 19, officials announced that Georgia-based artist and sculptor Jerome Meadows will create life-sized bronze sculptures of Johnson and the attorneys who filed the appeal on his behalf. The statues will be part of an Ed Johnson memorial garden at the south end of the Walnut Street Bridge, on which construction is expected to begin in early 2019.
Visit the Ed Johnson Digital Exhibit in the UTC library’s Special Collections here: https://blog.utc.edu/library/2018/02/04/explore-the-ed-johnson-digital-exhibit-from-special-collections/
