Overall, "A Lynching at Port Jervis" is a searing and thought-provoking read that offers a sobering reminder of the enduring legacy of racial violence in America. Dray's meticulous research, engaging prose, and deep empathy for his subjects make this book essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of race, power, and justice in the Gilded Age and beyond.

Every educator needs to take the time to read A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age. It won’t be easy. Not because of poor writing (the writing brings to mind Erik Larson) or gruesome details (lynching needs little explaining). No, the reader’s unease will come from the gentle prodding and poking at our conscious.

We find ourselves questioning how we would react in a similar situation today. Although lynch law seems like a dirty page in history, the past decade has revealed a festering wound we as a nation have never reckoned with.

Dray produces a page-turning historical account as well as an invitation to readers to examine their hearts. What hidden prejudices and racist attitudes linger within? How do those prejudices and attitudes manifest themselves?

The current problems plaguing our country come from a whitewashed version of history (the one I grew up with) which still pits the North against the South. Many Americans don’t understand how different kinds of racial prejudice have played out in every section of the country. No section remains blameless. Unless we work together to bring this to light, we won’t think we need healing and reconciliation.

The northeast United States likes to think of itself as fair-minded and humane. Unfortunately, history shows otherwise. According to Philip Dray, who focuses on racial discrimination, the two largest slave auctions in the country were in New York City and Albany, the state capital. In A Lynching at Port Jervis, Dray has assembled a compendium of coverage and intrigue surrounding the hanging of Robert Lewis, who, as is often the case in such things, probably committed no crime at all. In this case, it is worthy of a soap opera. And Dray provides all the lurid details from the media and local historical societies – and more.

Port Jervis, New York was a boomtown of rail, canal, and manufacturing. It employed thousands at its peak. The town was named for the Chief Engineer of the Delaware and Hudson canal and rail line, which brought coal from Pennsylvania to ravenous New York City though Port Jervis. Some twenty trains a day passed through, connecting New York to Chicago. Industry popped up to take advantage of the strategic shipping availability. A lively press reported all the latest personal news about everyone in town. Crime was low, letting the town maintain a tiny police force.

On June 2, 1892, the young woman who ran a candy store claimed to have been assaulted by a mysterious Black man while she was reading a book in the park along the Neversink River, a mile or so above where it meets the Delaware River. At this point both rivers turn sharply south, defining the outlines of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Some boys figured out who it must have been and went after him. He was simply walking along the canal tow path on his way to a job, when they caught up with him and offered him a lift on their boat. They captured him (and his fishing knife) and brought him back to town. A huge crowd of nearly a quarter of the population of 9000 prevented the police from bringing him inside. The mob pushed, kicked and beat him uphill on Sussex to Main St, where they turned right and strung him up on a big old maple tree, somewhere between Sussex and Fowler.

No one was arrested. At the inquest in Goshen (NY), all these neighbors, who all knew everyone else’s business, which was how the mob formed, suddenly didn’t know a single person in the crowd of 2000. They recognized no faces or voices, couldn’t remember who said what, who put the rope over Lewis’s neck, who pulled him up, or who demanded his death. As Dray puts it “The mob acquitted itself.”

Somehow, those who tried to stop it all were recognized and exonerated, including the mayor, a doctor and a judge, all of who lived right where the hanging took place. It was the teenage son of the town’s most prominent lawyer who held a match to the victim’s face, confirmed his name and identified him as the perpetrator. That was the go-ahead for the mob to lynch him.

The police were both incompetent and ineffective. Only one officer seemed to at least try to stop it all, but was trampled for his efforts. Naturally, the worst of them got promoted.

As usual in these events, the mob tore at the victim, ripping away bits of his clothing, stealing his shoes and such for sellable souvenirs. In other lynchings, even body parts were torn off for later sale, and a big business emerged in souvenir postcards commemorating the event. Such was life in Jim Crow America.

It instantly put Port Jervis on the map, making headlines globally. Every newspaper had something to say about it, often quite ugly. Dray says: “A Monticello sheet served up the odious ‘consolation’ that despite all that was wrong with Lewis’s murder, ‘there is deep in the breasts of thousands of parents, husbands, brothers, and lovers—warm-hearted, noble Christian men they are too—a feeling of serene satisfaction that the earth is no longer encumbered with this animal in human form.’’

Another paper claimed the woman McMahon sickened, faded and died from the attack. The Allentown (PA) Morning Call reported that “Lewis hid behind a tree until the young woman came up and then jumped out and seized her … Some boys … heard her outcry and crept up on Lewis but he heard the underbrush crackling, and, jumping to his feet, drew a drew a murderous looking revolver from his pocket.” He then threatened to blow her brains out, and on and on with no basis in fact whatsoever.

Across the river in Pennsylvania, they said no one did anything wrong: “The Honesdale Citizen mocked the notion that its neighbor Port Jervis had to apologize as ‘nothing but maudlin snivel.’”

As for the inquest: “In their silence and collective mendacity, Port Jervians had chosen to stand squarely behind lynching. ‘They cannot force grand jurors to regard as a crime the wild justice of mob law,’ the (Middletown NY) Argus concluded, ‘when the jurors feel in their hearts that the mob did the county a service by ridding it of a villain too vile for earth. The law is as powerless to punish the men who strung up Bob Lewis as is the ghost of their victim.’”

Reading all this, an aggressive New York City lawyer named Rufus Perry Jr., didn’t want the town to get off scot-free, and sued it for wrongful death. He claimed $20,000 for Lewis’s surviving family, notably his mother, a laundry woman in Paterson, New Jersey. This led to more vituperative analysis, such as The Newburgh (NY) Press which declared this was: “A case where a negro is worth $20,000 more dead than alive.“

The leading light of Port Jervis was Stephen Crane, an extremely gifted young writer, whose Red Badge of Courage has never been out of print, according to Dray. He listened to civil war stories from veterans around town and put together a horrific book of war, without ever having served, witnessed or even lived in its era. He was not in town the day of the lynching, but wrote a story called Monster that is a thinly disguised description of Port Jervis at the time. It is about a Black man, horribly disfigured by a fire in which he saved his employer’s son, at his own great cost. The town rewarded him by banning, shunning and taunting him for his now frightening countenance.

Crane was an adventurer, to his existential cost. He picked up tuberculosis in New York’s Bowery the year after the lynching, followed by malaria in Florida three years later. He then went to live in a drafty, unheated old mansion in damp England, continuing to smoke all along. He died from it all while still in his 20s.

There were about 200 Blacks among the 9000 in Port Jervis, not nearly enough to pose any kind of threat to the vast majority of whites. Enormously little was written about them or their views on the events of the day or those leading to it. Ida B. Wells came to write it up, and even she focused on the soap opera aspects rather than the Black community.

And what a soap opera it was. Lena McMahon was a 22 year old candy store operator. She was an adopted child from New York City, and chafed at her domineering parents. Phil Foley was a good-looking drifter, who was at first approved by her parents, but later forbidden as a ne’er do well, stealing food, jewelry, not paying his rent and on and on. A judge in Middletown (NY) released him on his promise never to set foot in Port Jervis again. But as soon as he left the courtroom, he headed right back there, eventually working in a bar downtown.

Lena ran away a couple of times, never able to explain what happened on her disappearances and which her clearly bizarre, made-up stories could never justify. Rumor had it she had an abortion one time. The lovers were in the park by the river one day, when Foley had to go. McMahon stayed and read a book. It was at that point that Robert Lewis approached her, verbally assaulted her and grabbed her. She cried out and he just walked away. She drew the attention of some boys and other women, and the race to find Lewis was on.

However.

When Foley returned, he was not the least surprised by her disheveled clothes and minor cuts on her face, which was at very least odd. Rather than take her to her doctor or bring her to the police station, he soon left her there again and went for a drink. Although she claimed not to know the strange Black man, he seemed to know everything about her, speaking to her in very personal terms. It later turned out both Foley and McMahon had been using him to run messages between them, so Foley could avoid her parents. And most bizarrely, Foley had paid him the large sum of five dollars to rough her up. Several other Black men said they turned down the five dollars, fearing, well, a lynching.

As soon as he was stopped, Lewis commented on what trouble Foley was about to get him into. But Foley denied ever knowing Lewis. Then, all kinds of rumors about Lewis, who was a bus driver for a hotel by the railroad tracks, began circulating big time. They, naturally, made him out to be a thief and a rude assaulter of women, fired by the hotel for offending its patrons, etc.

The truth never came out. Foley finally left town after months in jail, unable to post bail. An anonymous benefactor eventually paid the $500 to spring him. McMahon tried to pick up where she left off, but drifted away, changing her name several times, giving birth and abandoning a baby in a hotel room in Jersey City (NJ) and dying 35 years after the lynching. Lewis was buried in Laurel Grove cemetery, but his grave is unfindable, probably succumbing to a severe flood that washed away many stones and coffins.

Why Foley wanted her roughed up was never determined. What his plans for them were was never determined. Port Jervis was soon bypassed in every way. The two railways became a very minor one, the Chicago trains soon stopped, and the canal fell into disuse. The final nail was Interstate 84, which allowed vehicle traffic to avoid the town completely.

Dray finishes the book with a lengthy analysis of lynchings before and since. There have been about 4000 of them. It wasn’t until the 1960s that prosecutions of them started to succeed. But what remains with readers is the shock of just how thin a veneer covers American society when it comes to white womanhood and Black men. Even in thriving Port Jervis.

David Wineberg