The Great Migration brought tens of thousands of African Americans to northern industrial cities—including Omaha, Nebraska, which saw its Black population doubled, in the second decade of the 20th Century, as they were recruited to work in the meatpacking industry. The major meatpacking plants hired Black people as strikebreakers in 1917. The growing Black population, the lack of housing and resentment over job competition, after the end of World War I, by White ethnic groups helped fuel racial tension in Omaha as it did in other cities across the North. Following a national pattern the Omaha Bee, a newspaper notorious for its sensationalist headlines and open racial hostility, exploited this tension by the summer of 1919. They carried daily newspaper accounts of attacks by Black males on White women, without similar coverage concerning assaults on African American women, by White males.
Although the other major Omaha newspapers carried similar stories, the Bee sensationalized the news the most, blaming in particular Mayor Edward P. Smith and his hand-picked police chief, Marshall Eberstein. On September 25th 1919, a 19-year-old White woman, Agnes Loebeck, was allegedly assaulted at gunpoint by a Black male in south Omaha. The assault was witnessed by Millard Hoffman, described by the newspapers and subsequent reports as “a crippled friend” of Loebeck’s. The following day police arrested a 41-year-old Black man, Will Brown, who was known by many to be living with a White woman. The victim identified Brown as the perpetrator of the assault, although the police and Army intelligence later reported that the identification was not positive. In the local Omaha Bee, however, the incident was cited as only one further example of unpunished depredations committed upon White women by African Americans.
Here, too, local politics was a factor. The newspaper was controlled by a recently ousted political machine that was highly critical of the new reform-minded city administration. Over the course of several months it had published a series of articles highlighting alleged instances of Black criminality to embarrass city officials. The first attempt by a mob to lynch Brown was unsuccessful, but two days after his arrest rumors began to circulate that another attempt would be made on his life. On the afternoon of Sunday, September 28th, at about 2 pm, a crowd of mostly young men gathered at a school on the south side, reputed to be friends of Loebeck’s, gathered at the Bancroft School in south Omaha. They began a one-mile march led by Hoffman, adding followers as it progressed, to the downtown Douglas County Court House, where Brown was being held. By 4:00 pm this group had been joined by a much larger crowd.
Although initially good humored, the mob turned rapidly hostile, demanded that the prisoner be surrendered to them, and stoned the building, breaking all the windows on the first and second floors. By 7:00 p.m these actions forced the forty-five Omaha policemen present to retreat to the third and fourth floors. There, they joined forces with Michael Clark, sheriff of Douglas County, who had summoned his deputies to the building with the hope of preventing the capture of Brown. The county jail was on the fifth floor. The mob then stormed the building. The police opened fire, killing two, but only succeeded in delaying the mob temporarily. Within minutes the situation had escalated far beyond the capacity of the police to control. By 7:45 pm the crowd numbered some 5,000 people.
By 8:00 p.m. the mob had begun firing on the courthouse with guns they looted from nearby stores. They began to assault the police officers, pushing one through a pane of glass in a door and attacking two others who had wielded clubs at the mob. Demanding that Brown be handed over to them, several rioters had looted a nearby gasoline station and seized fuel which they promptly used to set fire to the first several floors of the courthouse, hoping to burn out the police and Brown. When firefighters appeared, their hoses were cut into pieces by rioters who had broken into nearby hardware stores and stolen axes as well as firearms. Nearly every window on the south side of the courthouse was broken. The mob continued to strike the courthouse with bullets and rocks, and many civilians were caught in the midst of the mayhem. Spectators were shot while women were thrown to the ground and trampled.
Black people were dragged from streetcars and beaten. Many members of the mob even inflicted minor wounds upon themselves. About 11 o'clock, when the frenzy was at its height, Mayor Edward Smith arrived on the scene and attempted to persuade the rioters to leave. He had been in the burning building for hours. Throughout the confrontation, Mayor Smith refused resolutely to surrender Brown. As he emerged from the doorway, a shot rang out. "He shot me. Mayor Smith shot me," a young man in the uniform of a United States soldier yelled. The crowd surged toward the mayor. He fought them and was struck on the head from behind, a rope was placed around his neck, and his unconscious body was strung up to a lamppost. Smith was suspended in the air when State Agent Ben Danbaum drove a high-powered automobile into the throng right to the base of the signal tower. He and others grasped the mayor and untied the noose.
The detectives brought the mayor to Ford Hospital. There he lingered between life and death for several days, finally recovering. "They shall not get him. Mob rule will not prevail in Omaha," the mayor kept muttering during his delirium. Meanwhile, the plight of the police in the courthouse had become desperate. The fire had spread to the third floor, and officers faced the prospect of burning to death. Appeals for help to the crowd below brought only bullets and curses. The mob frustrated all attempts to raise ladders to the imprisoned police. "Bring Brown with you and you can come down," somebody in the crowd shouted. Police authorities moved Brown and the other prisoners to the roof. The mob poured more gasoline into the building. The flames were spreading rapidly upward, and death seemed certain for the prisoners and their protectors. Attempts by the fire department to extinguish the flames were thwarted.
Boys and young men placed firemen's ladders against the building. They mounted to the second story. One man had a heavy coil of rope on his back, and another carried a shotgun. From inside the courthouse, terrified White inmates threw down a note surrendering to the mob: “THE JUDGE SAYS HE WILL GIVE UP NEGRO. BROWN. HE IS IN THE DUNGEON. THERE ARE TEN WHITE PRISONERS ON THE ROOF. SAVE THEM.” At this point the mob finally captured Brown. The actual sequence of events remains unclear, but one account maintains that the prisoners on the roof, in spite of Sheriff Clark's efforts, surrendered Brown to save their own lives. Clark also reported that Brown moaned "I am innocent, I never did it; my God, I am innocent," as he was surrendered to the mob. By the time the ground floor was reached, he had likely been beaten to death. They tortured him, hoisted into the air on a lynch rope, his swaying body was then riddled with bullets. A 12-year-old future actor named Henry Fonda witnessed the lynching, and could only speak about it near the end of his life.
Not yet satisfied, the crowd pulled his corpse to a nearby intersection where he was burned, and what remained of Will Brown was then towed about downtown Omaha. Still not satisfied, the mob ransacked more stores in search of arms and then went to the nearby police station to lynch other Blacks being held there. After Brown was murdered, however, the police captain on duty at the jail released the other Black prisoners, an action that undoubtably saved their lives. The lawlessness continued for several hours, throughout the night, after Brown had been lynched. Both the police patrol and emergency automobile were burned. Three times, the mob went to the city jail. The third time its leaders announced that they were going to burn it (but never did). Omaha municipal officials had already directed requests for aid both to local posts and to the War Department in Washington, D.C., which had been going on long before Brown was killed.
During the night federal troops arrived. The local Army commander, acting without prior War Department authorization, had decided to intervene under Army regulations allowing the deployment of troops in an emergency situation. On the morning of September 29th, Col. John E. Morris assumed command of the troops in Omaha. With Morris came sizable reinforcements from Camp Dodge, Iowa; Camp Grant, Illinois; and Camp Funston, Kansas. The largest detachment, from Camp Dodge, consisted of a provisional machine-gun company of 11 officers and 152 men with ten heavy machine guns. The Omaha Army commanders quickly published emergency orders to prevent a repetition of the previous day’s events. Colonel Morris had the newspapers in Omaha publish a proclamation warning that any citizen bearing arms faced immediate arrest, and a further proclamation ordering Blacks to remain indoors.
In the afternoon the Army launched an observation balloon in west Omaha, providing a panoramic view of the entire Black neighborhood. A thunderstorm aided the Army in keeping people off the streets; by nightfall of 29 September the city was reported quiet and under control. Major General Leonard Wood, commander of the Central Department, came the next day to Omaha by order of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Arriving late in the evening of 30 September, Wood immediately met with Nebraska Governor S. R. McKelvie, Acting Omaha Mayor Ure, and Colonel Morris. Then he created a strong reserve at the city auditorium – a provisional battalion, company, and machine-gun company – capable of being thrown quickly into any trouble spot. Three other company-size detachments were deployed at 24th and Lake Streets, in the Black neighborhood, the courthouse and city hall, in the city center
The New York Times quoted Wood as warning that “those who attempt to interfere with the military authorities will find themselves fighting the United States Army". Wood next issued a proclamation outlining the reasons for the federal military presence. He also prohibited public gatherings and carrying of firearms by all people except the police and military. Drawing on community support to help with local policing, he approved the deputizing of 200 men of the American Legion. The legionnaires made a favorable impression upon Wood, who later deputized men from this private, patriotic veteran’s organization in other civil disorders that the Army was ordered to quell. He observed in his diary that the legionnaires “have done good work and have shown what can be done with them in case of civic emergency”. On the following day, October 1st 1919, Wood declared modified martial law in Omaha.
Several arrests were made in the following days for complicity in the riot, but a grand jury's deliberations resulted in only a few indictments of little consequence. In Omaha racial tensions may have been orchestrated for political purposes. A reform movement's candidates had been elected in 1918, defeating the political machine headed by Thomas "Old Man" Dennison that had dominated city hall for two decades. Dennison was a saloon keeper turned political boss who resented reformers trying to clean up his influence, such as Mayor Smith, who had been elected on a platform of good government. Direct accusations by church leaders and an assessment by Gen. Leonard Wood assigned responsibility for the lynching to political ambition. They asserted that to discredit the reformers, Dennison and his newspaper ally, the Omaha Bee, exaggerated crime and racial tensions to create the atmosphere that exploded on September 28, 1919.
The Army’s efforts in Omaha involved the largest contingent of federal troops deployed to meet a racial disturbance during 1919-1920, 70 officers and 1,222 enlisted men. By early October the initial emergency had passed, and by midmonth only two companies of regulars remained in the city. The last troops departed Omaha on November 15th. Wood’s way of seizing and exercising authority marked another departure from prewar procedures for using the military in domestic disorders, and his analysis of the riot’s origins were obviously flawed. Yet, the overall performance of the Army in Omaha represented a fair and effective effort. On October 1, 1919, Brown was laid to rest in Omaha's Potters Field. The interment log listed only one word next to his name: "Lynched"