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The Zigzag Drama of a Memorial Day Monument

Colored Soldiers Memorial - Lansdowne Drive East of Belmont Avenue - Fairmount Park, January 15, 1935 (PhillyHistory.org)
Colored Soldiers Memorial – [original location] Lansdowne Drive East of Belmont Avenue – Fairmount Park, January 15, 1935 (PhillyHistory.org)
“All monuments have a message,” writes Dell Upton in Commemoration in America, “they direct us not simply to remember, but to remember in a certain light.

That’s the first of Upton’s “three rules of thumb for monument-building,” principles especially useful in explaining the zigzag drama of Philadelphia’s All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors, dedicated eighty-two years ago today at one of the most off-the-beaten-track places in all of Fairmount Park.

Upton tells us that monuments “interpret the subjects they honor for an intended audience: people who are thought to need the message.” By installing this piece on Landsdowne Drive behind Memorial Hall and not permitting it at the intended public place on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, its message was blunted and stunted; its audience disrespected.

Upton’s second rule of thumb is further revealing: “Monuments always say more about the people, times and places of their creation then they do about the people, times and places they honor.”

On May 30, 1934, if this monument had been dedicated where it was intended, Philadelphia’s Art Jury (the predecessor of the Art Commission) would have made a definitive declaration. By denying that site, and hiding the memorial in one of the farther recesses of the Park, we see a declaration of another kind.

Caption
All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors, 1934. J. Otto Schweitzer, sculptor. (Wikimedia)

“If a Negro is fit to fight and die for his country on the battlefield then no site is too great for a war memorial,” claimed a contemporary news story. But racial equality in the American Armed Forces was still 14 years off in 1934. Even at the start of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt still worried that the “intermingling of White and Colored personnel” would be a “new social experiment” that might “confuse the issue of prompt preparedness.” By 1948, when President Harry S. Truman finally issued Executive Order 9981 integrating the Armed Forces, the memorial’s move from banishment was still 46 years off.

Can Upton’s third rule of thumb help us understand why? “Monuments are almost always promoted by interested parties who claim to offer ‘the nation’s gratitude.’ By setting a monument in a public space, the builders claim to speak to everyone. This is a fundamental, necessary fiction of monuments,” he writes, “but it is a fiction.”

Ironically, memorials commemorate facts by employing fiction. Between, and rising above, six very representative African-American servicemen on the front of this memorial is an allegorical figure of “Justice” holding a pair of wreaths signifying “Honor” and “Reward.” On the back are four additional, equally unreal human figures. On the left is War” with a shield and “Liberty” with torch and tiara. On the right are “Peace” and “Plenty.” All are abstract allegories, idealistic personifications of classical attributes. All are unflinchingly represented by Anglo-Saxon Caucasian females, idealistic spokesfigures for the same authorities who kept this memorial out of the public view for six long decades.

In 1994, the All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors was refurbished, rededicated and finally reinstalled—this time on Logan Circle—a place of prominence and respect.

[Sources include: Bill Duhart, “Monument to Black soldiers may get its due, 67 years late,” The Philadelphia Tribune, December 24, 1993; Peter Landry, “Belated But Monumental Move Sixty Years Later, A Memorial To Black Soldiers Will Go On The Parkway,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 29, 1994.]

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The Center City Conflagration of 1897

Fire - 13th and Market Street, January 1897 (PhillyHistory.org)
Fire – 13th and Market Street, January 1897 (PhillyHistory.org)

Philadelphians couldn’t imagine their city in ruins. But the fire of January 26, 1897 provided a pretty good idea of how that looked and felt.

That Tuesday morning, a fire started in the basement bakery of Hanscom Brothers, 1309-1317 Market Street, at 6:45 am. A porter sweeping out an upper story room saw smoke and “dashed into the street, calling ‘Fire!’” and a watchman at the corner “rung in an alarm.”

In the panic, “someone bethought himself of the two bakers,” still inside and unconscious, and a pair of Hanscom employees “descended through the smoke and dragged the half-suffocated men out.”

What began as a “little tongue of flame” was soon “caught…by the winds that whirl about City Hall, and fanned…into a pillar of fire” destroying not only the 6-story building, the home of Hanscom, Dennett’s Café and Hirsh’s Umbrella Factory, but also 59 other buildings between 13th and Juniper Streets, Market and Filbert Streets.

“It was a fearful morning to fight a fire,” reported the Inquirer. “The thermometer was near zero, and the first line of hose, as it was unreeled, burst and covered everything surrounding with water that turned to ice the moment it struck. The flames gained on the firemen, and alarm after alarm was rung in, until every engine in the city was hurrying to the scene. Thousands of workers on their way to their places of business were attracted by the fire, and the streets in the vicinity speedily became impassable from the curious and surging throng.”

A conflagration of “spectacular grandeur” that “defied the resources of the city.”

“Firemen worked under the most discouraging conditions, the hosemen and laddermen taking their lives into their hands as they crawled cautiously up the ice coated rungs of their ladders, dragging after them their lines of hose, which were encased in a solid covering of ice. The streets around the fire were coated with ice… The fronts of the surrounding buildings upon which the water had been played presented a beautiful spectacle as they flashed back from their icy walls the rays of the morning sun.”

At time, the smoke “would descend to the street in almost [a] solid cloud, and the firemen were driven back, gasping for breath. … Building after building along Market Street crumbled beneath the touch of the fiery tongues of flame enwrapping them, and when the rear wall of the Hirsch Building fell into Silver Street, the fire leapt across and entered the seven-story double iron building fronting on Filbert Street.” Soon the entire block was “honeycombed by fire.”

Fire - 13th and Market Street, January 1897 (PhillyHistory.org)
Fire – 13th and Market Street, January 1897 (PhillyHistory.org)

“The firemen feared that the great Wanamaker establishment would go… Mr. Wanamaker himself had arrived early, and, dismissing the greater number of his 3,500 employees, marshaled under his own direction the fire force of the store.” At 8am, when “the Market Street front of the Hirsh building fell into the street…a torrent of fire rolled out and flowed across… and broke against Wanamaker’s. The building shriveled and blistered beneath the fierce deluge, and a tongue of flame shot up from the high clock tower at the corner of Thirteenth and Market Streets.

Much to the dismay of the firefighters—and Wanamaker himself—“the jets from the hose could not reach the flames in the tower and the entire building seemed threatened with destruction.” Just as the chimes in the burning clock were striking 8:15, the “entire tower toppled over and fell with the great crash.” This “proved the salvation of the building, for the firemen were then able to fight the heart of the fire, and soon had it under control…”

“By 5 o’clock the carpenters had completed the temporary repairs, and then they raised large American flag on ruins of the clock tower” which was quickly rebuilt.

To the west, City Hall survived, although the heat was so intense employees couldn’t “bear to stand within five feet of the windows, which, to a one, cracked or broke.

In the days to follow, the ruins were compelling to visit and dangerous to navigate. And with each “severe gust of wind” the “great bulging wall of the Hirsh building… was seen to be swaying dangerously. To all appearances it was on the point of crashing outward….  A shower of loose bricks was whirled off of the crumbling wall….”

The fire was the “worst in a generation.” But so long as there were no casualties due directly to the fire, the loss of buildings seemed welcomed by the Press. “Their destruction will probably be to the ultimate good, if newer and more modern buildings are erected on their sites.”

And, in a historical blink of an eye, new buildings that addressed the needs of the burgeoning city in the new century appeared in their places.

[Sources: “Big Philadelphia Fire,” The New York Times, January 27, 1897; and in The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Many Buildings A Prey to the Flames,” January 27, 1897; “Thousands at the Scene of the Fire,” January 28, 1897; “Tottering Walls Retard the Work,” January 29, 1897; and “New Buildings Soon To Be Erected,” March 12, 1897.]

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Market Street: Fodder for Literary Legends

Market Street, East from 13th Street, ca. 1910 (PhillyHistory.org)
Market Street, East from 13th Street, ca. 1910 (PhillyHistory.org)

Do Philadelphia streets have distinct personalities? We know they do. Are they potent enough to stand out in the literary imagination? In 1920, Christopher Morley thought so.

Morley considered how Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman and Henry James might have sung the praises of (or, in the case of Poe, bemoaned fears about) a Philadelphia thoroughfare.

But which street had the requisite robustness to nourish literary posterity? Which embodied stature, range, resilience and vitality? Morley’s choice, in Travels in Philadelphiawas Market Street.

“I see the long defile of Market street,” Morley imagined Whitman writing. “And the young libertad offering to shine my shoes (I do not have my shoes shined, for am I not as worthy without them shined? I put it to you, Camerado.)” …

“In a window I see a white-coated savan cooking griddle cakes, And thinking to myself, I am no better than he is, / And he is no better than I am, / And no one is any better than anyone else / (O the dignity of labor, / Particularly the labor that is done by other people; / Let other people do the work, is my manifesto, / Leave me to muse about it) / Work is a wonderful think, and a steady job is a wonderful thing, / And the pay envelope is a wonderful institution, / And I love to meditate on all the work that there is to be done, / And how other people are doing it. / Reader, whether in Kanada or Konshocken, / I strike up for you. / This is my song for you, and a good song, I’ll say so.”

(You didn’t really expect Morley to mount an earnest channeling of Whitman, did you?)

He imagined the return of Poe: “During the whole of a dull and oppressive afternoon, when the very buildings that loomed about me seemed to lean forward threateningly as if to crush me with their stony mass, I had been traveling in fitful jerks in a Market street trolley; and at length found myself, as the sullen shade of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy tower of the City Hall. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.”

And for Henry James (known for his long sentences) Morley reveled in a few of his own making: “Thorncliff was thinking, as he crossed the, to him, intolerably interwoven confusion of Market street, that he had never—unless it was once in a dream which he strangely associated in memory with an overplus of antipasto—never consciously, that is, threaded his way so baffling a predicament of traffic, and it was not until halted, somewhat summarily, though yet kindly, by a blue arm which he after some scrutiny assessed as belonging to a traffic patrolmen, that he bethought himself sufficiently to inquire, in a manner a little breathless still, though understood at once by the kindly envoy of order as the natural mood of one inextricably tangled in mind and not yet wholly untangled in body, but still intact when the propulsive energy of the motortruck had been, by a rapid shift of years and actuating machinery, transformed to a rearward movement, where he might be and how.”

“’This is Market street,’ said the officer. ‘Market street! Ah, thank you.'”

“Market street! Could it be, indeed? His last conscious impression had been of some shop—a milliner’s, perhaps?—on, probably, Walnut street where he had been gazing with mild reproach at the price tickets upon the hats displayed… So this was Market street. …

“Market street? How interesting.”

Yes, Morley did think of Market Street as especially interesting.

In another piece, this time entirely of his own creation and credit, Morley considered a midnight scene: “Market street is still lively. A ‘dance orchard’ emits its patrons down a long stair to the street. Down they come, gaily laughing. The male partners are all either gobs, who love dancing even more than ice cream soda; or youths with tilted straw hats of course weave, with legs that bend backward most oddly below the knee, very tightly and briefly trousered. … The girls all wear very extensive hats, and are notably pretty. ‘Which way do we go?’ is the first question on reaching the street. It is usually the way to the nearest soda fountain.”

When it comes to Market Street one hundred years later, what do we experience? Which way do we go?

 

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The Station-House Murder of Riley Bullock

Police, Fire and Patrol Stations, 20th and Federal Streets. (PhillyHistory.org)
Police, Fire and Patrol Stations, 20th and Federal Streets. (PhillyHistory.org)

A day after riots shook the city and a few hours after the Polyclinic incident, patrolmen Robert Ramsey and John Schneider returned to their station house at 20th and Federal before hitting the streets. Within minutes they encountered Riley Bullock, a 38-year old African-American who lived at 2032 Annin Street.

Bullock would soon be dead.

According to one account, Bullock “was being attacked by a crowd of white men when the two policemen came to his rescue and arrested him.” According to another, Ramsey and Schneider “arrested Bullock while he was going on an errand and committing no crime…” They struggled with Bullock, “who wielded a razor with such telling effect that Ramsey’s coat was cut.”

No one challenged that Ramsey and Schneider severely beat Bullock, who the Inquirer described as “a negro rioter.” According to one witness: they “beat him with all their might and force for about two squares until he reached the station.” Another witness, a Mrs. Williams, “testified that she saw Ramsay and Schneider beating Bullock at the corner of Titan and Point Breeze Avenue; that they held both of Bullock’s arms up as he walked … Schneider was beating him with a black jack and Ramsey was beating him with the butt of a revolver…”

Then, “just as soon as they entered the station house door, she heard a shot.”

At first, police said “the bullet which ended Bullocks life was really intended for one of the white policemen…” They claimed Bullock, who was escorted into the station’s rear door, was “shot by ‘a colored man’ [who] was detected running away from the scene of the murder with a revolver in his hand.”

The story soon changed: “In their haste to open the station house door and escape the threatening mob that followed them,” Officer Ramsey slipped on a step and his “revolver was accidentally discharged and Bullock was struck, receiving injuries that resulted in his death.”

Point Breeze Avenue entrance of the 20th and Federal Street Police Station. October 19, 1949. (PhillyHistory,org)
Point Breeze Avenue entrance of the 20th and Federal Street Police Station. October 19, 1949. (PhillyHistory,org)

Lieutenant Harry Meyers issued the statement: “As they came up the steps of the police station on the Point Breeze Avenue side, Ramsey, who still had his gun in his hand to keep the pressing crowd at bay, suddenly slipped. The revolver was accidentally discharged and the bullet struck Bullock in the back, piercing his lungs.” Then Meyers added: “Ramsey did not shoot the negro because of any malice resulting from the killing of Policeman McVey by Negroes.” And then Meyers “ordered all newspaper men from the station house and forbade them to return.”

In the following days, “delegations of Negro clergymen and business men” attempted to meet with the mayor and police officials to send the message that “Afro-Americans of this city are tired of legalized murder.” They “put responsibility for the rioting squarely up to the police of the 20th and Federal Streets station, whom they charged with showing sympathy for the white residents of the turbulent area.” They and others organized “The Colored Protective Association” which retained attorney G. Edward Dickerson “to prosecute Policeman Ramsey,” held at Moyamensing Prison.

Dickerson anticipated the testimony of two African-American policemen in the station house when Ramsey shot Bullock. One officer had even “helped put out the fire which the pistol shot started in Bullock’s clothes” and both had “heard Policeman Ramsey acknowledge that he shot” Bullock. But in court they weren’t reliable witnesses. One of the officers even “swore he never saw Ramsey before.”

2032 Annin Street. The home of Riley Bullock in 1918. (Google Streetview)
2032 Annin Street, home of Riley Bullock, killed by police July 29, 1918. (Google Streetview)

Testimony from the Coroner’s Physician proved the most damaging: “The ball entered into the small part of Bullock’s back and took a downward course through the pelvis [indicating] …that the bullet could not have been accidentally fired when Ramsey slipped going up the steps.” Judge Henry N. Wessel refused bail for Ramsey, who remained in his cell at Moymensing. Wessel criticized the police for their apparent looseness in the investigation and expanded it to include “every policeman who was in the station house at the time of the shooting.”

A month later, Lieutenant Meyers would be transferred to the Fishtown station at Girard and Montgomery Avenues, and a week after that “the entire force of policemen at the 17th District Station House” was transferred. “May the good Lord have mercy on the neighborhood to which this king of thugs has been assigned,” editorialized The Tribune about Meyers’ move.

Now we have a mixed force of colored and white officers,” they noted. “For the first time in six weeks colored children have been able to play in front of their homes…colored people can walk home and feel safe.”

Ramsey and Schneider lost their jobs and went to trial, but would never serve time for the murder of Riley Bullock. Two years later, they were tried and found “not guilty.” The jury had deliberated for a mere 30 minutes.

[Sources: “Race Riots Grow In Fury As Police Fail To Curb Mobs, Negro Is Slain at Door of Station House,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 30, 1918; “Race Riot Area Dry; Detain Policeman In Shooting Probe,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 31, 1918; “Policeman is Held after Rioter’s Death,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 1918; “Meyers Kicked Out 17th District,” by G. Grant Williams, The Philadelphia Tribune, August 31, 1918; “Entire 17th District Police Transferred,” The Philadelphia Tribune, September 7, 1918; “Judge Rebukes Police For Killing Of Negro,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 21, 1918; “Coroner Holds Patrolman for Grand Jury,” by G. Grant Williams, The Philadelphia Tribune, September 21, 1918; “Schneider Is In The Jail House Now; Prisoner Held Bullock While Ramsey Shot Him,” The Philadelphia Tribune, September 2, 1918; “The Colored Protective Association,” The Philadelphia Tribune, September 18, 1918; “Ex-Policemen Freed,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 16, 1920.]

More posts on the South Philadelphia Riot of 1918 herehere, here and here

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Aftermath of the Race Riots of 1918: The Station House at 20th and Federal

Engine House #24 - 17th District, Police Station, 20th and Point Breeze Avenue, November 9, 1896. (PhillyHistory.org)
17th District, Police Station and Engine House #24, 20th and Point Breeze Avenue and Federal Streets, November 9, 1896. (PhillyHistory.org)

After a weekend of rioting the likes of which Philadelphia had never seen, families of the deceased planned funerals for two of the men killed in the mayhem. Grieving for their fallen 24-year-old patrolman, the McVey’s would have Requiem Mass sung at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, 24th and Fitzwater streets. “Thousands of persons, hours before the services started, began assembling along the route of the funeral procession,” reported the Inquirer. Lieutenant Harry Meyers of the 17th Police District at 20th and Federal Streets would send a 30-man “guard of honor” and largest floral wreath. Six officers from the station stepped up as pallbearers. They’d attempt to console McVey’s bereft mother, who responded: “I have but one wish…to live long enough to see my poor boy’s death avenged. He didn’t deserve to meet with such an end, to be killed by the bullet of a negro.”

Even though he was on vacation, one of those pallbearers-to-be, patrolman John Schneider, reported for duty that Monday, the day after the death of Thomas McVey and two days before his funeral. The streets of South Philadelphia still seethed with a toxic mix of mob violence and martial rule, which would prove nearly fatal for African American men—even those going about their business.

That morning, Preston H. Lewis visited his brother, hoping “to find a place to move because the family with whom he lived, at 2739 Titan Street, was moving on account of the riot,” reported the Inquirer. “He was met on the streets by Officers Ramsay and Schneider” who stopped and frisked Lewis and “finding a small pocket knife, beat him about the head inflicting about 20 wounds.” In fact, Ramsay and Schneider beat Lewis “until he was semiconscious” before sending him to the Polyclinic Hospital at 18th and Lombard Streets. There, with his face and head “a mass of bruises” Lewis “was laid on a cot to await his turn to have his wounds dressed.”

But Schneider wasn’t done. He “walked into the hospital…went to the Accident Ward, and without a word of warning, knocked down Miss Applegate, one of the nurses in attendance” and began to beat Lewis with his fists and then with his black jack. “Lewis was knocked unconscious…”

William Watson, an African-American officer from another district “who was on guard in the hospital drew his gun and threatened to shoot Schneider before he would stop beating Lewis” but “several white officers present wrenched the gun from his hand…” The head nurse telephoned the police of the 19th Police District—not Schneider’s own stationhouse—for assistance. Two officers arrived, resident physician William M. Cooperage would later testify: “I tried to stop [Schneider] but could not, and it took the efforts of three other policemen to drag him from the helpless victim.”

Schneider would later be charged and tried, but that day, right after the incident at the Polyclinic Hospital, Schneider went back to work, rejoining his partner, Robert Ramsey, at the 17th District Station house. From 20th and Federal, Schneider and Ramsey would return to the streets, looking for trouble.

[Sources: “Pays Fine Tribute to Victim of Riot – Rev. Francis A. Brady Praises Policeman McVay for Dying at Duty,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2, 1918; “White Policeman Clubs a Race Riot Victim on Hospital Cot,” The Philadelphia Tribune, August 10, 1918; “Policeman Tried for Brutal Action,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 30, 1918; G. Grant Williams, “Cop Schneider on Trial,” The Philadelphia Tribune, September 7, 1918; “Echo of Race Riot – Policeman Schneider to Be Tried for Deadly Assault,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 1918.]

More posts on the South Philadelphia Riot of 1918 here, here and here. Next time: Schneider and Ramsey encounter Riley Bullock.

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The Riot Continues: Targeting African-Americans on Titan and Stillman Streets

1522 S. Stillman Street. Home of Mrs. Eleanor Grant in 1918. (Google Streetview)
1522 S. Stillman Street. Home of Mrs. Eleanor Grant in 1918. (Google Streetview)

“The fighting spread yesterday,” reported the Inquirer, to include a giant swath of South Philadelphia: Twentieth to Thirtieth streets, Lombard to Dickinson. Pawnbrokers were forbidden to sell “weapons of any kind until further notice” and saloons were ordered closed. Streets were roped off and police stationed at corners, allowing access to residents only.

Still, on Monday July 30, 1918, the violence grew more intense. “With the coming of night the rioting continued unabated, while the police made feeble and frantic efforts to scatter the throngs which gathered in the streets armed with every sort of weapon. Some even carried hatchets but the most frequently used instrument was a blackjack. Hundreds carried bricks with jagged edges.”

Frustrated, Mayor Thomas Smith “confessed that he did not know how order was going to be restored.”

“One of the most serious acts of the infuriated white mob took place at the home of Henry Huff at 2743 Titan Street” (near 28th and Wharton) the man accused of killing police officer Thomas McVey. While Huff sat in a cell in Moyamensing Prison, about fifty men, “many of them neighbors and friends of the dead bluecoat,” reported the Inquirer, “marched into Titan Street, armed with clubs, knives, bricks and revolvers.”

“With wild cries they descended upon the Huff home. The door had been locked and the windows barred. Inside were two women and three children, said to be the children of Huff. … They smashed the [door] panels with axes, tore open the windows and climbed in, one after the other. … Meanwhile the women and children inside the house at fled through the rear gate to the home of neighbors. Once inside, the vengeance seeking crowd started to wreck the place. A piano was shoved through the windows and hurled by willing hands into the centre of the street. Beds followed from the upper floors; chairs were tossed through windows, carrying away sash and glass. Everything removable in the house was sent flying into the street where it was made into a huge pile. Matches were applied to oil soaked mattresses and in an instant the furniture was in flames. Inside the house other members of the raiding party had started a fire.”

When there was nothing left to destroy at the Huff residence, the mob turned to other houses occupied by African-American families. “Mobs of white men” rampaged, wrecking interiors house after house. Police showed up, according to new reports. “only after the damage had been done.”

“Hundreds of colored residents are leaving the danger zone for places of safety,” police told reporters. “Several men were found fleeing clad in women’s garments.”

Four blocks to the southeast of the attack on the Huff home, someone thought a shot might have been fired from a window of 1522 South Stillman Street, the two-story home of Eleanor Grant, an African American woman. “Within a few minutes a struggling, fighting throng had forced its way into the Grant home and swept everything before it.”

2th Street - South of Dickinson Street. National Alloy Company, May 10, 1916. (PhillyHistory.org)
25th Street – South of Dickinson Street. National Alloy Company, May 10, 1916. (PhillyHistory.org)

“The crowd became a mob of five hundred within a short time.” A dozen policemen “were powerless before the swaying mass of bodies locked in deadly struggle. Every window in the house at 1522 Stillman street was broken. The furniture was cast into the street and broken with axes. From the Grant home the crowd entered houses of five other colored residents, repeating their actions. The street was soon filled with broken furniture and glassware. Half an hour later a mounted squad of twelve policemen arrived and, by sending their horses directly into the crowd managed to break it up.”

Soon after, William Duberry, 33, an African-American resident who lived nearby at 1511 South Stillman Street, returned home. “A crowd of white men who still lingered in defiance of the police” spotted Duberry, chased him through his house, then through the alley behind Stillman Street and across a nearby lot to Dickinson Street. With the mob “at his heels…Duberry ran into the office of the National Alloy Company and sought refuge behind the desk of the president of the company, Henry P. Miller. The crowd demanded admittance, and as Mr. Miller went to the door it gave way before the pushing of the crowd. Duberry managed to evade capture…by scaling the fence.”

But by the time police arrived, the mob had caught and was “pummeling” the now unconscious Duberry. “With their revolvers the policeman held the crowd at bay while they put Duberry into an automobile and took him to St. Agnes hospital” where he was admitted with internal injuries and a fractured skull.

[Source: “Race Riots Grow In Fury As Police Fail To Curb Mobs,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 30, 1918.]

More posts on the South Philadelphia Riot of 1918 herehere and here