Goldie Williams: The Defiant Face of Vagrancy, Race, and Respectability in 1890s America
- Harriet Wilder
- 17 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Sometimes history is captured not in words or speeches but in a single look.
In 1898, Goldie Williams sat for her mugshot in Omaha, Nebraska. She folded her arms and looked directly at the camera with quiet determination. The photo has become one of the most memorable images from the period, showing a woman who refused to appear defeated.
Williams had been arrested for vagrancy, a broad and loosely defined offence that allowed police to arrest almost anyone who did not fit social expectations. She gave her name as Goldie Williams, though she was also known as Mag Murphy. At the time of her arrest she was 5 feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, and listed her home as Chicago. The police record noted that her left index finger was broken and that she had a small cut under her right wrist.
She wore an elaborate hat trimmed with satin ribbons and feathers and large hoop earrings that caught the light. Her clothing suggested pride and self-presentation rather than defiance, yet her face told another story: one of exhaustion, perhaps, but also of self-respect.
The Crime of Vagrancy
During the late nineteenth century, vagrancy laws gave the police wide powers to control public space. People could be detained for loitering, begging, or simply being seen in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Legal historian Risa Goluboff explained that “the laws’ breadth and ambiguity gave the police virtually unlimited discretion.” She described them as a kind of “escape hatch” from the Fourth Amendment, which was meant to protect citizens from arrest without cause.
A Supreme Court justice would later write that under these laws, standing on a street corner could be considered legal or illegal “only at the whim of any police officer.”
In effect, vagrancy laws made it an offence to be a certain kind of person. They targeted anyone seen as idle, poor, or morally suspect. In Goldie Williams’ case, the record listed her occupation as a prostitute, but it was the vague accusation of vagrancy that brought her into police custody.
The Rise of the Mugshot
By the 1890s, photographing prisoners had become standard practice across the United States. The word “mugshot” came from the British slang “mug,” meaning face. Before this innovation, wanted posters relied on drawings or written descriptions, which were often unreliable.
The new photographic method was seen as scientific. Some criminologists even believed that a person’s features could reveal criminal tendencies, an idea that has long since been discredited. For police departments, however, these images created useful visual records of people who passed through the system.
Whether guilty or innocent, each photograph captured a moment in a life that might otherwise have been forgotten. Goldie’s image stands out for the clarity of her expression and the dignity she managed to hold on to.
From Chicago to Omaha
Why was a woman from Chicago arrested in Omaha? Historian Christy Hyman provides some context. After 1880, Omaha’s population expanded rapidly as railroads and stockyards created jobs that attracted workers from across the country, including many African Americans.
“The railroads provided the largest number of job opportunities for African Americans,” Hyman wrote, “with many finding employment as porters, cooks, and common labourers.”
It is likely that Williams followed this route west in search of better prospects. By 1910, Omaha had one of the largest Black populations among newer western cities. Yet opportunities were limited, and discrimination remained constant.
Racial Tension and the Lynching of Will Brown
Two decades after Williams’ arrest, Omaha became known for one of the worst racial incidents in early twentieth century America.
In 1919, Will Brown, a 41-year-old African American man, was accused of assaulting a white woman. The identification was uncertain, but rumours quickly spread. A crowd gathered outside the Douglas County Courthouse demanding that Brown be handed over.
Historians Clayton D. Laurie and Ronald H. Cole described what happened next:
“Although initially good humoured, 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.”
The mob grew to several thousand. They stormed the building, set it on fire, and attacked anyone who tried to intervene. Mayor Edward P. Smith attempted to calm the situation but was assaulted and nearly killed. The mob eventually seized Brown, killed him, and set his body alight.
The lynching of Will Brown remains one of the darkest episodes in Omaha’s history, showing how racial violence could erupt even in northern cities that claimed to offer new beginnings.
Chicago’s “Ugly Laws”
Life in Chicago, where Goldie Williams had once lived, was also harsh for anyone who did not conform to accepted norms. In 1881, the city passed an ordinance known as the “Ugly Law.” It made it illegal for people who were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed” to appear in public if they were considered “unsightly.”
Alderman James Peevey, who promoted the law, described beggars as “street obstructions.” The measure fitted neatly into the City Beautiful movement, which sought to make urban environments clean, orderly, and attractive. Those unable to pay fines faced imprisonment in poorhouses.
As journalist Nina Renata Aron observed, these laws were less about public safety than about removing visible poverty from sight. Cities wanted to appear prosperous and moral, and those who contradicted that image were forced out.
The Broader Reach of “Ugly Laws”
Historian Susan M. Schweik traced the first such ordinance to San Francisco in 1867. By the early 1900s, similar laws existed in cities across the United States. They were sometimes enforced against disabled people and sometimes against the poor or elderly.
In Portland, Oregon, a disabled woman known as “Mother Hastings” recalled being told that she was “too terrible a sight for the children to see.” Authorities gave her money to leave town.
These measures were closely linked to the eugenics movement, which claimed that social improvement could come from excluding those deemed “unfit.” Schweik noted that “unsightliness was a status offence, illegal only for people without means.”
Some of these ordinances stayed in place until the 1970s, long after the moral language that created them had faded.
Race and Health in Post–Civil War America
Racial inequality was not limited to the justice system. The historian-physicians W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton have written about the medical neglect faced by African Americans after the Civil War.
They observed that “Black health plummeted due to the Civil War collapse of the slave health subsystem.” Freed people were left without hospitals, doctors, or sanitary conditions. Some experts at the time even predicted that the Black population would die out completely, an idea rooted in prejudice rather than fact.
This period saw the growth of laws and policies that treated race, poverty, and disability as problems to be managed rather than injustices to be corrected.
Goldie Williams and Her Time
Seen in this context, Goldie Williams’ mugshot represents more than a single arrest. It reflects an era in which people could be criminalised for their appearance, race, or social status.
Her folded arms and level gaze suggest not defiance for its own sake but a refusal to be reduced to a stereotype. She dressed neatly, maintained her dignity, and met the camera without fear.
Behind her story lie broader histories of migration, inequality, and survival. The laws that caught her in their net also shaped the lives of many others who simply tried to live within the limits society imposed.
Today, her photograph stands as a record of that world: a reminder of how law, science, and prejudice often worked together to label people as outsiders, and how even a small act of self-possession could endure as a quiet form of resistance.
Sources
Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s https://amzn.to/30PBFAs
Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (History of Disability) https://amzn.to/2MraQxa
W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States 1900–2000
Clayton D. Laurie and Ronald H. Cole, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1877–1945
Christy Hyman, “Mapping the Black Experience in Omaha”
Nina Renata Aron, “The Disturbing History of the Ugly Laws”
