“Mob Rule in Omaha: The Lynching of Will Brown and the 1919 Courthouse Riot”
- U I Team
- Jul 4
- 10 min read
“If you must hang somebody, then let it be me.” — Omaha’s Mayor, just before a lynch mob strung him up.
That was Sunday, 28 September 1919, in the heart of Omaha, Nebraska. Flames licked the walls of the Douglas County Courthouse. A crowd numbering in the thousands surged outside, fuelled by rumour, rage, and years of racial tension. By the time it was over, the courthouse would be charred, dozens injured, the mayor nearly lynched, and a Black man named Will Brown murdered, mutilated, and dragged through the city’s streets before being burned.
What played out over those 24 hours wasn’t a spontaneous riot. It was a siege, a public spectacle, and one of the most brutal episodes in what came to be known as the Red Summer, a wave of racist mob violence that swept through the United States in 1919.
A City on Edge
By the time of the riot, Omaha was already a city on edge. Racial tensions had been brewing for years. Between 1910 and 1920, the city’s African American population had more than doubled, from around 5,000 to over 10,000. Black workers, many of whom had moved north during the Great Migration, were being recruited into Omaha’s meatpacking industry, especially during labour strikes.
That didn’t sit well with the city’s predominantly Irish and eastern European white working class. “A clash was imminent owing to ill-feeling between white and black workers in the stockyards,” federal investigators warned just three weeks before the riot.
Omaha’s Irish population in particular had long dominated the city’s political and police institutions. Years earlier, after an Irish policeman was killed, mobs had descended on Omaha’s Greektown and violently expelled the Greek community. That pattern of ethnic scapegoating now shifted focus to Black residents.
Add to this volatile mix a political climate rife with corruption. The city was effectively ruled by a criminal-political machine led by Tom Dennison, a saloon keeper turned political boss who resented reformers trying to clean up his influence. One such reformer was Mayor Edward Parsons Smith, who had been elected on a platform of good government and prohibition enforcement. His administration was under constant attack from the pro-Dennison Omaha Bee, a newspaper notorious for its sensationalist headlines and open racial hostility.
A Dubious Accusation and a Brewing Storm
The spark came on 25 September 1919. A 19-year-old white woman named Agnes Loebeck reported that she had been raped by a Black man. The next day, police arrested 41-year-old Will Brown, a Black packinghouse worker, and brought him to the courthouse. Loebeck identified Brown, although Brown later said she hadn’t been sure. “She didn’t make a positive identification,” he reportedly told police. She later contradicted this.
Even before Brown had been formally charged, rumours of lynching began circulating. A crowd formed outside the courthouse on the day of his arrest. That night, a mob reportedly tried to seize him. Omaha’s police, meanwhile, were short on manpower and hesitant to act decisively.
And The Omaha Bee wasted no time. It splashed Loebeck’s accusation across its front pages and framed it within a larger narrative of supposed “black criminality.” The paper, aligned with Dennison’s political machine, had an interest in undermining Mayor Smith’s administration. A frightened public made for good headlines — and good politics.
The Mob Gathers
Sunday, 28 September. A crowd of white youths gathered near Bancroft School in South Omaha around 2 p.m. and began marching north towards the courthouse, where Brown was being held.
Police Detective Chief John T. Dunn tried to turn them back, but the mob pressed on. By the time they reached the courthouse, 30 officers were stationed at its entrances. At first, the officers didn’t seem worried. Members of the crowd were laughing, bantering, and not showing signs of immediate violence. So relaxed was the mood that police reported back to headquarters that the crowd was not a serious threat. Fifty reserve officers were sent home.
That too was a mistake.
By 5 p.m., the crowd had swelled to somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 people. Tension turned violent. Projectiles flew. Police were pelted with bricks, sticks, and stones. One officer was shoved through a glass door. Another was cornered and beaten.
Fire hoses were deployed, but the mob wasn’t deterred. Nearly every window on the south side of the courthouse was smashed. The doors were rammed. Police, attempting to scare the attackers, fired shots down an elevator shaft — an act that only further agitated the crowd.
Police Chief Eberstein arrived and tried to calm the crowd. He climbed onto a window ledge and spoke beside a man known to be a ringleader. “Let justice take its course,” he pleaded. The crowd wasn’t listening. “The chief’s voice did not carry more than a few feet,” one witness said. “He ceased his attempt to talk and entered the besieged building.”
By 6 p.m., the courthouse was surrounded. Policemen were stripped of their badges, guns, and caps. Black civilians unlucky enough to be in the area were attacked. So were white civilians who tried to help them. Order had broken down completely.
The Flames Rise
As darkness fell, the mob looted nearby pawnshops and hardware stores, stealing over 1,000 firearms. Shots were fired into the courthouse. Louis Young, a 16-year-old white youth described as one of the “most intrepid” leaders, was shot and killed while trying to storm the building.
The mob poured gasoline on the lower floors and set the courthouse on fire. Gas had been siphoned from a nearby petrol station. Firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames but were blocked. Hoses were slashed. Shots rang out in all directions. Spectators were hit. Black people were dragged from trams and beaten. Some rioters even injured themselves to appear like they’d been in the thick of the fight.
The Mayor Steps In – and Nearly Dies
As fire consumed the lower floors of the Douglas County Courthouse and gunfire cracked through the smoky night, Mayor Edward Parsons Smith had been inside, doing everything he could to restore order. But by around 11 p.m., with the building under siege, bodies injured, and the crowd swelling outside to more than ten thousand, Smith stepped out into Seventeenth Street. He was covered in soot, his clothes scorched, his face gaunt with exhaustion. For hours he had tried, and failed, to calm the city he had sworn to serve.
Then, from somewhere in the mob, a shout rang out:
“He shot me. Mayor Smith shot me!”
It was enough.
The accusation, unfounded, but deadly, triggered a violent surge in the crowd. Smith was instantly swallowed up by the chaos. Men lunged at him. He was punched, kicked, struck on the head with a baseball bat. In the din, someone produced a rope and slipped it around his neck.
As the mob began to drag him, Smith managed to cry out over the din:
“If you must hang somebody, then let it be me.”
It was a desperate plea, one that likely saved his life. For a moment, the violence paused. A woman in the crowd tore the noose from around his neck. But it was quickly replaced by other hands.
The crowd carried him down the block to Sixteenth and Harney, where a traffic signal tower loomed over the intersection. They hoisted him up using the metal cross-arm. Omaha’s sitting mayor, dangling by the neck, feet above the pavement, his hands still clenched, became the latest victim of the mob’s fury.
Then, in one of the most dramatic rescues in the city’s history, a high-powered automobile came barrelling through the crowd. At the wheel was State Agent Ben Danbaum, accompanied by three plainclothes detectives: Al Anderson, Charles Van Deusen, and Lloyd Toland.
They ploughed through the sea of bodies and screeched to a halt at the foot of the tower. With pistols drawn, the detectives leapt from the vehicle, slashed the rope, and brought Smith down. Amid flying debris and shouted threats, they bundled the unconscious mayor into the car and sped away, dodging bricks and bullets.
They delivered him to Ford Hospital, where doctors worked through the night to save him. Smith had suffered severe injuries, a concussion, multiple contusions, and a crushed windpipe. He lingered near death for several days.
In his delirium, according to those by his bedside, he kept repeating a single line:
“They shall not get him. Mob rule will not prevail in Omaha.”
Brown is Handed Over
Inside the courthouse, the situation was dire. Flames engulfed the lower floors. Gas from broken formaldehyde containers choked the air. Deputies and police brought 121 prisoners, including Will Brown, to the roof. Some reports claimed other prisoners, desperate to save themselves, tried to throw Brown off the roof.
Three notes were thrown from a window: “Come to the fourth floor… we will hand the negro over to you.”
The mob raised ladders and scaled the building.
Shortly after, a gunshot rang out. Then a cheer. Will Brown had been seized. He was beaten into unconsciousness. His clothes were torn off by the time he reached the building’s doors. Then he was dragged to a nearby lamp pole on the south side of the courthouse at 18th and Harney around 11:00 p.m. The mob roared when they saw Brown, and a rope was placed around his neck. Brown was hoisted in the air, his body spinning. He was riddled with bullets. His body was then brought down, tied behind a car, and towed to the intersection of 17th and Dodge. There the body was burned with fuel taken from nearby red danger lamps and fire truck lanterns. Later, pieces of the rope used to lynch Brown were sold for 10 cents each. Finally, Brown’s charred body was dragged through the city’s downtown streets.
Nebraska-born actor Henry Fonda was 14 years old when the lynching happened. His father owned a printing plant across the street from the courthouse. He watched the riot from the second floor window of his father’s shop.
"It was the most horrendous sight I’d ever seen . . . We locked the plant, went downstairs, and drove home in silence. My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope."
During Fonda’s long career, at least two of his best movies,Young Mister Lincoln and The Ox Bow Incident, featured lynchings as major plot points.
The Soldiers Take Control
It wasn’t until 3 a.m., hours after Will Brown had been lynched and the city had descended into anarchy, that federal troops finally arrived. Soldiers from Fort Omaha and Fort Crook, just outside the city, were deployed under the command of Colonel John E. Morris of the 20th Infantry. In total, some 1,600 troops marched into Omaha’s smouldering downtown. They weren’t just armed with rifles — they came with mounted Browning M1917 machine guns and 37mm support cannons. This was not a peacekeeping mission in the soft sense. It was a military operation designed to regain control of an American city that had, for the past twelve hours, ceased to function under the rule of law.
Strategically positioned gun emplacements were established at key intersections in the business district, where much of the previous night’s destruction had taken place. Other soldiers were stationed in North Omaha, the heart of the city’s Black community, to prevent retaliatory attacks or further violence from either side. South Omaha, home to the ethnic working-class neighbourhoods where the mob had first gathered, was also secured to halt any chance of new crowds forming.
Although martial law was never formally declared by state or federal authorities, the presence and actions of the troops left little doubt: Omaha was under military control. The police, widely criticised for their failure to contain the riot and protect prisoners, were sidelined. At the request of acting Mayor W.G. Ure, General Leonard Wood — the commander of the U.S. Army’s Central Department — assumed operational control over the Omaha Police Department.
Within hours, the atmosphere shifted. The mobs dispersed. Street patrols were reinstated, this time wearing army uniforms. For the first time in more than a day, there was calm. The military stayed on for weeks. At its peak, it was the largest deployment of federal troops in response to a racial conflict that year. The presence was necessary not only to maintain public order but to reassure Omaha’s citizens — particularly its Black residents — that someone was finally in charge.
The Survivors and the Silenced
Mayor Edward Parsons Smith, who had come within inches of death, was slowly recovering in hospital. In a haze of fever and pain, he reportedly repeated the same phrase over and over: “They shall not get him. Mob rule will not prevail in Omaha.” His political career, however, would never recover. While he had survived the lynching, the riot marked the end of his reformist movement and the dominance of the Dennison machine would continue.
Will Brown, by contrast, was beyond saving. His body, mutilated, burned, and paraded through the city, was eventually collected by city authorities. There was no autopsy, no family funeral, no marker.
On 1 October 1919, three days after the riot, Brown was buried in Potters Field, Omaha’s cemetery for the poor, the unidentified, and the forgotten. There was no ceremony. No priest. No mourner.
Next to his name in the burial register, the city clerk wrote a single word: “Lynched.”
It was a cold, bureaucratic entry that belied the cruelty of his death and the failure of a city to protect its own citizens. For decades afterwards, Brown’s grave remained unmarked, tucked away in a remote corner of the cemetery — a symbol of how easily victims of racial terror were erased from public memory. It wasn’t until 2009 that a headstone was finally placed on his grave, funded by a private citizen from California who had learned of the lynching by chance and felt compelled to ensure Brown would not be forgotten.
That simple granite stone now bears his name, the date of his death, and the words: Lest we forget.
No Justice, No Peace
The riot was condemned across the country. A grand jury was convened. Military and police arrested over 100 participants. Another 300 names were flagged for questioning. But of the 120 indicted, no one served time.
General Leonard Wood, initially blaming the Industrial Workers of the World, quickly realised the riot had deeper roots. The Omaha Bee came under fire for fanning racial hatred. Rev. Charles E. Cobbey said, “It is the belief of many that the entire responsibility for the outrage can be placed at the feet of a few men and one Omaha paper.”
Some pointed fingers at Tom Dennison. Rev. John Albert Williams, editor of The Monitor, made public allegations that Dennison’s operatives had donned blackface and staged attacks to justify mob action. Police confirmed one white rioter had been caught still wearing dark makeup.
A grand jury concluded the riot “was not a casual affair; it was premeditated and planned by those secret and invisible forces that today are fighting you and the men who represent good government.”
Today, the story of Will Brown lives on — in theatre, novels, memorials, and archives — not as a forgotten footnote, but as a chilling reminder of what mob justice really looks like.
