Lingering hurt over a century-old lynching in Coatesville

For more than three long, overheated hours Saturday morning, a somber group gathered in Coatesville to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the last lynching in Pennsylvania, and to discuss the legacy of the white police officer and black steel-mill worker whose lives ended in a conflagration that smolders still.

A half-dozen descendants of both men - Edgar Rice and Zachariah Walker - were among the more than 125 people who packed into a room at the colonial brick Lukens Executive Office Building.

They listened to an extensive disquisition by the professorial Dennis Downey, who was selling signed copies of two books he has written on the subject: No Crooked Death and Coatesville and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker. They tapped their feet to three a cappella gospel songs. They watched the trailer for a documentary tracing the history of unequal justice for African Americans in the United States. They amen-ed along with James C. Kennedy Sr., the 97-year-old mayor of South Coatesville, who reminisced about the steel-mill town's racially charged past.

On Aug. 12, 1911, Walker and Rice were involved in a scuffle that ended with Rice dying of a gunshot wound. The exact circumstances of the killing remain unclear. What is known for certain is that Walker had been drinking. Less certain are the details about the gun and whether he and Rice had a history of bad blood. Numerous stories have evolved over the decades, Downey said, including a rumor that the two men were wooing the same woman. He knows of no evidence to substantiate the claim.

Walker tried to escape but was captured by a posse the following day, shackled, put into a straitjacket, and taken to the hospital. Vigilantes followed him there, dragged him from bed, and burned him alive.

He tried to crawl out of the fire three times and was forced back by a crowd of several thousand onlookers. At one point, he cried out: "For God's sake, give a man a chance . . . . Don't give me no crooked death because I'm not white."

Fifteen men and teenage boys were arrested, but they were all acquitted. The last of eight recorded lynchings in the state, the incident incited national outrage. It led to the growth of the fledgling NAACP and eventually to passage of the first federal antilynching law.

When the question-and-answer session finally got started, many members of the audience let fly their frustrations with the city's enduring problems.

"There's still a lot of hate in Coatesville," said Sylvia Washington, a councilwoman for South Coatesville who works in the school district.

"I don't know what happened that night," said William Culclasure Sr., "but I do know two men died." The animus, he said, "has trickled down through the years . . . it's time to move on. . . . We think we have come a long way from 1911, but we really haven't."

The 65-year-old church deacon, who stood at the back of the room with his hands resting on an elaborately carved walking stick, said that when he passes white women on the streets of Coatesville, he still sees them switch their pocketbooks to the opposite shoulder.

The city's wounds have never truly healed, and three years ago when a historical marker was placed near the site of the lynching, old resentments were stirred up. Sam Stretton, a white West Chester lawyer who helped establish the marker, said at the time that it was not intended to incite, but rather remind citizens that "we are a society of law and that mob violence . . . will not be tolerated."

At Saturday's event, he said: "When we dedicated that sign, we said the curse on Coatesville is lifted. It wasn't." He decried the absence of any Coatesville City Council or school board members at the event and said their lack of interest "speaks volumes."

In fact, Tonya Taylor, a member of the school board and an organizer of the event, was in attendance.

Two of Zachariah Walker's grandnieces, Lorraine Smith and Jean Belgrave, said that their family no longer harbors any grudges and that the past is the past. Charlene Stokes, whose great-grandfather was Edgar Rice, said she was moved by the ceremony. She and several of her relatives were planning to meet with Walker's family members after the event to talk.

Her father, however, would have no part in any attempt at reconciliation, she said.

"Stories have been passed down," she said. "He's still resentful. He's a very bitter man."