THE OMAHA COURTHOUSE LYNCHING OF 1919
THE OMAHA COURTHOUSE LYNCHING OF 1919 The infamous Omaha Courthouse Lynching of 1919 was part of the wave of racial and labor violence that swept the United States during the “Red Summer” of 1919. It was witnessed by an estimated 20,000 people, making it one of the largest individual spectacles of racial violence in the nation’s history. The Great Migration brought tens of thousands of African Americans to northern industrial cities—including Omaha, Nebraska, which saw its black population double from 4,426 to 10,315 in the second decade of the 20th Century. The growing black population and resentment over job competition 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 exploited this tension by the summer of 1919 carrying daily newspaper accounts of attacks by African American males on white women, without similar coverage concerning assaults on African American women, by either blac