The Lynching of George Smith

Steeped in the white supremacist conventions of the day, the Omaha World-Herald left no doubt of where it stood when it called for the 1891 lynching of George Smith, who was almost certainly innocent, according to historians today.

“HE IS TOO VILE TO LIVE” screamed the paper’s uppercase headline about George Smith, also known as Joe Coe, who was accused of assaulting a child. Taking its counsel, thousands of Omaha residents grabbed the hotel waiter out of prison and hanged him from a street car cable at 17th and Harney streets in downtown Omaha.

The inflammatory headlines, the assumption that the audience was white, and the disregard for the legal rights of the accused, moreover, all reflected the lax standards of the journalism of the era.

The World-Herald did not normally interview Black people then, according to Preston Love, Jr., a professor in UNO’s Black Studies Department and a current World-Herald community columnist. It lacked the knowledge and tools to cover the victim’s personal story.

“They would not know who to talk to and where to go,” Love said.

A year before the lynching, the World-Herald hired reporter Susette La Flesche, an Omaha tribal member, to cover the Native American’s perspective on the Wounded Knee uprising. This was a seminal decision by the World-Herald as it peers sent white reporters who only covered the white military’s viewpoint. It did not make a similar effort in its reporting of the Black community until well into the next century.

Smith, was arrested for assaulting a 5-year-old girl even though he had an alibi with corroborating witnesses. The paper urged its readers to lynch him with the headline: “EVERY REASON FOR THE LYNCHING OF A LUSTFUL YOUNG NEGRO.” A letter years later in the World-Herald’s competitor, The Omaha Bee, condemned the World-Herald’s reporting along with the misleading bulletins it posted in front of its office.

“These misrepresentations infuriated the populace until restraint broke down all barriers and as a result George Smith was lynched,” said the 1898 letter that was signed only “Colored Voter.”

When Smith was identified and jailed, the World-Herald ran the headline, “THE NEGRO FIEND HELD” and on the editorial page, a one-line note: “George Smith, the dastardly assailant of little girls, would just fit the Nell gallows.” This referred to Ed Nell, a white man who earlier had been legally hanged after being convicted of murder.

The Black press at the time was becoming active in most major cities and was pushing back at the racist stereotypical and sensational coverage of the established white press. Pulitzer Prize winner Ida B. Wells debunked much of the “false news” the white-owned press was publishing about lynchings. She wrote that lynchings were used to oppress the Black population who were considered as threats to the white economy and its social and political system.

“The American press, with few exceptions…encouraged mobs and is responsible for the increasing wave of lawlessness which is sweeping over the States,” Wells wrote in The Washington Post in 1893.

Kathy Roberts Forde, journalism professor and Associate Dean of Equity & Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, maintains the World-Herald’s coverage was par for the course for the white press back then.

“These newspapers would typically justify and do everything they could to protect the white newspaper. Its editors and publishers would do everything to protect the image of its city, town, state and its people. White people, I mean,” she said.

The white establishment controlled all of Omaha. Adam Fletcher Sasse, an author of books on Omaha’s Black history, says that the tradition of white supremacy played a role in the newspaper’s coverage.

The World-Herald had portrayed Black people mostly as criminals and not as human beings, stoking fear and prejudice and allowing Black residents to become easy scapegoats, according to Sasse.

“African Americans generally weren’t interviewed, they weren’t featured, their direct words were not told,” Sasse said. They were rendered as “not relevant to the city’s life, health and wellbeing. They were not included in terms of uplifting and really positive story telling.”

It would have been easy for Omaha readers to think its Omaha residents were not human since the press did not normally give Black people a voice in its newspapers.

“We have no pity for the lascivious wretch whose savage taking off was richly deserved,” the World-Herald published after the lynching. “Our only regret is that there are crimes so monstrous that law-abiding communities are impelled to burst the bonds of civil law and return to the savage methods of primitive justice.”

A 2022 commemorative plaque near the former site of Smith’s lynching notes that local newspapers falsely reported that the white girl who had been attacked by a Black man had died. The Council Bluffs Globe newspaper reported at the time that this fake news intensified the hatred toward Smith which led to frequent lynching threats. A mob lynched Smith two days later which was watched by over 10,000 white spectators.