https://www.timesunion.com/hudsonvalley/culture/article/1892-a-Black-man-was-lynched-in-the-Hudson-Valley-17192170.php?IPID=Times-Union-HP-life-packageNew York is currently in a collective outcry over the recent shooting in Buffalo. Communal shock over racist incidents comes and goes with unsettling frequency these days. Unfortunately, it’s nothing new. Back in 1892, the shock was over a Black man named Robert Lewis, who was lynched in Port Jervis.
Lewis’ story is told at length in “A Lynching in Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age,” a book out this month by historian Philip Dray. It’s a micro-history of a brutal incident involving a white woman, a frustrated white male suitor her parents didn’t approve of, a villainous scheme, and a Black man accused of assault. Besides flowery language, old-school sentiments about women and sexuality, and no social media to share bystander video of Lewis begging for help and repeating, “I am not the man,” the 130-year-old story feels remarkably modern.
Lynching of Black Americans is largely associated with the South, not Orange County — even in the 19th century. “The fact that this occurred in Port Jervis set off alarm bells. It’s so close to New York City; in a way it can be seen as a remote part of New York City itself,” says Dray in a phone interview. Of the 1,134 recorded lynchings of Black Americans between the years 1882 and 1899, Robert Lewis was the only one known to have occurred in New York State.
Details of the assault that took place June 2, 1892 — who did it, why, and who was in on it — are murky. It’s possible Lewis was egged on or maybe even paid by a white man, Philip Foley, to sexually assault his girlfriend, Lena McMahon. Foley claimed McMahon would resist, but only at first. This scheme might have been hatched to get back at her parents. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
“It’s almost as if the principals set out to make it as confusing as possible,” says Dray. Still, locals — worried that the epidemic of lynching was coming to the “civilized” North — were quick to condemn Port Jervis. Newspapers all over the country covered the incident, too. The Los Angeles Herald wrote that Port Jervis had “unsectionalized the rage for lynching.”
Sectionalizing North from South glosses over the North’s history of enslavement. “At some point in the 18th century, New York State, which was a colony at the time, rivaled South Carolina in terms of the number of enslaved Black people here. That was mind boggling,” says Dray, who is also the author of “At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.”
He quotes A. J. Williams-Myers, a scholar of regional Black history, in his latest pages: “The two biggest slave markets in the country before the American Revolution were in New York City and Albany. New York was not a society with slaves, it was a slave society, dependent on enslaved Africans.”
The Hudson Valley, Dray writes, was at one point home to 15,000 people in bondage, some working as teamsters, diggers, or even skilled workers. “Large numbers of house servants and gardeners were needed to maintain the great Hudson River estates of families such as the Livingstons, the Van Rensselaers, and the Van Cortlandts,” he writes. These names remain familiar locally to this day.
News that a white woman was assaulted by a Black man spread quickly through the community. A few townspeople set out to find anyone who fit the description, picked up Lewis, and claimed he confessed as they were bringing him to the authorities. McMahon herself said it wasn’t Lewis, but the wheels were in motion. Lewis, 28, a former bus driver for the town’s leading hotel, begged to be allowed to be given to “the hands of the law,” but an angry mob gathered in town took over instead.
The killing coincided with the birth of the anti-lynching movement in the United States, which was led by journalist Ida B. Wells. Dray recounts how she had recently moved to New York City in flight from Memphis, “where her writings had agitated local white people.” Wells found “safe harbor” working at the New York Age, the leading Black newspaper of the day, and also wrote short books about the scourge of lynching in America. She weighed in on the mystery behind the lynching of Lewis in Port Jervis, at one point positing that the lynching occurred because of a consensual relationship between McMahon and Lewis.
Lewis’ killing was “in every way like a Southern lynching, even down to the fact that no one was ever held responsible,” Dray says. “It was pursued but there was no judicial resolution to it.” One person who abetted the lynch mob was a part-time police officer who later became the chief of police. The parallels to modern concerns about police brutality and corruption are obvious.
Today, residents of Port Jervis aren’t uniformly aware of their town’s history. “When you go for many years avoiding talking about something, the historical knowledge of it disappears,” Dray says. When he began visiting Port Jervis in 2018 for book research, he says, “it seemed like the Black community was still very small. It was almost hard to find people who spoke to the Black community.”
His original idea for “A Lynching in Port Jervis” was that “extreme racial violence wasn’t something that happened in one part of the country and in police departments.” His idea became “eclipsed by reality” when the world watched George Floyd die as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck. In June 2020, following Floyd’s murder, Dray attended a surprisingly large Black Lives Matter march in Port Jervis. “It was organized by young college-aged Black women from the Port Jervis area,” he says.
The well-attended march changed the tone of Dray’s research. From then on, he says, the subject of lynching “became more accepted to talk about.” The small group of people who came together to commemorate Robert Lewis yearly on June 2 grew. Last year, 100 people showed up. A small organization, Friends of Robert Lewis, was formed (Dray is a member) and it raised money for a plaque on the site of the lynching, before New York State stepped in to pay for the plaque — and another in Newburgh, the site of a Civil War lynching. At a time when there are people in the United States trying to stop teaching children about our racist history, this acknowledgment by New York State, even belated, is notable.
“I was up in Port Jervis a few weeks ago,” says Dray. “At the railroad station, they have a collage in a glass weather shelter with images of Port Jervis past life. One is a portrait of Robert Lewis. I looked at that and thought, wow this is amazing that someone thought, ‘Yes! This belongs here.’”
