In late 1905, Chattanooga was gripped by what local newspapers called a black "crime wave." Between December 11 and 23, black suspects were accused of one rape, one assault, and one assault and burglary. On Christmas Eve, a Black gambler named Floyd Westfield shot and killed constable Alonzo Rains. On Christmas Day, police received reports of eight more robberies or assaults. Every victim was white. Racial fear escalated sharply. Westfield, it would later be proven, had acted in self-defense after Rains attacked his grandmother's house unprovoked, firing a pistol shot through her door. Westfield was tried four times before being acquitted in 1908. But in early 1906, none of that mattered. What mattered was the atmosphere of terror that surrounded the arrest of Ed Johnson on January 23, after Nevada Taylor was attacked near the Forest Hills Cemetery. Taylor could remember little about her assailant beyond the fact that he was a Black man who approached her from behind.

Johnson was indicted by a grand jury on January 26, 1906. The night of his arrest, a mob of 1,500 white residents surrounded the jail and demanded Johnson be handed over. Sheriff Joseph F. Shipp and Judge Samuel McReynolds had anticipated the danger and already evacuated Johnson to Nashville. At trial, Taylor said she recognized Johnson by his voice, face, and size -- but she repeatedly refused to swear under oath that he was her attacker, saying only that it was her "belief." During her testimony, a juror leaped from his seat and had to be physically restrained from attacking Johnson. Three days later, the all-white jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. Johnson's court-appointed attorneys declined to appeal, fearing an acquittal might trigger another mob attack on the jail.

When Johnson's own attorneys gave up, two Black Chattanooga lawyers -- Noah Parden and Styles Hutchins -- stepped in. They requested an appeal from Judge McReynolds. Denied. They went to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Denied again. Democratic governor John I. Cox granted a stay, pushing the execution to March 20. Parden used that narrow window to travel to Washington, D.C., where he met on March 17 with Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, the same justice who had famously dissented in Plessy v. Ferguson. Harlan agreed to hear the case. On March 19, the Supreme Court ordered a second stay of execution. The law had spoken. But the mob had other plans.

On the evening of March 19, Sheriff Shipp dismissed every guard from the jail except an elderly nighttime jailer named Jeremiah Gibson. All prisoners except Johnson and one white woman were moved off the third floor. Between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m., a group of men entered the unguarded building and spent nearly three hours breaking through three locked doors with an axe and a sledgehammer. Shipp arrived and made a show of protesting, but never drew his revolver or attempted to physically stop anyone. The mob escorted him to a bathroom and told him to stay put. He did. They dragged Johnson to the Walnut Street Bridge and hanged him from a beam. After he had been hanging for two minutes, the mob grew impatient and began shooting. Over fifty bullets hit his body. One severed the rope. When Johnson fell and moved, a man later identified as a deputy sheriff pressed a revolver to his head and fired five more times.

President Theodore Roosevelt directed the Secret Service to investigate. Sheriff Shipp told the Birmingham News that the Supreme Court's "interference" was to blame for Johnson's death. The court disagreed. Twenty-five men were charged with contempt of court in United States v. Shipp -- the only criminal trial the Supreme Court has ever conducted. Six were convicted. The court found that Shipp "not only made the work of the mob easy, but in effect aided and abetted it." He received 90 days in prison. When Shipp was released, he was welcomed home as a hero. Noah Parden and Styles Hutchins, the lawyers who had fought for Johnson's life, were driven from Tennessee by threats of violence and never returned. In February 2000 -- 94 years later -- Hamilton County Criminal Judge Doug Meyer vacated Johnson's conviction, ruling that his right to a fair trial had been violated by the all-white jury and the refusal to change venue. On September 19, 2021, a memorial to Ed Johnson was dedicated near the Walnut Street Bridge, not far from the spot where a mob once pinned a note to a dead man's body that read, "To Justice Harlan. Come get your nigger now."