Lynching victim “Remembrance walk” by 3 mayors and grass roots group to place historic marker June 2
Friends of Robert Lewis, to memorialize the 1892 lynching victim and address the dynamic behind the crime, have organized annual walks and advocated for the state historic marker, to be placed on June 2
New York /
| 18 May 2022 | 06:49
Previous year’s Remembrance Walk on E. Main St. in Port Jervis, where the l892 lynching occurred. (
)
Civil rights historian Philip Dray
Bishop James Rollins, Sr., of Tabernacle Church in Middletown, left, and Father Jean Pierre Sequin (
)
PORT JERVIS – Students from Port Jervis will join a gathering of public officials and advocates for racial justice in dedicating a New York State historic marker on June 2 at the site where a local African American man was brutalized and lynched in front of what is now a church.
They will join Friends of Robert Lewis -- organizers of this remembrance walk -- and the mayors of Orange County’s three cities: Kelly Decker of Port Jervis, Torrance Harvey of Newburgh and Joseph DeStefano of Middletown.
The walk is organized by the Friends of Robert Lewis, a grass roots organization brought together to understand the events that led to the 1892 crime. This will be their sixth “reverential remembrance walk” held in the spirit of community-building and nurturing equality.
It follows the route on which Robert Lewis, an African American Port Jervis resident, was brutalized on June 2, 1892, before being lynched on East Main Street.
Other notables expected to attend include:
-17th District Congressman Mondaire Jones whose legislatively changed district may include Port Jervis after the next election;
- Civil rights historian Philip Dray, author of the award-winning nonfiction account, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, the Lynching of Black America. His newest book – A Lynching in Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age -- was recently featured in the New York Times.
– Bishop James Rollins, pastor of the Tabernacle church in Middletown.
– Ray Harvey, NAACP President, Newburgh-Highland Falls.
-Pat Claiborne, of Middletown, a civically involved advocate
- Retired Port Jervis police detective Michael Worden, a local historian and author.
They will join others at the 4:30 p.m. remembrance ceremony and walk that starts at the steps of Port Jervis City Hall, a short distance from where Mr. Lewis, who was accused of raping a White woman, was forcibly extracted from police custody by a mob estimated in the several hundreds, if not thousands.
They will trace the steps of the mob for just three city blocks to the site near what is now a church where Mr. Lewis was murdered. The historic marker will read:
“1892 Lynching: On June 2nd Robert Lewis, A Local Black Resident,Was Mob Lynched Near This Site. No One Was Held Accountable For His Murder..”
Across the street from the lynching site is the former home of Judge William Crane, who was roused from bathing and attempted, unsuccessfully, to stop the lynching. He was the older brother of occasional Port Jervis resident Stephen Crane, whose inspiration for “The Red Badge of Courage” may have come from his time talking with Civil War veterans in the city.
Music for the ceremony will be provided by Hudson Valley’s Souls United, and Port Jervis High School students, along with drummer Maxwell Kofi Donkor, who will also perform a “libation” ceremony. Port Jervis High School students will participate in the ceremony along with the Middletown based youth-oriented group “Because It Matters 24/7”.
The Robert Lewis Remembrance Walk has grown substantially since it was initiated six years ago by Port Jervis native Ralph Drake and a handful of others who were inspired to seek reconciliation with the past and foster community healing.
All are invited to attend.
Noted Historian Publishes Book on Port Jervis Lynching
PORT JERVIS – Philip Dray, an award-winning writer and historian known for his comprehensive analysis of scientific, racial and labor history, has published his latest book -- A Lynching in Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age. The book debuts just before the annual remembrance walk of that 130-year-old injustice.
Dray will be among the speakers at the ceremony and walk on June 2, which starts at the steps of Port Jervis City Hall at 4:30 p.m.
He is the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, among many other nonfiction books.
An Amazon.com description of Dray’s latest work, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, notes that “The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward.”
The description asks: “What factors prompted such a spasm of racial violence in a relatively prosperous, industrious upstate New York town, attracting the scrutiny of the Black journalist Ida B. Wells, just then beginning her courageous anti-lynching crusade? What meaning did the country assign to it? And what did the incident portend?”
It concludes, “In A Lynching at Port Jervis .. Philip Dray revisits this time and place to consider its significance in our communal history and to show how justice cannot be achieved without an honest reckoning.”
###
For further information, contact John Kinney at johnpkinney@hotmail.com, a volunteer of the Friends of Robert Lewis.