They Want Me to Say Yes: The Lynching of Henry Williams

About midnight May 23, 1898, someone slipped into Ann Browitt’s home a mile west of Macon, Missouri, and attacked Ann’s two older daughters. However, he was frightened off before he could complete his hellish work when Ann and a younger daughter awoke and lit a lamp. The younger daughter said she saw in the light of the lamp that the attacker’s skin was black. That was enough to help get Henry Williams lynched when a similar attack occurred in Macon a month later.
On the late night of Tuesday, June 28, a man entered John Koechel’s home at Macon and went into the bedroom of Koechel’s stepdaughters, Amelia and Ann Leubke. Grasping Amelia’s arm when she awoke, the intruder threatened, “If you holler, I’ll do you as I did the girls at the waterworks.” At this point, an older stepdaughter heard the commotion from an adjoining room and appeared on the scene to frighten the man away.
As he was fleeing, the intruder stole a sack of flour from the kitchen. Unbeknownst to the thief, the sack had a small leak in it, and after daylight the next morning, two local officers followed the trail of flour to the home of Henry Williams, a thirty-year-old married black man. Not only was the bag of flour found at the residence but so, too, were a number of other articles that were identified as having been stolen from various Macon area homes in recent months. In addition, a bloody coat found in the home was thought to have been the coat worn by the assailant of the Browitt girls.
Williams was arrested and tossed in the Macon County Jail. He vehemently denied assaulting either the Leubke girls or the Browitt girls, and he offered explanations for how he’d gotten the flour and the coat. But no one believed him, partly because of his reputation for prior bad acts. A few years earlier, he’d been arrested for attempting to criminally assault a young white woman in a room over a downtown Macon store, but he’d received just ninety days in jail because of the woman’s “bad reputation.”
As word of Williams’s arrest spread throughout the morning of the 29th, people began gathering on the streets of Macon. That afternoon, the prisoner repeated his denials to a local reporter who called on him at the jail. He said he did not attack Amelia Leubke and did not say to her that he would do to her as he did the girls at the waterworks, because he did not commit either break-in. Informed of the mob that was forming, he said, “They want me to say yes, but they can kill me before I’ll do it.”
And kill him is exactly what they did.
Around ten o’clock that night, knots of men formed near the courthouse, and they soon came together into one crowd, determined to carry out vigilante justice. A local minister made a speech imploring them to let the law take its course, but he was howled down.
The mob marched to the jail and demanded the sheriff turn over the prisoner. He refused, but the determined gang knocked down a fence surrounding the jail and made a rush on the officers guarding it. The sheriff and his deputies were quickly disarmed, and the front door of the jail battered in. The key to the jail corridor was located and the iron door unlocked. The would-be lynchers took Williams from his cell and herded him outside, where his appearance was greeted with wild hurrahs from the crowd.
The prisoner was taken south through the streets of Macon to a railroad bridge at the edge of town. The doomed man was positioned beneath the bridge, a rope was looped around his neck, and the other end was thrown up to some men on the bridge. The gang leader, described only as a tall man, signaled the men on the bridge to pull, and Williams’s body shot up. It was 12:30 a.m. on the 30th of June, 1898.
The lynch mob tied the rope to the bridge and marched off into the night, leaving Williams’s body dangling. It was still hanging there after daylight on the morning of the 30th, “furnishing an uncanny spectacle for the passengers on the Hannibal and St. Joe Railroad trains,” according to the local paper.
The body was finally cut down about 8:30 a.m., and a coroner’s jury reached the meaningless verdict that the deceased had come to his death “at the hands of some two or three hundred men whose names, identities and residences are to these jurors unknown.”
This despite the fact that the identity of the tall leader was “pretty well known” in Macon, according to a county history written twelve years later.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.