A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age

An account of a lynching that took place in New York in 1892, forcing the North to reckon with its own racism.

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town’s well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Souther...