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‘You needn't be afraid here; you're in a civilized country’: region, racial violence and law enforcement in early twentieth-century New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania

On 30 August 1904, in the town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, what was described as a ‘large and enthusiastic number of . . . representative colored citizens’ gathered at the Howard Place African Methodist Episcopal Church to denounce two flagrant miscarriages of justice. Although neither incident directly involved the local black community of Scranton, both had been widely reported in the news and editorial columns of the Defender, an African American newspaper published in the city. The first incident concerned an alleged assault perpetrated by nine white men on a young black girl in Philadelphia, a Miss Ellen Steward. Ellen had been walking back from a picnic when she was separated from her mother, dragged into an empty house by the white gang, and raped. She was found some time later by police officers walking their beat and taken to a station house and then on to hospital. At first, the police had not believed Ellen’s allegations and it was only after the young girl underwent a medical examination that officers were persuaded that a serious crime had been committed and began tracking the assailants. Three weeks later, at the time of the meeting in Scranton, only two of the nine alleged attackers had been arrested and it was speculated that many of the others had fled overseas, most probably to Liverpool. African Americans throughout Pennsylvania were incensed by the lax police response to Ellen Steward’s rape. One spokesperson claimed to be ‘astounded at the slowness of justice in this case’, and there was particular condemnation of both the police, who had instinctively distrusted Ellen’s story, and also of Philadelphia’s white press, which had not reported the incident at all. The implication, according to one speaker at the Scranton meeting, was that