Edition: U.S. / Global

Memories of Lynching Divide a Town

Published: April 4, 1998

Down by the Price River, the bare, twisted limbs of a dried-out cottonwood are enough to make a grown man shudder.

''It's still there, scary and ominous as ever,'' the Rev. France A. Davis, pastor of Salt Lake City's largest black church, said after visiting the old tree, site of what historians say was the last lynching of a black man in the American West.

On Saturday, the 30th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Davis and other religious leaders, most of them white, will gather at the cemetery here to dedicate a gravestone of gray Georgia granite inscribed: ''Robert Marshall. Lynched June 18, 1925. A Victim of Intolerance. May God Forgive.''

But on the eve of that gathering, for what the organizers call a ceremony of ''reconciliation and forgiveness,'' this close-knit coal mining town in Utah's desert canyonlands is being torn apart by the memories that the occasion was intended to evoke.

''A man came out of the store with a rope, and my father asked, 'What's going on?' '' recalled C. Matthew Gilmour, 88, a white native of Price who planned the ceremony from his home in Salt Lake City. ''The man said, 'They've caught him -- we've got a necktie party.' That was the phrase that stuck in my mind all these years: 'a necktie party.' ''

''The same racism that shot Martin Luther King in Memphis is the same prejudice that strung up Marshall in Price,'' Mr. Gilmour, a retired lawyer, said of the all-white mob that lynched an itinerant black miner suspected of murdering a coal company guard.

Not so, says Kevin Ashby, publisher of the local newspaper, The Sun Advocate, who calls the reconciliation day ''a slap in the face to the community'' and says the organizers are trying ''to make a martyr out of a murderer.''

On Tuesday, Mr. Ashby, who like other critics does not deny the lynching itself, published a long editorial denouncing the reconciliation day as an imported hodgepodge of ''correct political thinking, rewriting of history and victim culture.''

''On Wednesday,'' he said, ''the calls started coming in. Then yesterday I got 50 calls. All the callers were in support'' of the editorial.

On Thursday afternoon, one of those callers sat in her living room, the blinds drawn and a vase of roses from her 80th birthday sitting forgotten on a shelf. Near tears, she asked that she not be identified by name.

''Why, why resurrect this thing?'' said the woman, who recalls visiting the jail where her father, the town marshal, was one of 11 men briefly held for the lynching. ''Why attack the second and third generation?''

As a result of the controversy brought on by plans for the gathering, she said, ''I can't go shopping, I can't go to the beauty shop -- people always ask me about it.''

Mr. Gilmour says it was President Clinton's call for a national dialogue on race that inspired him and the other organizers to plan ceremonies at the resting place of a lynching victim who for 73 years has lain in an unmarked grave.

But with the reconciliation day organized largely by outsiders from Salt Lake City, much of Price has retreated. Isolated by geography, Carbon County, with only 20,000 residents today, has long felt alienated from Salt Lake City, 120 miles to the northwest. Unionized, industrial, Democratic and a religious and ethnic mix, the county is an anomaly in a state that is overwhelmingly anti-union, Republican and Mormon.

''Once again, Carbon County gets the black mark,'' objected J. Eldon Dorman, an 88-year-old retired doctor, echoing a sentiment heard around town. ''This was not a racist thing at all. If Marshall had been an Italian or a Greek, he would have gotten the same thing.''

But events of the period suggest the contrary. For instance, in a mining strike here three years before the lynching of Mr. Marshall, workers shot and killed two coal company guards. Three Greek immigrant miners were arrested, tried and convicted. One was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the others to life. Strong community, church and labor support for them applied the brake to any inclination toward vigilantism.

In contrast, Mr. Marshall, hanged amid a bitter later strike, was one of only 100 or so blacks in the entire county. He had no family nearby, no church to support him.

As the ceremony's critics point out, Mr. Marshall had a criminal record and, by the account of historians, did shoot the guard, five times.

But ''whether he was guilty or not is irrelevant,'' said Larry Gerlach, a University of Utah history professor who wrote ''Blazing Crosses in Zion: The Ku Klux Klan in Utah'' (Utah State University Press, 1982). ''Justice was subverted.''

The lynching, the state's first in 40 years, occurred at a turbulent time in Utah coal country. Carbon County had a population that was half foreign-born, an uneasy cauldron of 33 nationalities. In this remote area where laws barring gambling, prostitution and alcohol were largely ignored, the community fabric was ripped asunder in 1924 by a mining explosion that killed 172 men.

That summer the Ku Klux Klan started organizing here, making targets of Italian and Greek immigrants, whom the Klan blamed for the 1922 strike. Then, with coal prices slumping in the spring of 1925, two coal companies here tried to slash miners' wages, bringing on the second strike. The mean mood boiled over with the shooting of another company guard and the capture and lynching of Mr. Marshall.

As many as 1,000 people gathered for the hanging, some with picnic lunches. ''You would have seen your neighbors, your friends'' and ''folks prominent in church and social circles,'' The Price Sun reported the next day.

One witness was J. Bracken Lee, a local insurance agent who later became Price's Mayor and Utah's Governor. ''I'd say there were enough ropes there to hang 20 people,'' he told an interviewer in 1977.

The authorities detained 11 men, mostly Klansmen who were employees of one of the struck concerns, the Utah Fuel Company. During an inquiry by a grand jury that heard 124 witnesses, the jailed men were feted by townspeople with ice cream and home-cooked meals.

No one identified any member of the mob, and the 11 suspects were freed. Professor Gerlach recalls that in interviews he conducted here half a century after the lynching, ''I had a number of people tell me, 'Yeah, I lied' '' to the grand jury.

''The response was always the same,'' Professor Gerlach said. '' 'We weren't going to do anything to take down members of our community.' '''

Photos: C. Matthew Gilmour, 88 and a native of Price, Utah, led the planning of a ceremony dedicating a gravestone for a black miner lynched there in 1925. Critics say the organizers have made a martyr out of a murderer. (Photographs by Kevin Moloney for The New York Times)