The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  Wells took the slight personally, and saw it as a reflection of behavior she understood all too well—a distaste, especially among white people but also among some blacks, for her forward, aggressive style.

  At the Charity Hall, Du Bois offered to retrieve the final list, which had just been sent out, and put Wells’s name on it again. Wells declined, and left the hall for good.

  It was, she would later admit, a “foolish” move. “My anger at having been treated in such a fashion outweighed my judgment.” Wells believed she had somehow let down her cause.

  Nevertheless, Du Bois soon put her name back on the list, and she was included on the stationery of the Committee of Forty.

  The New York City conference ended with a proclamation of principles and the incorporation of a national organization. The new entity was named the Committee for the Advancement of the Negro Race. The following year, the name was changed. Some objected to the new title, with its unwieldy eight words. But Villard, adamant that the word “advancement” be included, made sure the new name stuck.

  From 1910 onward, it would be known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the NAACP.

  * * *

  Six months after the conference, Ida Wells won her big victory at the reinstatement hearing of Sheriff Frank James.

  Word of her achievement made it back to the other members of the Committee of Forty. One of her advocates there, John Milholland, let Wells know the matter had been discussed at a recent meeting.

  “The committee,” he told her, “regarded that as the most outstanding thing done for the race” all year.

  Despite the praise, Wells kept her distance from the new association. She missed five committee meetings in six months, and stayed out of organizational decision-making. She was already busy with the Negro Fellowship League, which she founded in the wake of the Springfield Riot, and which grew out of informal “indignation” meetings in her home. She was also frustrated with having to endure constant criticism and political maneuverings while fighting on the front lines, usually, as at the Frank Davis hearing, by herself. Reluctantly, she’d left her family to stand up for Frog James, but she had no interest in leaving them again to deal with infighting in New York City. Wells was forty-eight years old now, and she was tired.

  Then, on August 15, 1910, she looked through a Chicago newspaper and read the story about Steve Green.

  Wells did not know Green, but she knew his story. It could have been the story of any free black man struggling for a foothold in post–Civil War America. Green was born in Jackson, Tennessee, during the war. When he was a child, his widowed father gave him to a local policeman who also ran a grocery store. Green worked for the man and his wife under the system of peonage, which many considered to be slavery by another name. “I nursed their children for six years, and got my room and board as wages,” Green told a newspaper reporter. He was kept out of school so he could work at the grocery store. “They promised me three dollars a week,” Green recalled, “but I seldom got it.”

  At seventeen, he ran away to Cairo, Illinois, and worked on the railroad for one dollar and fifty cents a day. He saved his money and rented a farm in Putnam County in Arkansas, and got by as a tenant farmer. He took a wife, had two children, and moved to nearby Jericho, where the schools were better and his children could get a decent education. In Jericho, Green rented twenty-five acres from a farmer named Will Saddler for five dollars an acre. When Saddler raised his fee to nine dollars an acre, Green decided to leave.

  Saddler wasn’t happy and wouldn’t stand for it. “He told me if I did not keep this place for a year, there would not be room in Crittendon County for him and me,” Green said. “I told him I would not do so.”

  Green finished gathering his crop and got ready to leave the farm.

  Two days before he left, Green’s wife died of heart failure.

  Three days after burying her, on a snowy February afternoon, Green was back at work on the farm of a new landlord, a man named J. H. Usher. “I was grinding an ax, getting ready to go down in the field, when Mr. Saddler rode up and called me,” Green said.

  Saddler, wearing a revolver, reminded him of his earlier threat.

  “You would not try to hurt an old man like me because of that, would you, sir?” Green asked.

  “I mean just what I said,” answered Saddler.

  With that he pulled out his gun.

  Green broke and ran, and Saddler fired three shots. Green was hit in the neck, the flesh of his left arm, and the calf of his right leg. But no bones were broken, so he kept running, and he raced Saddler, and two of his armed men, back to his home on Usher’s property.

  “I ran in and got my Winchester and ran out the back door,” Green said. One of Saddler’s men shot at him and hit him in the shoulder.

  Finally, Green raised his numb arm and fired his rifle.

  “They say that the shot killed Mr. Saddler,” Green told a reporter, “but I do not know, for I did not stop to see.”

  The Daily Arkansas Gazette declared, “Rich Planter Killed by Negro,” and claimed none of the white men were armed.

  The fugitive made his escape by wading across a nearly frozen lake and hiding in a tree for a day. A doctor later told him the cold water in the lake stopped his bleeding and saved his life.

  Thinking on his feet, Green put pepper in his shoes and mud on his clothes to throw bloodhounds off his scent, and made it out of Arkansas. He hid away on an island in the Mississippi River for three weeks. Some friends raised thirty-two dollars to help him escape, and gave him food and blankets. He eventually made it to Cairo, Illinois, where he ran into some colored men he knew. One of them, Green would say, proved to be “a Judas.” The man contacted the sheriff in Jericho and asked about the reward for Green’s capture. One day after Green arrived in Cairo, on August 14, 1909, two policemen arrested him and put him in the county jail.

  When Wells picked up the story, the Arkansas governor had already sent extradition papers to Illinois, and Jericho sheriff C. L. Lewis was already in Chicago, preparing to put Steve Green on a train and bring him back to Arkansas to face justice.

  Wells got straight to work. She called two black Chicago attorneys, William G. Anderson and Edward H. Wright, and asked them to look into the matter. The lawyers petitioned the Cook County Circuit Court to get a writ of habeas corpus—a document claiming unlawful imprisonment—and sought resolution of that matter before any other matter. William Anderson, who one newspaper called “one of Chicago’s most able habeas corpus lawyers,” was granted the writ, and along with Rev. A. J. Carey, presented it to the Chicago police chief steward.

  “We don’t want to see Green go back to Jericho for trial,” Carey told a reporter, “for fear that he will be mobbed and burned at the stake.”

  But they were too late.

  On the morning of Monday, August 22, Jericho sheriff Lewis took Steve Green aboard the Illinois Central Passenger Train No. 1, bound for Arkansas. In less than twelve hours, the train would leave the southernmost station in Illinois—the Cairo station—and cross the state line. When that happened, Steve Green would be gone for good.

  If Wells wanted to save him, she would have to find a way to get Green off the train before it left Illinois.

  Wells devised a plan. She had the other attorney on the case, Edward Wright, petition the Cook County sheriff, Christopher Strassheim, for permission to offer a one-hundred-dollar reward to any law officer who returned Steve Green to Chicago. Strassheim signed off on the reward. Working out of Strassheim’s office, Wright called or sent telegrams to the office of every county sheriff along the train route, informing them of the habeas corpus writ and the reward. While he waited for someone to respond, he reached out to his more prominent contacts in Chicago for help in raising the reward money.

  The hours passed, and the train carrying Steve Green continued rumbling toward Cairo. Aboard the train, Sheriff Lewis and a deputy kept close watch over their prisoner.
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  Sheriff Lewis was no stranger to the handling of black prisoners, or to the practice of lynching. Just a few months earlier, a mob lynched two black men in his custody in the courtyard of the Jericho Courthouse. Though an excited crowd had circled the courthouse all day, Lewis went home at 10:00 p.m., saying he believed the threat of danger had passed.

  Sometime after midnight, several men from the mob of three hundred took the keys from Lewis’s deputy, Tom Williford, and pulled the prisoners—Bob Austin and Charles Richardson—from their cells. They took them to the yard and hanged them from a tree. “The mob was orderly and went about its work in businesslike fashion,” one paper reported. Lewis insisted he only learned of the hangings in the morning. Since Arkansas had no law similar to the Suppression of Mob Violence Act that ousted Frank Davis in Illinois, Lewis kept his job.

  Now Lewis was charged with bringing Steve Green back to Jericho. On the afternoon of August 22, the train carrying Lewis and Green was just a hundred miles or so from the Illinois state line. The weather turned, and a terrible summer storm moved in. “Rain and lightning,” one witness said, “seemed to rent the very earth.”

  Time was running out. Back in Chicago, Ida Wells waited for word, and Edward Wright worked the telephone. Many sheriffs were skeptical.

  On whose authority would they be able to take Steve Green off the train?

  “By the authority of the state attorney’s office in Cook County,” Wright replied.

  Still, no sheriff agreed to help.

  Night fell. The Illinois Central train had reached the last station in southern Illinois, in Cairo—the town where Frog James had been arrested the previous year. The train stopped at the depot to load up on water, and Sheriff Lewis sent a man out to telegram his office in Jericho.

  The telegram said they’d be leaving Illinois in minutes.

  Steve Green, sitting beside Lewis, may have believed his fate was sealed. And if he didn’t, Sheriff Lewis made sure that he did.

  “Steve, you are the most important nigger in the United States today,” he told Green as they sat in the stopped train in Cairo. “There will be a thousand men at the Jericho station when we get there, and they will have the rope and coal oil all ready to burn you alive.”

  Green later recalled the moment.

  “Not until then did I give up hope,” he said. “I told the Lord that I would never again believe there is a God.”

  And then, as the hard storm raged and the train prepared to leave the station, a man with a gun and a badge stepped on board.

  * * *

  It was a local sheriff. He walked up to Steve Green and put his hand on his shoulder.

  “I arrest this prisoner by virtue of authority vested in me as sheriff of Alexander County,” the man said.

  He handed the writ of habeas corpus to Sheriff Lewis, who protested. He had more than enough men waiting in Jericho to protect Green from any mob, Lewis argued, and if needed to, he could also call in the militia. He also offered to put Green in a jail cell in Memphis, Tennessee, until the whole mess could be worked out.

  The Alexander County sheriff said no. He had the authority to take custody of Steve Green and bring him back to Chicago, and that is what he intended to do.

  That, it turned out, is what he did.

  Just a few miles from the Mississippi River, which defined the Illinois-Arkansas border, Steve Green was taken off the train.

  “When the sheriff stepped up and arrested me,” Green later said, “that was a direct answer to my prayers.”

  The sheriff who stepped up, the only lawman in the entire state of Illinois who stepped up, was Fred D. Nellis—the very man who just months earlier had replaced Frank Davis as the sheriff in Cairo, after Ida Wells made sure that Davis paid the price for a lynching on his watch.

  CHAPTER 32 The Premonition

  February 27, 1911

  Yonkers, New York

  The headline in the Yonkers Herald was sensational:

  ATROCIOUS MURDER DISCOVERED ON MIDLAND AVENUE

  The story reported that a passerby found the body of an Italian man in the snow along a trail. Police secured a good description of a stranger seen in the area. They were working the case hard.

  Both Frank Heidemann and Carl Neumeister read about the murder in the Yonkers Herald. For Frank, the turn of events was a nightmare. The last thing he needed was more scrutiny from police. He could not afford to get caught up in a brand-new murder case, and he was desperate to leave the area immediately. He told Carl they had to flee the rooming house where they were staying, and he checked out so quickly he left behind a bag of laundry. But there was something he didn’t know.

  There was no murder. There was no dead man in the snow.

  It was all part of the play.

  * * *

  Ray Schindler understood that the roping of Frank Heidemann, given the German’s cleverness, had to be executed perfectly in order to succeed, which meant it would take time—a lot of time. Weeks, possibly months. Time Schindler did not have.

  In Asbury Park, Tom Williams continued to languish in a jail cell. He still faced conviction for the killing of Marie Smith. The county prosecutor was eager to close the Smith case once and for all, and let it be known he’d be happy to try Williams for the crime. The longer Black Diamond stayed in prison, the greater the risk he might suffer an even worse fate, an ever-present possibility—being dragged from his cell by a frenzied, impatient mob and lynched, just as Mingo Jack and Thomas Moss had been. Even in a northern state like New Jersey, a black prisoner had no guarantee of safety in any jail anywhere.

  So while Schindler trusted his rope, he realized Carl had failed to fully impress his target as a partner in crime—a truly malevolent man. “We’ve made Carl too respectable,” Schindler said to his fellow detectives in a meeting. Somehow they had to speed things up. Schindler had an idea for how to convince Frank that his new friend was every bit as evil and cold-blooded as any other gangster he knew.

  “Neumeister is going to commit murder,” Schindler declared.

  His plan was to stage a mock murder. A Burns operative traveled to meet the Yonkers chief of police, Captain Brady, who agreed to help, and suggested a location—a lonely country road that wound around the woods in northern Yonkers.

  Brady also connected the detective to the editor of the Herald, Frank Xavier, who agreed to print eight copies of his newspaper with a phony story about the murder in it. Meanwhile, Carl paid $13.93 for a Colt revolver. Carl told Frank about his new gun, but not about the cartridge of blanks he’d also purchased.

  Early on February 27, two of Schindler’s operatives—Detective Brody and Joseph Sfoza, the agent chosen to play the murder victim—traveled to Yonkers and took their places, Sfoza in the woods, Brody atop the hill overlooking the road. Sfoza was dressed “in the ramshackle attire of a vagabond,” Schindler reported.

  Five long hours passed with no sign of Carl or Frank.

  Finally, at 4:15 p.m., Sfoza spotted a horse-drawn carriage coming up the avenue. He recognized the two men sitting inside. He waited until the carriage reached him, then jumped out of the woods and stood in front of it.

  “Got a match?” he asked Carl Neumeister.

  Carl threw him a pack of matches. Sfoza lit a cigar. As planned, Carl quickly steered the carriage away.

  “I called after them and approached them and asked [in a surly manner] if they didn’t want their matches back,” Sfoza reported.

  “To hell with them,” Carl said to the Italian.

  “To hell with you,” Sfoza replied, spitting out an Italian curse.

  Carl swung the carriage around and asked Sfoza what he had called him in Italian.

  “You know what I called you,” Sfoza said, “and you can take it any way you want.”

  Carl jumped down from the carriage and punched Sfoza three or four times. Sfoza punched back. Carl landed another punch that dropped Sfoza on his back in the snow.

  “I’ll fix you,” Sfoza said, jumpi
ng to his feet.

  “You will, eh?” Carl answered, pulling out his Colt revolver.

  As Frank Heidemann watched from the carriage, Carl squeezed the trigger and two shots rang out. The blasts startled the carriage horse, and Frank struggled to control him. Sfoza fell to his knees and pitched forward, facedown in the snow. Carl fired one more shot.

  “Is he dead?” Frank asked.

  “Yes,” said Carl. “Let’s beat it.”

  He climbed into the carriage and steered it away from the scene.

  Sfoza, unhurt by either the fake punches or the blanks, stayed in the snow, motionless, for five long minutes, until he was sure the target was gone.

  * * *

  Frank did not suspect a thing. Carl didn’t even have to push too hard to get them to leave the area, because Frank was desperate to go. They agreed to try Philadelphia, and Carl arranged to have the next day’s edition of the local paper, the Yonkers Herald, forwarded to him there.

  The two men packed their bags and traveled to New York City’s Penn Station, where they boarded a train to Philadelphia’s Reading Station. They paid for separate rooms in the Brogley Hotel, using phony names—Frank D. Baker and Ben Hamilton. They stayed at the Brogley for several days, and at night went out for whiskey and beer.

  “I pretend to have taken to drink with him,” Carl reported, hoping the key to getting Frank to talk was getting him good and drunk. “He is too cautious. I have to try to get him to lose his self control.”

  In fact, Frank was already falling apart. He’d been on the run for nearly two months, and his money was gone. He had trouble sleeping, and “he is becoming a nervous wreck through the nightly practice of self-abuse,” Carl wrote. When Carl confronted him about it, Frank said he had no choice. “I know you would give me the money to go and see a girl, but what’s the use?” he said. “I’m too weak now.”