A lynching in Port Jervis, New York, 130 years ago is only now getting the full recognition it deserves as America wrestles with its history of racial violence
A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Agen June 2nd a gathering in Port Jervis, New York will witness the unveiling of a plaque memorializing the lynching 130 years ago, on June 2, 1892, of Robert Lewis, a local Black citizen. Though scantly remembered for most of the 20th century, the horrific incident was infamous in its time, seen as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward.
Situated at the confluence of the Delaware and Neversink Rivers, where the states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet, it was a largely peaceful, orderly burg, surrounded by water and mountains, attractive to city folk who came in summer to fish for trout, canoe in the scenic Delaware, or enjoy a breeze on the verandas of the local boardinghouses.
In recent years, due to the efforts of a small group of current and former residents, and the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been new interest in the lynching, arguably the most troubling incident in the town’s past. But years of silence about the crime have left many residents, Black and white, substantially unfamiliar with it.
Today, instead of guarded optimism, there is a weary pessimism that, as the Port Jervis lynching signaled intime, the assault on and devaluing of the lives of Black Americans are neither a regional nor a temporary feature but a national crisis and, for the foreseeable future, a permanent one.
These issues remain as deserving of our concern as they did 130 years ago, when America turned its gaze to Port Jervis.
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