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By Mike Hudson
He opened the door and stepped into a tableau of domestic horror. His 2-year-old daughter, Mildred, lay in a pool of blood. He snatched her up and saw she had a gaping wound in her head. He did not see his wife anywhere. He placed Mildred on a couch. He searched the house. He followed a trail of blood upstairs. He opened a closet door and found his wife, Alice, unconscious, her throat slashed. A hatchet and razor, both stained red, lay near. Somehow, mother and daughter clung to life, and doctors revived them. Alice Shields haltingly described her attacker, a stranger who had come to rob the house. It was one detail of her description - the color of the assailant's skin - that transfigured the attack from a horrifying crime by a single man into something else. Alice and Mildred Shields were white. Their attacker was black. In an era when racial oppression was growing in intensity, the race of victims and attackers carried powerful implications. Crimes by whites were treated as individual transgressions. Crimes by blacks against whites were treated as the sins of an entire race. In the days to come, the manhunt for the would-be killer was almost overshadowed by the unrest sparked by the racial logarithm of the crime. Hundreds of whites would take to the streets in violent mobs. Black citizens would endure vilification, assaults, intimidation, threats of lynching. And inside newspaper offices, away from the mobs but not from the prejudices that fueled them, men used the power of pen and printing press to both whip up and redirect bigotry, seeking to transform the crudeness of the mob mentality into a more orderly, lasting spirit of racial domination. The Roanoke Times treated the crime as evidence of the black race's depravity, citing it as justification for keeping blacks powerless: cut off from education, political rights, economic opportunity. The paroxysms of the Shields case were far from unique in the lifetime of Jim Crow. They were in fact less frenzied than the upheavals that characterized many other racial confrontations that shook the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. Lynchings were commonplace across the nation. Mobs in Roanoke had lynched black men in 1892 and 1893. Thousands of blacks were murdered or burned out of their homes by white mobs during "race riots" in East St. Louis, Tulsa and elsewhere. The Shields case provides a sobering portrait, however, of Roanoke's race relations at the turn of the last century. It was, in all respects, a tragic story - for the Shields family, for black citizens who were menaced and unjustly blamed, for anyone who hoped to see the city strive for humanity and reason in a time of tribulation. &&& The Roanoke Times related the crime in explicit detail. Mrs. Shields' throat had been cut from ear to ear by the razor, her skull fractured by the cutting end of the hatchet. Mildred had been burned deeply with a hot poker. Only the family's 2-month-old son, sleeping in his crib, was unharmed. The city convulsed with outrage. Crowds gathered. By 8 that night, nearly 1,000 people clamored outside the jail. Rumors flew: The evildoer was already in the lockup. Mayor Joel Cutchin and Judge John Woods stood on the stone steps and swore police had made no arrest. A beer bottle whizzed from the crowd and grazed the judge's head. "Break down the door!" people yelled. "Search the jail!" It was a moment fraught with peril. Everyone knew the city's history of mob savagery. In 1892, a white girl had run home saying she had been accosted by a black man who wore rubber boots. A white horde grabbed the first black man it encountered wearing rubber boots - not the man she'd identified - and hung him near Wasena Bridge. The Roanoke Times declared, nevertheless, that "Lynching has its place." In 1893, Mayor Henry Trout called the state militia to stop a mob from lynching a black man accused of assaulting a market vendor. Shots flew. Eight died. Dozens were wounded. After more clashes, police turned over the suspect. The mob hung Thomas Smith, riddled him with bullets and attached a sign saying "Mayor Trout's friend." Barely a decade later, authorities understood they could not control the rabble. They allowed the mob to appoint a committee to inspect the jail. The searchers found no suspect. An editorial in the next morning's newspaper said the "heart of every white man" went out to the Shields family. It urged whites not to take matters into their own hands. That said, the editorial focused upon what the Times saw as the root cause of the crime. It spoke of "the black menace" and "the beast in the negro," playing on fears and prejudices: "If the moral leprosy of the negro find expression in the home of one white family, wherein is another safe?" The paper blamed schools that treated blacks "as good as a white man" rather than teaching them "perfection in menial occupations." Through the expenditure of "the white man's money," the paper said, a "new issue of darkies is being bred to be a source of never ending unrest and peril to the white people of the country." The logic was characteristic of the reasoning that underpinned Virginia's post-Reconstruction apartheid: Any black-on-white crime was an attack on white authority; its cause must therefore be an insufficient resolve in keeping blacks in a place of servitude. &&& Police rousted black men in almost every corner of the state. Reports of suspects came from all over. Bluefield. Radford. Wytheville. In Chesterfield County, deputies scoured the countryside with bloodhounds. In Roanoke, a stable hand was briefly arrested, even though he was at least four inches too short to be the wanted man. Days passed. Whites fumed. How could the villain have eluded capture? The Roanoke Times detected "an undercurrent of subtle race sympathy for the brutal assailant of Mrs. Shields and her child." Mayor Cutchin said nearly every white believed "some of the colored people know the culprit and will not give information." It made no difference that black citizens wrote to "condemn any crime committed by our people" and donated money to boost the reward for the outlaw's capture. Enmity ruled. Hearsay outraced facts. On Feb. 3, four days after the attack, rumors spread that a black pastor, the Rev. R.R. Jones, had preached that Mr. Shields was the one who had committed the assault. At least 1,000 whites gathered and headed for Jones' First Baptist Church. The mob interrupted a prayer meeting, but arrived too late to find the minister, who, it was said, had fled in a horse-drawn buggy. The rabble stormed through black neighborhoods, shooting up Jones' house, tearing down fence pickets, flinging bricks at homes and blasting pistol shots heavenward. The next morning, The Washington Post headlined its story, "Race War Threatened." Jones wrote authorities demanding protection. The mayor replied archly that the city had no resources to protect those "who were known to make indiscreet remarks that would arouse the indignation of the public." Jones denied making the remarks. He said he had not preached during the sermon; two other ministers had been in the pulpit, and they had said nothing about the case. Whites weren't interested in his side of the story. Hundred of placards papered the city, vowing Jones would be lynched if he did not leave town by nightfall. The minister walked seven miles through the woods to secretly catch a train heading north. &&& The letters column of the Times seethed with malice. One letter, signed simply WOMAN, tarred blacks as "ravenous beasts" and asked "tell me oh! men is it any wonder your mothers, wives and daughters cry out to you for some means of protection from this fiend?" Another, signed PRUDENCE, urged a program of economic ostracism: The negro domestic must go. Every negro cook or maid has her male satellites, generally of the most idle, vicious and insolent type. These hangers-on . . . . learn all the ins and outs of our homes, and plan their devilment while eating our bread in our very dwellings. Let all grocers, coal and wood dealers, laundrymen and others who send drivers into our houses be required to employ whites, or lose their customers. Let fences be placarded, "No negroes allowed," and let all prowlers be met with a shower of bullets. Let us "carry the war into Africa" and make them feel the weight of their own undoing. Words turned to action. A black man from West Salem, Taylor Fields, was accused of making a "dastardly statement" about the case. As a mob hauled him away, the Times said, Fields "hollered a good-bye to his wife, believing that he was to be hung, but this was not the intention of the mob, as much as he deserved it." Instead, The Washington Post reported, the mob stripped him, tied him to a telephone pole at the corner of Salem's Main and Broad streets and whipped him "unmercifully" with electric light wires. His screams carried for blocks. The thugs silenced him by stuffing handkerchiefs in his mouth. The Times said the young men who oversaw the lashing "seem to have had the sanction of every citizen, old or young." Whites seized on any rumor - no matter how unfounded - that blacks had made disparaging comments. Four blacks at the Norfolk & Western shops were fired. Two other black men were run out of town amid threats on their lives. A mob stalked to a black woman's home in Northwest Roanoke, giving up its plan to flog her only after finding the terrorized woman "in spasms." Mayor Cutchin beseeched the populace to "calm down and do nothing rash," saying the "excitement" was hindering law officers' efforts to find "the brute." The unruliness, he said, "has disgraced the city and its good citizens. The throwing of rocks at negro women or threatening the lives of colored people is unmanly and cowardly." &&& On Feb. 13, the front page of The Roanoke Times proclaimed, "THE NEGRO FIEND TAKEN IN CUSTODY." His name was Henry Williams. He had been arrested in the coalfields around N orth Fork, W.Va. Williams was not from Roanoke at all. He was a drifter who had left the city soon after the crime. If the mayor or anyone else apologized to black citizens for wrongfully accusing them of harboring the offender, the expression of regret was not recorded in the Times. Williams was loaded on a heavily guarded train. It passed through Roanoke at the hasty speed of 40 mph, carrying him to the State Penitentiary in Richmond, where he could be free from lynch mobs until trial. The Times described Williams as a "loathsome brute" with a "woolly head" and "beast-like eyes." The paper quoted Mrs. Shields' father saying "it was a 'dirty shame' that the negro was not taken to Roanoke, where the people could inflict the punishment he deserved." A Charlottesville newspaper said Williams should be burned at the stake without benefit of trial. Trial commenced Feb. 16. Eight hundred militiamen from across the state were on hand to keep the peace. Testimony indicated Williams had confessed, telling investigators where to find two watches and a coat stolen from the Shields home. Twelve white men took five minutes to return a guilty verdict. Judge Woods was likewise speedy in passing sentence: Death by hanging. Williams was stashed in the Lynchburg jail until the appointed date. The day before his execution, he was baptized by a Catholic priest. He told a reporter: "I won't talk any more. ... Jesus was hanging on the cross for three hours, all to wipe my sins away." On March 18, he was led onto a gallows at the Roanoke jail yard. Rooftops were packed with spectators. Some shimmied to the top of a telephone pole on Campbell Avenue. The trap fell at 11 a.m. Williams' body was cut down at 11:13. A mad scramble ensued as souvenir hunters grabbed for pieces of the rope and Williams' death hood. &&& Mildred Shields survived less than another year. She died Feb. 15, 1905, from the effects of the attack. Her obituary said, "the child never knew another well day," but "death was painless, she falling asleep." Alice Shields died in 1956, at age 76. The Rev. R.R. Jones did not return to Roanoke. He had come to First Baptist in 1882, taking over a congregation with $11 in its treasury. In his 22 years in the pulpit, he led his flock in raising a new house of worship and paying off $20,000 of the cost of the $25,000 structure. In the aftermath of the mob threats, Mayor Cutchin once again let Jones know the city would do nothing to protect him or take action against those who had forced him to leave town and give up his pastorate. "I would not know who to arrest," the mayor said. Jones moved his family to Pennsylvania. Then he sued in federal court in Lynchburg, demanding $50,000 to censure the mayor and other Roanoke officials for failing to uphold his rights. His lawsuit was unsuccessful. The convulsions of strife over the Shields case seemed to harden racist sentiments, prompting whites to redouble their efforts to maintain racial domination. Several days before Williams' hanging, The Roanoke Times devoted nearly an entire page to an open letter headed, "The Negro Question." The author said the "future of our beautiful southern land" was jeopardized by the "enormous crimes perpetrated by negroes." The only solution, he said, was the "formation of a white man's league" that would exert a "repressive influence on the lawless negroes." The missive was signed by the Rev. C.R. Vaughan. It would be less than two decades before the Ku Klux Klan formed a chapter in Roanoke. Many whites from all walks rushed to sign up. Roanoke Times staff researcher Belinda Harris contributed extensive reporting on this story. Information came primarily from back issues of The Roanoke Times. Other sources included Raymond Barnes' book, "A History of Roanoke," and the archives of The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
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