(From H-Pennsylvania): August 13, 2011 will commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the lynching of Zachariah Walker in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. The violence received national and international attention and resulted in the reluctant prosecution of fifteen men and teenage boys. All were found not guilty at trial.
The Coatesville Historical Commission and several community organizations are coming together to sponsor a day-long program in Coatesville on August 13. A remembrance service, community forum and public presentation will mark the hundred anniversary in Coatesville. Other events are being planned throughout Chester County and the surrounding area. To commemorate the hundredth anniversary, The History Press has issued a new paperback edition of Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser’s award-winning 1991 book No Crooked Death: Coatesville and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker, fully revised and updated.
JANET tALLON
The commemoration of the killing of Zachariah Walker is a travesty; he had killed Officer Edgar Rice in cold blood to avoid being taken into custody. Rice was unarmed having dropped his gun and Walker admitted he saw that. Walker then shot him once with a contact shot, turned and followed him and shot him two more times in the head to make sure he was dead. His motive? He had killed another man and was a fugitive from justice and couldn’t be taken into custody because of this. In the next day before his capture, he shot at two more people, assaulted two men, and put his gun in the chest of one man and pulled the trigger, but the gun misfired. He was a drunken murderer and lifetime criminal having been arrested in 1906 in Williamsport for attempting to kill two elderly black women. He had committed other crimes there for which he spent time in prison. INSIDE THE COATESVILLE LYNCHING uses court testimony and other publications to set the record straight. This man had been in PA since at least 1902 when he was a strike breaker in Lebanon PA and was arrested there and literally ran out of town. The remembrance of a multiple murderer, drunk and career criminal is an abomination. Officer Edgar Rice was responding to shots fired by Walker at two immigrants that he was attempting to rob; Rice died in the line of duty trying to take into custody a threat to the community and he paid with his life.
JANET tALLON
I hope that you can read the book before the 13th of August.