Knoxville, Tennessee, and Omaha, Nebraska, did not appear to be likely sites of racial violence in 1919. Knoxville’s mayor, John McMillan, had recently spurned a Ku Klux Klan organizer’s request for support and had publicly denounced the Klan in an address to black leaders. Omaha, an industrial city on the banks of the Missouri River, did not have a large black population. In his response to a NAACP questionnaire about the racial conflict spreading across the nation, Omaha’s chief of police succinctly observed that “we have had no race riots here.” In August and September, however, Knoxville and Omaha experienced race riots after massive mobs formed to lynch black men accused of crimes against white women. The mobs stormed the courthouses in both cities and attacked black residents, who responded with individual and collective acts of self-defense. In a resemblance to Chicago and Washington, Knoxville’s armed resistance featured roving groups of black men who repelled or slowed down bands of white attackers. Although black self-defense in Omaha was more dispersed and sporadic than in Knoxville, it prevented a mob from mounting an attack on Omaha’s black neighborhood. As was the case in Charleston, Bisbee, Longview, Washington, and Chicago, black self-defenders in Knoxville and Omaha confronted not only mobbing whites but also hostile police, troops, and volunteer vigilantes. If the courthouse riots demonstrated that no city or locale in the United States was immune from antiblack collective violence in 1919, then African Americans’ actions in Knoxville and Omaha demonstrated that armed resistance was no aberration.

The Charge against Maurice Mays

For Maurice Mays, Friday, August 29, 1919, was a busy day. In his early thirties, the Knoxville native was handsome, with almond eyes, smooth cheeks, and a sublimely confident expression. Posing for a portrait as a young man, he offered a pensive look, gazing directly at the camera, lips caught between a smile and a frown, chin propped on folded fingers. His taste for fine clothes and beautiful women made it easy to dismiss him as a dandy, but Mays had many interests and diversions. For a time he owned a café and briefly served as a deputy sheriff. He also knew the law from the other side: his arrest record included charges, but no convictions, for gambling and carrying a concealed weapon.