On a particularly dark evening on January 23rd, 1906, about 6p, Nevada was making her way home from her job as a bookkeeper at W.W. Brooks grocery on Market Street. She had just gotten off the bus. As she walked toward her father’s house through the gravestones, she was attacked from behind, choked with a leather strap and raped. When later questioned by the Sheriff, Nevada wasn’t sure at first if the attacker was black or white. Then she said it was a Negro man with big muscles and “a soft, kind voice.”

It’s hard to appreciate the public outrage this incident caused. The month prior (December of 1905) a black man had raped a 15-year-old white girl living at the Vine Street Orphanage. One week later a 16-year-old girl had been severely stabbed by an escaping black burglar. The day after that a black man attacked a white schoolgirl in downtown Chattanooga. This was followed by a Chattanooga constable being shot by an infamous black gambler.

The two local newspapers, the morning Times and the afternoon News, competed with each other for inflammatory and indignant rhetoric about these incidents, as if attempting to be more likely quoted at the local saloons. “Desperadoes Run Rampant in Chattanooga” blared the headlines.

The prevailing sentiment put forward was that a message needed to be sent to the black population or no white woman in Chattanooga would be safe.  Sheriff Joseph F. Shipp, a former Confederate captain, was up for re-election soon. 

24-year-old Ed Johnson was identified by one white man after a $375 reward for information was posted. The several witnesses who saw him elsewhere that night were denigrated in court as untrustworthy due to their being either black themselves, or at a saloon where Ed was working that night. Nevada Taylor was at first unable and later very reluctant to identify him as her attacker. The court records reflect a tainted and biased process.

At this time, to be white and disagree that Ed Johnson was guilty was to invite violence upon yourself. To be black and say anything about the incident was to do the same. Yet the citizenry and their newspapers loudly objected to the idea that any local trial could be anything but fair.

Two local black attorneys appealed Johnson’s conviction first to the state and then to the federal courts. The Supreme Court reviewed the case and issued a stay of execution for further review. To local residents, only barely deterred from a previous lynching attempt on Johnson, this was too much.

Aided by intentionally weak security measures at the jail, on the night of March 19th, 1906, a lynch mob broke into the county jail in downtown Chattanooga, dragged Ed Johnson to the Walnut Street Bridge, beat him, hung him and shot him (in that order) until he was dead. They hung him from the second cross railing back from the city side of the bridge because another black had previously been lynched from the first railing of the nearly-new bridge, with the intention, one man yelled, of working their way across the bridge.

Despite the beatings and threats and promises of leniency if he would confess his crime, Ed Johnson’s last words were, “God bless you all. I am an innocent man.” Those were the words placed on his tombstone.

The Pleasant Garden Cemetery, established in 1891 as one of the first black cemeteries in the state of Tennessee, is located on the southeast side of Missionary Ridge, just below the crest, in the community of Ridgeside, not far from Shallowford Road. Ed Johnson’s grave is there.

Burials at Pleasant Garden continued into the late 1960s. The property is now privately owned. Although it includes hundreds, probably thousands of graves, it fell into such neglect that it was practically unrecognizable as a cemetery by the late 1990s. Efforts are now underway to at least stop further decay of the grounds.

-Doug Eckert