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1. Here is a story about another day of mayhem at the nation's Capitol. On May 1, 1894, Jacob Coxey, leader of a march of the unemployed, was famously arrested for stepping on the Capitol lawn. But blood flowed as police attacked Black citizens peacefully gathered at the Capitol.
2. In the midst of a terrible depression, unemployed from across the U.S. headed to DC to petition for a Good Roads Bill, infrastructure spending to provide jobs. Coxey, a Populist from Ohio, led about 300 jobless in a 500-mile march to read the petition from the Capitol steps.
3. Political & military leaders braced for the event. The War Department delivered cases of carbines, pistols, and ammunition. The National Guard drilled. The police swore in two hundred emergency members. Police swept the Capitol rotunda & sensitive places of suspicious persons.
4. Police chief Wm Moore sent spies as the march crossed Maryland. They reported 300 ragtag, unarmed, and peaceful marchers. Contrary to reports, there was no violent horde about to sack DC. But something was no less frightening to Moore: Black marchers & joyous Black crowds.
5. "Our movement is cosmopolitan," Coxey said, open to "all of humanity." Jasper Johnson of WV & other Black men marched "on a footing of equality." John Mitchell & other Black editors took note. They criticized most white Populists for abiding the color line but praised Coxey.
6. George Knox's Freeman likened the Coxey marchers to John Brown's band, a drop of rain before the flood of redemption for millions of black citizens. The jobless marchers had no sharpened pikes or violent intentions. But Chief Moore had reason for alarm.
7. DC had the largest Black population of any city in U.S. & half of that population was unemployed. Thousands faced hunger & evictions. School children went barefoot. Moore earned the peoples' wrath, because as police chief he was in charge of charity relief & did his job badly.
8. The bitterest point of contention involved years of police violence. The DC's white police force clubbed & murdered Black citizens with impunity, & Calvin Chase, editor of The Bee, & the Black community waged a bold campaign to stop the brutality.
9. They focused their anger on Wm Moore, who in the spring of 1892 had exonerated an officer who had murdered a Black child. In this context, the police & National Guard armed & drilled in preparation for Coxey's arrival at the Capitol.
10. On May 1, the Coxey march paraded down Pennsylvania Ave, greeted by 20,000 well-wishers, half of them Black citizens of DC. Rev George Lee, pastor of the 3,500 member Vermont Ave Baptist Church, waved a Coxey flag amid a joyous & peaceful crowd.
11. Coxey walked towards the Capitol to read his petition for a Good Roads bill, only to be arrested for stepping on the grass & taken into custody. (Note: May 1, 1944, 50 years later, a New Deal Congress invited Coxey to read his petition on the Capitol steps).
12. As Coxey was being arrested, the police unleashed mayhem. Armed with truncheons, they engaged in a riot of violence against peaceful Black spectators, breaking skulls & bones of some twenty men, women & children, including one man sent to the hospital in critical condition.
13. In the aftermath, the remnants of the Coxey march found refuge in the Black community, where Black women provided the logistics to provide food & shelter & the African Methodist Mount Pisgah Negro Chapel harbored a group of New England marchers.
14. Meanwhile, the Black community asked the question, what type of violence would have been unleashed if Coxey had been Black?
15. "Ask What the Country Would Do," wrote the Baptist Vanguard, if thousands of unemployed Black workers "marched on to Washington to make demands on Congress?" Indeed, here we are in 2021 asking the same questions about race, class, & power at the nation's Capitol.
