COMMUNITY
THE ED JOHNSON MEMORIAL In remembrance, reconciliation and healing By Chuck Wasserstrom
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aFrederick Thirkill is a lifelong storyteller, historian and educator, but even he didn’t know the story. Growing up in Chattanooga, Thirkill knew that the Walnut Street Bridge—a popular pedestrian path for locals and visitors—had a dark secret. A lynching happened on the bridge more than a century ago, but names and circumstances were seemingly forgotten. But dots became connected as a result of a newspaper article in 1999 about Pleasant Garden Cemetery, an abandoned graveyard in Chattanooga’s Shepherd community. “I was amazed to read that there was this Black cemetery that I had never heard of,” says Thirkill, a 1997 graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “Being a lover of history, and Black history in particular, I wanted to go to this place.” Thirkill saw that Pleasant Garden, which had operated from 1891 to 1970, had fallen into a state of disrepair. There he observed that the cemetery is the final resting spot of—among others—Lula F. Kennedy, the first Black music teacher in Chattanooga; Dr. Thomas William Haigler, one of the area’s first Black surgeons; John Louis Brown, the great-grandfather of singer Lionel Richie; and Thirkill’s own great-grandfather, Willis Orr. After seeing the cemetery’s conditions, Thirkill set out to clean it up. “It was just a simple desire to reclaim the dignity of the lives buried in that abandoned cemetery because I felt that it was just so disrespectful to have such a historic cemetery lying in such disarray,” he says. “I never dreamed that in doing that, I would learn the story of Ed Johnson.”
utc.edu/thirkill utc.edu/johnson-memorial 18 | The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Magazine
Ed Johnson’s story is not easy to summarize. In 1906, Johnson—a 24-year-old Black man—was unjustly convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. When the U.S. Supreme Court intervened with a stay of execution as a result of the first and only criminal trial in the Supreme Court’s history, a mob of white people stormed the jailhouse in Chattanooga, took Johnson and—despite his maintaining his innocence—hanged him from the Walnut Street Bridge. The case was largely unknown, especially among white residents, until the 1999 publication of Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips Jr.’s book “Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism.” Thirkill’s early trips to Pleasant Garden coincided with the release of the book. “We scheduled the first cleanup,” Thirkill says, “and while we were there, Leroy Phillips came over to me and introduced himself. He said, ‘Come on young man, I want to show you something.’ He walked me to the burial site of Ed Johnson and began to tell me the story.” Phillips, a longtime Chattanooga criminal defense attorney, brought Thirkill to the tombstone inscribed with Johnson’s final words: “God bless you all. I AM a innocent man.” “Even after their book came out, there didn’t seem like enough people knew this story,” Thirkill says. “The baton was passed to me. From that point, I felt that not only was it my responsibility to learn this story, but it was now my responsibility to share the story.” Thirkill wrote the play, Dead Innocent: The Ed Johnson Story. He established the Ed Johnson Memorial Scholarship Fund. He met
