History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou
Join us on August 13th as we shine a light on our shared history, and learn about the tragedy of Zachariah Walker & Edgar Rice.
We will begin our remembrance by having a burial service for Zachariah Walker. Ministers from different faiths will conduct the service.
We will then proceed to Gateway Church where lunch will be provided. Participants will be able to look at displays and videos from many different local organizations during the lunch hour.
After lunch, we will commemorate the events of August 13th through the words and thoughts of local leaders.
Participants are also welcome to be part of an interactive forum, discussing those events and putting them in context. There will also be music and singing and a sociodrama.
Zachariah Walker was a victim of a lynching in Coatesville in 1911. We will learn together in hopes of overcoming hatred and violence through the strength of community. August 13th 2025 will mark the 114th anniversary of the event. Below is a detailed account of the lynching and its context, prepared by professors of history emeritus Dennis B Downey Ph.D, and Charles Hardy III Ph.D.
We’re co-sponsoring the event officially titled The Together Endowment’s Third Annual Senator Andy Dinniman Community Gathering, with The Together Endowment and the Coatesville Area Ministerium.
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Please sign-up if you’d like to attend! this helps us estimate attendance for food and transportation, and provides you with e-mail reminders for the event.
Transportation from Coatesville to the event will be available, although the details are still in progress. Please register for more information.
Statement of Purpose
Maya Angelou describes the essential focus if we are to achieve a diverse, but united America.
As we mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, her quote is
especially meaningful. Each generation of Americans, including our own, must look at the
Declaration to celebrate its successes, while at the same confronting its failure to make its
aspirational words that we are all created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights a reality for each and every American. We deeply care about our nation and
dedicate ourselves to helping it meet the Declaration’s aspirational goals.
This can only be achieved if we have the courage needed to face our history and understand
the role that race has played in the American experience. The brutal lynching of Zachariah
Walker shows the need and provides the impetus to have this courageous conversation. You
see, whether as an individual or a community, the past is never completely past and racial
reconciliation and national unity depends on understanding the impact of the past. What Maya
Angelou is saying, you cannot rewrite history to make it look different but you must have the
courage to face and understand it, so that it doesn’t happen again.
You will find on this website, a history of the 1911 lynching as well as a potential lynching in
1938, out of which the Coatesville NAACP was formed.
Zachariah Walker was burned to death and the crowd of several thousand watched as he was
thrown back into the fire three times. He was never given a proper burial and that burial will
finally take place, 114 years after the August 13th lynching with the Coatesville Area Ministerium
officiating. In the afternoon at Gateway Church we will gather to comprehend how race played a
role in lynching and the dynamic behind lynching that have resulted in the death of over 4,000
African Americans. Zachariah Walker was burned to death and the crowd of several thousand watched as he was thrown back into the fire three times. He was never given a proper burial and that burial will finally take place, 114 years after the August 13th lynching with the Coatesville Area Ministerium officiating. In the afternoon at Gateway Church we will gather to comprehend how race played a role in lynching and the dynamic behind lynching that have resulted in the death of over 4,000 African Americans.
We understand that Zachariah Walker and the person he was accused of killing, police officer
Edgar Rice, were both victims of August 13 1911. As a recognition of the humanity of both and
of all people, before the burial, a delegation will go to Rice’s gravesite to put flowers on his
grave.
Zachariah Walker received no burial, was killed by a lynch mob, denied a fair trial, and it’s time
that we face the horrors of lynching and fully recognize the humanity of Zachariah and others
who were lynched. It’s time to courageously face our shared American history and to reaffirm in
America that mob violence will not be tolerated and that every American has a right to a fair
burial and a proper burial. That is the purpose of the August 13th Zachariah Walker
Remembrance Day. Join us in this affirmation.
Commemoration: The Lynching of Zachariah Walker
Historians have generally treated lynching as a peculiarly Southern phenomenon, but on
Sunday evening August 13, 1911, one of the worst spectacle lynchings in American history
occurred in Coatesville, a mid-sized Pennsylvania steel town. The burning alive of Zachariah
Walker as several thousand spectators looked on demonstrated the worsening nature of race
relations in the North during the era of the Great Migration of southern Blacks to northern towns
and cities in the early 1900s.
Moreover, the incident received national and international attention, and it dramatized the
potential for racial violence in Pennsylvania and across the country. The Coatesville lynching
also mobilized the newly formed NAACP to launch a nationwide anti-lynching crusade.
Reformer John Jay Chapman termed the entire episode “one of the most dreadful crimes in
history” and an “American tragedy.”
Pennsylvania has a long history of racial conflict, chiefly in the form of race riots and efforts
to deny suffrage. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there were eight recorded
lynchings in the Commonwealth. By any standard of measurement, the Coatesville lynching was
the most significant and had the most far-reaching consequences.
Coatesville, PA, c. 1911. Source: Chester County History Center, West Chester, PA
Coatesville itself was a prosperous steel town located along the Brandywine Creek some
thirty miles west of Philadelphia. As the industry grew the small borough tripled in size to
nearly 12,000 inhabitants by the summer of 1911. The largest influx of newcomers was from
southern and eastern Europe, and African Americans, including Zachariah Walker, who had only
recently arrived from rural Virginia and secured employment in the Worth Brothers mill.
Tensions between natives and newcomers ran high that season. We will never know
exactly what took place on Saturday evening, August 12. What we do know is that as he walked
home alone, Walker became involved in a scuffle with Edgar Rice, a former borough policeman
now working as a security guard at the mill site. When Rice tried to arrest Walker for public
drunkenness, the two scuffled, Walker shot the guard, and then fled the scene. (Given the
guard’s questionable jurisdiction off company property, Walker may have been acting in self-
defense.) Rice stumbled to a nearby storefront where he died of his injuries. Within an hour a posse formed and set out to apprehend Walker, who had vanished into the countryside south of
Coatesville.
By mid-morning Sunday a group of men found Walker hiding in an orchard. As they
approached him Walker allegedly tried to take his own life rather than be captured. It is more
plausible that a member of the posse shot Walker, who fell from a tree with a severe head
wound. Someone said, “Let’s lynching him here,” but cooler heads prevailed, and Walker was
transported back to the Coatesville hospital, where surgery was performed to repair his jaw.
Around twilight, a crowd estimated at more than two thousand marched on the hospital, the
police guard stood aside, and the leaders seized Walker, still shackled to the bed frame, and
carried him from the hospital out Strode Avenue. Just off the road a large bonfire was set, and
the mob watched in morbid fascination as Walker was thrown atop the pyre. Three times he
crawled off, only to be thrown back in the blaze. The last time Walker’s foot was cut off and a
rope tied around the victim to hold him in the inferno. His last spoken words were, “Don’t give
me no crooked death because I’m not white.”
When the deed was done, onlookers waited hours for the ashes to cool so they could
retrieve souvenirs. By all accounts the most excited culprits were teenage boys closest to the fire.
No one stood against the mob.
Zachariah Walker’s Remains, August 14, 1911. Source: Chester County History Center, West
Chester, PA
For two weeks, state police patrolled the streets to prevent further racial unrest and quell
rumors of reprisals. National criticism was scathing, with the likes of former president Theodore
Roosevelt, and civil rights leaders T. Thomas Fortune and Ida Wells-Barnett denouncing the
residents and police for their inaction. The NAACP’s W.E.B. Du Bois wrote scornfully of “that
quiet Sabbath evening,” when a large number of people left church services to follow the mob.
Religious periodicals condemned a conspiracy of silence that stymied efforts to bring the alleged
perpetrators to justice.
Despite strong community opposition, pressure from the state government resulted in the
indictment of a dozen men and teenage boys for their roles in Zachariah Walker’s death. In the
end, all were found not guilty and the Commonwealth abandoned further prosecutions. One
constructive outcome was a NAACP-sponsored rally in New York to raise funds in support of a
national anti-lynching campaign. Although the Commonwealth threatened to revoke
Coatesville’s municipal charter, no further action was taken against the community or those
responsible for Walker’s abduction and death. The Walker lynching did, however, mobilize a
movement in Pennsylvania for a state anti-lynching law. First proposed in the General Assembly
in 1913, it took ten years for the measure to gain enough support to become a law that made
participation in a lynching a felony.
Local residents standing near the site of Zachariah Walker’s lynching, August 14, 1911 Source:
Chester County History Center, West Chester, PA
Lynchings were often underreported, and attempted lynchings, including two later incidents
in Coatesville, often have been ignored in the history of racial violence. In 1938, as rumors
circulated of a possible lynching, local Blacks organized themselves into an armed militia to
prevent further violence. In 1911, police chief Charles Umsted was indicted for involuntaery
manslaughter for his failure to the stop the lynching. This time, Coatesville police chief Ralph
Williams courageously used his authority to prevent vigilante violence. It should be noted that
both Zachariah Walker and Edgar Rice, their families, and the community were traumatized in
the 1911 incident. The lynch mob not only prevented Walker from receiving a trial; it also
prevents us today from fully understanding what actually took place between Rice and Walker.
The memory of Zachariah Walker’s lynching remains controversial, another reminder of the
history and gruesome legacy of mob violence and racial intimidation in Pennsylvania and the
United States.
Dennis B. Downey, Ph.D., is Professor of History Emeritus at Millersville University.
Charles Hardy III, Ph.D., is Professor of History Emeritus at West Chester University.
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