Cape Cod Confidential

Worthington Wasn't First: 1921 The Yankee Lynch Mob

The mob arrived at the Barnstable County Jail and House of Corrections at 2:30 the morning of the Aug. 19, 1921. The jail's log for that night reports the crowd numbered 150. Only six men stood guard outside the jail, but they were ready.

Inside were three men : John Dias, Benjamin Gomes and Joseph Andrews. Wareham police had arrested them the night before in their home town of Onset, a small resort village in the town of Wareham, and charged them with kidnapping at gunpoint a man and woman.  According to police, the three men had abducted the couple late at night during a stroll on a Buzzards Bay street, and taken them to a secluded spot near the Cape Cod Canal. While holding the boyfriend at gunpoint, the three men repeatedly raped the woman.

The mob gathered in front of the brick jail in Barnstable Village. Witnesses later identified the rabble as workingmen and women from the Upper Cape, along with a sprinkling of summer visitors. Many in the crowd carried ropes and firearms. Their intention was to take the three men back to the remote section of Bourne where the alleged rape had occurred and hang them. As they walked up to the jail, the air was punctuated with shouts of "Let's get them!"

The only thing standing between the mob and the three men inside the jail was the chief warden, James Boland, and his five men. The officers fired riot guns over the mob's head, halting its progress. Boland ordered the mob to disperse or they "would be shot down like rats!"

For 90 minutes, the rabble milled about outside, but the chief warden's threat had cooled its bloodthirst. No further attempt was made to storm the jail.

Cape Cod had survived its first lynch mob, and thankfully, no one was hurt.

How could this have happened on Cape Cod? The reasons are complex, but indefensible. There was a perception by some white Cape Codders that the court system was corrupt, that it favored people of color. Dias and Gomes were Cape Verdean, as was Andrews' stepfather. A few weeks before the lynch mob, a Brockton judge had made national headlines by finding an African American man not guilty of a crime on the grounds that his people had suffered enough. Two years before, a Cape Verdean man from Onset had been tried for manslaughter after he killed a white man in a fight. In a plea bargain, the judge fined the defendant $200, then gave the money to the dead man's father. To people from Wareham and Bourne, it didn't matter that the dead man had provoked the Cape Verdean man and that the victim had died after being punched only once.

Even more significantly, all of Massachusetts was changing. It is no coincidence that this event occurred exactly halfway between the Emancipation Proclamation (which Lincoln attributed to Massachusetts Abolitionists) in 1863 and the desegregation of Boston's schools in the 1970s. Massachusetts had once been known as "The Negroes Paradise;" by the 1970s, it became known as the most racist state in the nation. Neither description was completely true, but both were true enough. And thanks to the New York Times and other national newspapers which printed stories about the lynch mob, the world now knew that Massachusetts was no longer a paradise for African Americans. And if Massachusetts, home of the Abolitionists, had fallen to racism, what hope was there for the rest of America.

The case against Dias, Gomes and Andrews was a significant turning point in Massachusetts jurisprudence. When the three men were arraigned in Barnstable Superior Court later that summer, the defense motioned to move the trial off Cape Cod. Never before had a judge granted a change of venue. Superior Court Judge Henry Lummus (later a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court) granted the motion, and for the first time in the history of Massachusetts a criminal trial was moved because of prejudice.

Joseph Andrews was 15 when the crime occurred. His lawyer attempted to get him tried as a juvenile, but Judge Lummus ruled that he was to stand trial with Gomes and Dias, both of whom were in their early 20s.

The trial of Dias, Gomes and Andrews was a sensation. Newspapers across New England blared every detail daily on their front pages. The first week appeared to go well for the defendants. The victim kept fainting on the stand (more than 30 times), and much of her testimony consisted of her saying "I don't know," or "I don't remember." Her escort testified that he had not been bound head and foot during the rape as had been reported in the newspapers. In truth, he testified he had been smoking cigarettes he had bummed from his captors.

 That first week the district attorney revealed he had conclusive proof that linked the three defendants to the stolen car that had been used in the abduction. A hat left in the abandoned car supposedly belonged to one of the defendants. In a scene eerily reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson trial three-quarters of a century later, the district attorney put the hat on Ben Gomes. Later, it turned out the hat belonged to the car's owner, a white man from Sagamore and the hat was withdrawn from evidence.

When the trial broke for the weekend, the prosecution had presented no evidence beyond the testimony of the witnesses that linked the three men to the crime. That all changed when court reopened Monday. The district attorney announced a surprise witness. George Snell, a Wareham man, who testified that he had seen the three men steal the car in Onset. Snell had not been scheduled to testify, and told the court that he had only told his story to the district attorney for the first time the day before. Try as they could, the defense lawyers could not shake Snell's testimony. The trial continued through the rest of the week, but the damage had been done. On Saturday the verdict came in -- guilty.

Dias, Gomes and Andrews were sentenced to 20-25 years. It was only because of their youth that they did not get a more severe sentence, the judge said.

One of the lawyers for the three men, William Lewis, believed with all his heart that the men were innocent. There was too much about the case against them that did not add up. He believed the alleged victims were lying to protect themselves. He fought for more than a decade for no compensation to free them.

In 1933, the governor pardoned the three men even though they had served slightly more than half the minimum sentence. What probably prompted the governor to grant them their freedom was a letter written by the judge who had sentenced the men. They had received a fair trial, Judge Henry Lummus wrote. "Upon the evidence the conviction in these cases was proper ... Yet I cannot say that my mind is free from doubt as to whether the true story has ever been revealed." To this day, it has not.

© 2008 Mystery Lane Press