The violence was triggered by the alleged rape at gunpoint of a 19 year old woman, Agnes Loebeck, on September 25, 1919. The following day the police arrested 40 year old Will Brown, a black man who lived with a white woman. Loebeck identified Brown as her rapist, although later reports by the Omaha Police Department and the United States Army stated that it was not a positive identification. There was an unsuccessful attempt to lynch Brown on the day of his arrest.

The Omaha Bee publicised the incident as one of a series of alleged attacks on white women by black men. The Bee was controlled by a political machine opposed to the current administration of Omaha and was running a series of articles on alleged incidents of "black criminality" to embarrass the new administration.

By 5:00 p.m., a mob of about 4,000 whites had crowded into the street on the south side of the Douglas County Courthouse. They began to assault the police officers, pushing one through a pane of glass in a door and attacking two others who had wielded clubs at the mob. At 5:15 p.m., officers deployed firehoses to dispel the crowd, but they responded with a shower of bricks and sticks. Nearly every window on the south side of the courthouse was broken. The crowd stormed the lower doors of the courthouse, and the Police inside discharged their weapons down an elevator shaft in an attempt to frighten them, but this further incited the mob. They again rushed the police who were standing guard outside the building, broke through their lines, and entered the courthouse through a broken basement door.

It was at this moment that Marshal Eberstein, chief of police, arrived. He asked leaders of the mob to give him a chance to talk to the crowd. He mounted to one of the window sills. Beside him was a recognized chief of the mob. At the request of its leader, the crowd stilled its clamor for a few minutes. Chief Eberstein tried to tell the mob that its mission would best be served by letting justice take its course. The crowd refused to listen. Its members howled so that the chief's voice did not carry more than a few feet. Eberstein ceased his attempt to talk and entered the besieged building.



By 6 p.m., throngs swarmed about the court house on all sides. The crowd wrested revolvers, badges and caps from policemen. They chased and beat every colored person who ventured into the vicinity. White men who attempted to rescue innocent blacks from unmerited punishment were subjected to physical abuse. The police had lost control of the crowd.

By 7 p.m., most of the policemen had withdrawn to the interior of the court house. There, they joined forces with Michael Clark, sheriff of Douglas County, who had summoned his deputies to the building with the hope of preventing the capture of Brown. The policemen and sheriffs formed their line of last resistance on the fourth floor of the court house.

The police were not successful in their efforts. Before 8 p.m., they discovered that the crowd would resort to any means to gain its end. Soon they saw tongues of flame leaping up at them. The crowd had set the magnificent courthouse building on fire. Its frenzied leaders had tapped a nearby gasoline filling station and saturated the lower floors with the flammable liquid.

Bullets began to spit. Members of the mob pillaged hardware stores in the business district and entered pawnshops, seeking firearms. Police records show that more than 1,000 revolvers and shotguns were stolen that night. The mob shot at any policeman who presented as a target with seven officers receiving gunshot wounds, although none of the wounds were serious.



Louis Young, 16 years old, was fatally shot in the stomach while leading a gang up to the fourth floor of the building. Witnesses say the boy was the most intrepid of the mob's leaders.

Pandemonium reigned outside the building. At Seventeenth and Douglas Streets, one block from the court house, James Hiykel, 34 years old, fell to the pavement with two bullets in his body and died. Hiykel had been a businessman in Omaha for ten years.

Bullets and rocks were continuously whizzing through the air. Spectators were shot. Participants inflicted minor wounds upon themselves. Women were thrown to the ground and trampled. Blacks were dragged from streetcars and beaten.

Meanwhile the plight of the police in the court house had become desperate. The fire had licked its way to the third floor. The officers faced the prospect of roasting to death. Appeals for help to the crowd below brought only bullets and curses. The mob frustrated all attempts to raise ladders to the imprisoned police. "Bring Brown with you and you can come down," somebody in the crowd shouted.

On the second floor of the building, three policemen and a newspaper reporter were imprisoned in a safety vault, whose thick metal door the mob had shut. The four men hacked their way out through the court house wall. The mob shot at them as they squirmed out of the stifling vault.



The gases of formaldehyde added to the terrors of the men imprisoned within the flaming building. Several jars of the powerful chemical had burst on the stairway. Its deadly fumes mounted to the upper floors. Two policemen were overcome. Their companions could do nothing to alleviate their sufferings.

Sheriff Clark led his prisoners (there were 121 of them) to the roof. Will Brown, for whom the mob was howling, became hysterical. Blacks, fellow prisoners of the hunted man, tried to throw him off the roof. Deputy Sheriffs Hoye and McDonald foiled the attempt.

Sheriff Clark ordered that female prisoners be taken from the building due to their distress. They ran down the burning staircases clad only in prison pajamas. Some of them fainted on the way. Members of the mob escorted them through the smoke and flames. Negro women as well as white women were helped to safety.

The mob poured more gasoline into the building. They cut every line of hose that firemen laid from nearby hydrants. The flames were rapidly lapping their way upward. It seemed like certain cremation for the prisoners and their protectors.

The orgy of lawlessness continued for several hours after Brown had been lynched. The police patrol was burned. The police emergency automobile was burned. Three times, the mob went to the city jail. The third time its leaders announced that they were going to burn it. Soldiers arrived before they could carry out their threat.



The riot lasted until 3 a.m., in the morning of September 29. At that hour, federal troops, under command of Colonel John E. Morris of the Twentieth Infantry, arrived from Fort Omaha and Fort Crook. Machine guns were placed in the heart of Omaha's business district and in the center of the "black belt." Major General Leonard Wood, commander of the Central Department, came the next day to Omaha by order of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Peace, enforced by 1,600 soldiers, then brooded over the city.

Martial law was not formally proclaimed in Omaha, but it was enacted throughout the city. By the request of City Commissioner W.G. Ure, who was acting mayor, control over the police department was vested in the military commander of the troops.