Especially leading into World War I, this method of vigilantism continued to be used by the KKK and other groups against Black Americans, immigrants and labor organizers, especially in the South and West. In nearby Ellsworth, Maine, a Know Nothing mob, seen by some as a forerunner to the KKK, tarred and feathered Jesuit priest Father John Bapst in 1851. Incidents of tarring and feathering as a form of public torture can be found throughout American history, from colonial times onward. Local police, alerted hours earlier, arrived only after the incident ended. The victims and bystanders cried out for the mob to stop but to no avail. The mob then covered them with feathers from their dorm room pillows. They were forced to slop each other with hot molasses. The mob captured the brothers and led them about four miles back to campus with horse halters around their necks.īefore a growing crowd at the livestock-viewing pavilion, members of the mob held down Samuel and Roger as their heads were shaved and their bodies stripped naked in the near-freezing weather. Soon a mob of hundreds of students and community members formed to finish what the freshmen had started. They knocked three freshmen attackers out cold in the process. While no first-person accounts or university records of the incident are known to remain, newspaper clippings and photographs from a former student’s scrapbook help fill in the details.Īlthough outnumbered, the Courtney brothers escaped. The mob planned to attack the two Black brothers from Boston in retaliation for what a newspaper article described at the time as their “domineering manner and ill temper.” The brothers were just two among what yearbooks show could not have been more than a dozen Black University of Maine students at the time. One cold April night in 1919, at around 2 a.m., a mob of 60 rowdy white students at the University of Maine surrounded the dorm room of Samuel and Roger Courtney in Hannibal Hamlin Hall. This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors. This article is republished here with permission from The Conversation. This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

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