I want to tell you about another black woman who suffered a horrific ordeal. The injustice and brutality that she faced was a result of her being both black and a woman. This is an important story to tell because it's not just about one black woman who suffered.
Her story is a part of a larger story of black women who have suffered under the weight of injustice and oppression. Black women who have been brutalized and mistreated for no other reason than they were black women. This video and the story I'm going to tell you about is a continuation of another video I did it by a black child named Mary Booth.
Mary was falsely accused and convicted and sentenced to die by hanging at age 13 for a crime that she did not commit. She suffered tremendously. From being almost lynched to being abused in prison, her life was full of pain. And so many of you were really touched and moved by Mary's story.
So we decided to cover that topic more here in this video. There was so much more that I wanted to talk about as it relates to the demonization of black women in the Mary Booth video, but I couldn't because it would have been too long. So, what I want to do here is delve deeper into this subject and tell you another tragic story of a black woman who suffered. I'm not going to repeat all of the historical context I shared in the Mary Booth video, so I encourage you to watch that video if you haven't already. I provide a really good history on how the narrative that black women are dangerous was shaped and created.
But I do want to share with you some additional information that I didn't get into in the last video. So, give me a few moments to talk about this and then I'll get into what happened to the black woman. At least 150 black women were lynched. And thousands more were attacked and violated by white mobs in the American South between the years of 1880 and 1965. The lynching of black women called into question white southerners'defense of this barbaric mob violence ritual. They maintained that this practice was necessary to protect white women who were being attacked by black men.
But the fact that so many black women were lynched for things like arson and poisoning and causing offense to a white person contradicted this idea that lynching was only used on black men. to prevent attacks on white women. This was a lie. Lynching had nothing to do with protecting white women. It had to do with brutalizing black people because they were black.
We know it was a lie because if the only reason for lynching was to protect white women from black men, then why was a black woman named Emma Fair lynched in 1893? A mob stormed a jail in Alabama and fired at her and four black men as they were in the cell who were accused of burning a white man's cotton gin. If lynching was only about protecting white women from black men, then Mahala Jackson and Luke Carter would not have been lynched in 1893 in Quincy, Mississippi for being complicit in poisoning a white family even though a coroner's jury found them innocent.
A black woman named Julia Metz not have been lynched in 1891 for allegedly setting fire to the Barnum for Employer, J.S. Blaylock. After being arrested, Julia was taken from the constable and hanged from a tree. I could keep going on and on and on with stories of countless black women who were attacked and beaten and lynched well into the 20th century and every time the brutality against them was justified. White newspapers would often defend lynchings of black women. They would describe black women as being vicious and dangerous or monstrous.
Public opinion had to be swayed in favor of lynching when it came to women. So the white press made sure that black women were portrayed in the worst possible light to justify the mob's actions against them. It was easy to justify the lynching of a black man. The accusation was not just a lynching of a black man. of violating white women received no pushback when it came to lynching black men. But that wasn't the case for black women.
There was no comparable crime that would justify the lynching of a black woman. So the monstrous and dangerous black woman had to be created. The lynchings of black women exposed the real reason behind Southern lynching, and that was to ensure that the caste system that kept black people on the bottom row of society was maintained at all costs. This idea of black women poisoning white families went back to slavery.
Enslaved black people not only worked in the fields, but also in the slave owners'homes. And slave-owning whites maintained a fear about being poisoned by the enslaved black people that they were keeping in bondage and brutalizing. In 1751, South Carolina passed a law that made it illegal for a black person to teach another black person anything about any poisonous plant, herb, root, or poison.
It made this crime punishable by death. In Charleston, an enslaved black woman was burned alive after a white infant came up sick and they accused her of poisoning that child. In 1886, a black woman named Eliza Woods was accused of poisoning a white woman she worked for as a cook named Mary Wooten.
It was claimed that Mary Wooten had arsenic in her stomach and when Eliza's house was searched. A rat poison called Ruff on Rats was found in it. That was all the evidence that was needed to accuse, arrest, and lynch Eliza.
A mob of 1,000 men formed and dragged Eliza from the jail, stripped her naked, and hanged her from a tree in front of the courthouse. After she was hanged, the mob fired at her body. Papers referred to Eliza as a black female devil who deserved what she got. This was the environment that black women were living in. They were under full...
...assault at all times from all directions. And this was the environment that Jenny Steers found herself in when she became another black woman to suffer at the hands of those who did not see her as human and were quick to accuse, convict, and execute her without taking a breath or blinking an eye. Jenny Steers was born Jenny Clayton in August of 1877 in northwest Louisiana.
Both her mother and her father were from Louisiana. We don't know their names because we weren't able to locate any census records before the year 1900. that will help us to detail Jenny's family history. Jenny never attended school and could not read or write.
In September of 1898, she married a man named Alex Steers. Together, they had two children, a son named Walter, who was born one year before they married in 1897, and a son named Robert, who was born in 1900. Something happened between 1898 when Jenny and Alex married because the 1900 U.S. Census, which was taken in early June, states that Jenny was a widow raising her two sons by herself. Around this time, Jenny worked as a farmer and a sharecropper and lived on or near a plantation called Cross Keys Plantation. This was about 30 miles down the river from Shreveport.
Sometime in the summer of 1900, Jenny moved to Shreveport. She worked as a domestic worker in the home of a white woman named Alice Matthews. The Matthews family lived in the downtown Shreveport area and ran a boarding house that sometimes had as many as 35 people staying there at a single time. Before I get into what happened to Jenny Steers, it's important for me to give you one more piece. to this horrific story.
It can be argued that this incident was one of the reasons whites in Shreveport were so quick to condemn Jenny Steer. In April of 1903, tragedy struck the Matthews home. On Saturday, April 12, 1903, someone broke into the home of Alice Matthews in the early morning hours and brutally attacked Alice and her 10-year-old daughter, Eileen.
Alice was attacked with an axe and died from her injuries. Eileen was also seriously injured, but she ended up surviving. It wasn't until 6 a.m.
when a black woman named Mary Wells, who worked as a cook, and Jenny Steers, who worked as a housemaid, arrived to begin their day at work when the gruesome crime scene was discovered. When Mary and Jenny reached the kitchen, they saw a bloody footprint on the floor. This led to the bedroom where the two women discovered Alice Matthews, who had been horrifically attacked and left for dead. The scene was so bloody and so gruesome that Jenny screamed out in fear and woke everyone in the home. Alice was attacked with an axe as she slept in her bed.
When 10-year-old Aline heard her mother being attacked, she came to see what was going on. The intruder then struck her twice over the head with the axe. Aline was discovered next to her mother's body.
She played dead during the attack. She barely survived what happened. This crime shocked all of Shreveport.
Everyone wanted to know how this happened, who did it, and when they would be captured. There was no clear motive because all of Alice Matthews'valuable jewelry was left on her person and in her room. Her diamond rings were still on her fingers when her body was discovered. The police began investigating immediately. A coroner's jury was also called to investigate this incident.
Shortly after the discovery of Alice Matthews'body, police received a note at the Shreveport police headquarters saying that a black man was seen with blood stains on his shirt. Police immediately put together a search party and went looking for this unknown black man in the area where the note said that he was. After searching, police spotted a 35-year-old black man named Albert Washington coming out of the woods walking towards the road. Albert had no connection with Alice Matthews or her boarding house.
The police said that Albert had blood on his shirt and when they asked him to stop, he ran. The police fired at Albert as he ran away and took his life. His body was then stolen from the undertaker and burned on the street in downtown Shreveport for all to see.
Everyone thought that the case was solved. Albert's story is very sad. Albert worked in Bossier Parish as a laborer on a plantation.
The two white men he worked for said that Albert had worked for them all day, and afterwards, he and other black men took the train to Shreveport. Once in Shreveport, Albert went to the hospital to see his wife, who was sick. When he arrived at the hospital, he was told that she had been moved to DeSoto Parish.
Alpert made his way to the train and it was during this walk to the train that he was stopped by the police and they took his life. A grand jury was later convened to investigate the death of Alice Matthews. Judge Alfred D. D. Land presided over the grand jury and he told the grand jury members that the police had the lawful right to take the life of Albert Washington to prevent his escape.
But after investigating, the grand jury still had no idea as to the motive for the crime. But there was one more thing that was discovered that officials were starting to realize, and that was that Albert Washington had nothing to do with Alice Matthews'death. All of this set the stage for what was going to happen to Jenny Steers.
With her employer dead, Jenny went back working on the Cross Keys Plantation. The plantation was was now owned by John Dolan. He was a very prominent citizen in Shreveport and he was also someone who was no friend to black people. He once bragged about how he was glad that white rule had been restored to the South after Reconstruction ended. The Dolans had a daughter named Elizabeth.
She was around 16 years old in 1903. On July 25th of that year, Elizabeth became ill and she died after consuming a cup of lemonade that had been poisoned with strychnine. It's a toxic odorless and colorless pesticide that can be fatal if ingested. When Elizabeth died, papers all across the state carried the story. She was the daughter of one of the state's most powerful and prominent white men. Without any real reason, suspicion quickly turned to Jenny being the one who gave Elizabeth the poison lemonade.
And just like that, plans began to be made to find Jenny and lynch her. Jenny must have sensed that she was in danger because she fled the plantation. I can only imagine how fearful Jenny must have been.
Here was this 26-year-old widowed mother of two boys. And this was a time when segregation and racial discrimination was seen as normal. No one protected Black people.
Jenny had already seen what happened to Albert Washington just three months before, and we can safely assume that she was aware of other Black people who had been brutalized and lynched. She likely was consumed with fear for herself, but also for her two boys. A mob of white men men searched the area looking for Jenny. After searching all over, they found her hiding in a hayloft near Bayou Le Chute. When the men found Jenny, they questioned her about the Dolan girl's death.
Jenny denied having anything to do with the girl's death. But the mob did not care. She was dragged out and Jenny was taken back to Cross Keys Plantation. This must have been terrifying for Jenny because this was not a situation that black people typically made it out alive from. Once back at the plantation, the Dolan family identified Jenny as the one who poisoned their daughter.
The mob then took Jenny to a nearby tree. They tied a rope around her neck. They tied her hands and her feet.
The mob then asked Jenny to confess to the crime. Jenny again said that she did not poison the girl. Mob members pulled the rope and hung 26-year-old Jenny Steers from the tree until she was dead.
As her body dangled, members of the mob fired at Jenny. After Jenny was lynched, the press and public continued to go after her. Papers expressed regret for her death.
Not because they believed that Jenny was innocent, but because they wanted Jenny to tell them what happened to Alice Matthews. People began saying that Jenny was the one who attacked Alice Matthews and her daughter, Aline. Jenny was now portrayed as a diabolical black woman who attacked respected white women.
Once One paper actually said this. It said that Jenny was one of the most diabolical female criminals that the country had ever known. Initially, the press and the police advanced the theory that a man attacked Alice Matthews and her daughter for the purpose of violating them.
But after Jenny Steers was lynched, the press did a 180 and presented a new theory that was designed to blame Jenny Steers. By late July, after Jenny's lynching, the press said that it was robbery and not outrage and violation that was the motive for the Matthews crime and that a woman was the culprit because the wounds on Alice Matthews'body were too shallow to have been inflicted by a man. After initially claiming that nothing had been stolen, the papers reported that money was missing.
The story was altered to make it seem like Jenny Steers was the brutal attacker to justify her lynching. The press also said that Jenny had previously tried to take Elizabeth's life on two prior occasions. They said the first time, Jenny put strychnine in Elizabeth's lemonade, but that she refused to drink it because she sensed that something was in it. On the second alleged attempt, they said that Jenny had tried to lure Elizabeth into a rowboat to drown her, but Elizabeth was afraid of water and refused to get in.
Another paper said that Jenny was jealous of Elizabeth because Elizabeth was engaged to a white man that Jenny had been intimate with. The rumors about Jenny were outlandish. The paper said that she was violent and that she had gambled outside the church with black men.
One paper said that Jenny was so violent and so strong that once she fought another black woman in the field and it was difficult to pull Jenny off of the other black woman. All of this hysteria about the violent, villainous black woman who was driven by sexual passions was designed to create fear of Jenny and justify the lynching of her. They wanted to make sure that no one felt sorry for Jenny Steers or any other black woman. I should also tell you that after Jenny was lynched and blamed for the Matthews crime, just one month later, a similar attack took place.
In August of 1903, a white couple in Shreveport, Robert and Mae Smith, were brutally attacked in their beds as they slept. The intruder used an axe. Mae died from her injuries.
It was at this time that the press changed their story once again. They found similarities in this crime to that of Alice and Aline Matthews, and also with that of two other women, Josephine LeCal and Marie Wheeler, two women attacked in the same way before the Matthews crime. Now the press and the authorities were sure that it was a single man who was responsible for all the crimes. A reversal from when they had said that a woman, mainly Jenny Steers, was responsible for all of this.
The police claimed that a man named Jim Reed confessed to the crime and was responsible for attacking Robert and Mae Smith with an axe. The police said that Jim was having a relationship with Mae. But in 1904, a jury was unable to reach a verdict in Jim's case.
An interesting twist that we found was that Jim Reed was represented by A.D. Land Jr. The son of the judge who said that it was lawful to take Albert Washington's life. And the prosecutor was Judge Lamb's brother, John Lamb. At Jim Rees'second trial, the prosecution dropped all charges against him and said that they had no evidence that he had committed the attack.
After it was all said and done, three black people had been blamed for Alice Matthews'death. Two had lost their lives as a result of it. Albert Washington and Jenny Steers.
Neither had anything to do with this crime. The mob, whites in Shreveport, and the press were quick to justify Jenny Steers'lynching because They claim that she was responsible for two white women's deaths. We don't know if Jenny poisoned Elizabeth Dolan. There is strong evidence to suggest that she did not. But what we do know is that her being a black woman during a time when black women were demonized and made out to be monsters gave all the cover that was needed for the mob to lynch her and never asked a single question.
At the time of Jenny's death, her son Walter was five and her other son was three. We don't know what happened to them, but what we do know is that in the span of three years, they lost both their mother and their father. And they too lived the rest of their lives, likely under Jim Crow rule in the South.
They lived and died lives filled with injustice. filled with pain, and filled with horrific memories. Being black has always been associated with criminality.
Stories were created and exaggerated to justify brutality against black people and black women in particular. If you were black, there was no need to conduct an investigation or ask any questions. Being black convicted you and executed you.
I wanna know your thoughts on this story. Had you ever heard of Jenny Steers and how did that make you feel learning all that she went through? Leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts.