feb 20, 1892 - Edward Coy was torched by his white sweetheart before a crowd of over 1000 people, in Texarkana, Arkansas on February 20, 1892

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Edward Coy was charged with assaulting Mrs. Henry [Julia] Jewell, a white woman. A mob pronounced him guilty, strapped him to a tree, chipped the flesh from his body, poured coal oil over him, and the woman in the case set him on fire. Julia Jewell, the alleged rape victim, was given a torch. She looked at Coy, looked at the torch, and seemed to falter until, as one, the entire crowd yelled, “BURN HIM! BURN HIM!” She applied the torch, and the crowd watched Coy burn alive. Coy protested his innocence all the way until his death saying that he and Jewell were lovers by mutual desire and consent. As she applied the torch to his oil-soaked body, he turned to her and asked how could she burn him after they had been "sweethearting” for so long.

Investigation details given by the Bystander in the Chicago Inter Ocean, October 1, proves that the woman who was paraded as a victim of violence was of bad character, she was publicly reported and generally known to have been criminally intimate with Coy for more than a year previous, and she was compelled by threats, if not by violence, to make the charge against him. The relatives and husband of Jewell were fully aware of the fact that her relations with Coy were consensual but nonetheless, they still coerced and intimidated her into making the accusation against him.

In the newspaper, the Chicago Inter Ocean, Jewell was described as a person with bad character because she was having sexual relations with a black man, which was against the law at the time. But what makes her a person of bad character is not breaking race laws, but making false accusations about rape and even worse, setting your lover on fire, and being the one to directly put them to death. Even though she did hesitate before torching him, what she did was a barbaric, heartless act. Being threatened by your family to press charges is not a justification for burning your lover at the stake. Most likely she wouldn't have been killed for not pressing charges but she knew that Coy would have definitely been killed just by her word alone, but the fact that she was the one who killed him is even more egregious and abhorrent.

Photo #1: Photo of the lynching of Edward Coy
Photo #2 & #3: articles from the Arkansas Gazette describing the lynching of Edward Coy and the aftermath

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