Monster

On June 2nd, 1892 a black man was murdered in the New York town of Port Jervis. He was lynched, or hanged, by a mob of people who accused him of assaulting a local girl. Four days later, on June 6th, there was a "Coroners investigation into the death of Robert Lewis by lynching" (New York Times) which implicated several townsfolk, who quickly left the area. This incident is regularly thought of as the basis for Stephen Crane's novella The Monster. He based his fictional town of Whilomville, NY on the real town of Port Jervis, where he had lived as a boy. While taking place almost five years prior to the publication of The Monster, the lynching of Robert Lewis was not the only source of inspiration for Crane. The Supreme Court of the United States, in 1896, ruled in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that state laws...
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