A group of 1,000 people gather to look at the body of Frank McManus, a 25-year-old white man, after his lynching. McManus was kidnapped from his cell and hanged from tree by an angry mob after his arrest for kidnapping and raping Mina Spears, a 4-year-old white girl (Minnesota, 1882) [1152 x 800].

[The Lynching of Frank McManus](https://www.mostnotorious.com/2016/06/03/the-lynching-of-frank-mcmanus/)

TL;DR: Obligatory note that lynching is bad.

That said, Frank McManus was guilty as hell. He kidnapped the girl in front of her screaming mother. When he was spotted by the police, he immediately ran. When he was arrested, his vest, pants, underclothes, and hands were found to be covered with blood. The girl’s mother immediately recognized him and started screaming at him where her daughter was. The girl was found nearby, unconscious and almost dead from injuries caused by being raped by a grown man. After the arrest of McManus, a lynch mob gathered outside the jail and demanded his blood.

The police tried to stop them, but there were too many of them. By midnight, a crowd gathered outside the county jail downtown, battered down the doors, overpowered the sheriff, and removed McManus from his cell. One of the prisoners told the lynch mob that McManus was on the third tier, and they moved with heavy hammers to take out the thick, locked door that separated them from their target. After gaining access, they clamored down the corridor to McManus’s cell, and found two men inside.

Both of the prisoners vehemently denied being the rapist they were looking for. According to press reports at the time, the vigilantes were surprisingly cautious. They went to the prison office and searched the files for any record of a physical description of an inmate matching McManus. Soon they had their information, and noticed that one of the two men they had questioned matched McManus’s description; heavyset, of medium height, with a mustache and a coarse workman’s shirt. Just to be certain, the mob then brought him back to the neighborhood where the crime occurred.

McManus was handcuffed and taken in front of a group of women who had confronted him that afternoon. All of them identified him. Mina’s mother screamed that it was him and urged the mob to take him away. McManus allegedly confessed to the crime, but then reversed course and said, “I confess nothing.” He was deemed a liar and promptly hanged from a burr oak tree at the corner of Grant Street and Fourth Avenue, opposite a high school. It took five minutes for him to die. The body was still there at 7:00 AM when a crowd of 1,000 morbidly curious onlookers gathered.

I guess bowler hats were very popular

What does ethnicity have to do with anything