King Johnson: Maryland’s Governor Took Bold Action to End Lynchings in 1912
New recording technologies and undercover investigations were initiated by a Republican governor in a Democratic state to end mob rule, corruption and lynchings just outside of Baltimore
On a wet, soggy Christmas Eve in 1911, five men drank, played pool, and hurled insults at each other in a small saloon in the quiet community of Fairfield, an enclave of Brooklyn, Maryland. Hours later an African-American man, King Johnson, 26, had killed a white man and then was himself murdered by a mob in one of the most prominent lynching cases in state history. It set into motion a series of events prompted by the state’s newly elected Republican Governor that aimed to forever close the door on lynchings in Maryland.
The King Johnson case was historically significant in a number of ways. It was the first case where a sitting Maryland governor, a Republican, commissioned a secret investigation by a private national detective agency because he had serious doubts about how the local officials were investigating a crime. Through the course of this secret investigation, the detective agency employed the first documented use of a new technology in Maryland courtrooms, the telegraphaphone, a new cylinder-based audio recording machine. The new device allowed investigators to record their suspects as they divulged details of the crime.
The furtive investigation was conducted without the knowledge or assistance of the three local police departments involved in the original investigation — Fairfield, Masonville, and Brooklyn. Detectives from the nationally renowned Burns Detective Agency doggedly pursued evidence through a fictitious junk shop they set up on Light Street in Baltimore and the implementation of multiple aliases and disguises they used over six months in 1912 that even included a fake fortune teller. These then-new investigative techniques eventually led to four arrests.
It all started in Fairfield on Christmas Eve, 1911. At roughly 11 a.m. Sunday afternoon King Johnson and his companion, Hubert “Reedbird” Chase, 19, were playing billiards with Masonville residents Frank and Frederick Schwab and their brothers-in-law, Baltimore residents Thomas and John Gleason, at the saloon of George Miller in Fairfield.
Johnson, a St. Mary’s County native, was new to the area and was employed at the Rasin Monumental Chemical Company in Fairfield as a laborer. Chase owned a home nearby. The Frederick (Md.) Daily Post reported that over the course of the evening, Johnson and Frank Schwab, who was an unmarried blacksmith in Fairfield, bitterly argued over who was the better pool player. After winning several games Johnson taunted and cursed Frank Schwab. As they left the bar, Frederick Schwab grabbed Johnson, shouting, “Why did you curse my brother?” Speaking to alleged witnesses, the Baltimore Sun reported that Johnson pulled a .38 revolver, spun around and shot the Schwab in the heart, killing him instantly.
Brooklyn police were alerted and found Johnson at Chase’s home in Fairfield and took him to the Brooklyn jail, a two-story brick building with narrow windows covered by horizontal iron bars. Johnson admitted to shooting Schwab, but claimed it was in self-defense. He was to be transported to Annapolis for his own safety in the morning. It wasn’t soon enough. A lynch mob showed up at the unattended jail at 2 a.m. and severely beat Johnson and dragged him out to nearby Second Avenue where he was shot four times. He died there that night.
An investigation was quickly organized, but a wealth of information was seemingly ignored. An anonymous letter was sent to local police the next providing names of people allegedly involved and how they planned the abduction and murder. But Chief of Police Tom Irwin and Justice John Potee chose not to investigate further because the letter’s source could not be verified. A coroner’s jury was convened and after 10 minutes concluded that Johnson had been murdered by “persons unknown.” The thoroughness of the investigation was question by Annapolis politicians and especially by the local clergy after the Baltimore Sun reported that Chief Irwin had confined his search for clues to the lynching mainly to “questioning negroes in Fairfield and Wagner’s Point.”
Intimate detail about the lynching appeared in the Baltimore Sun’s Tuesday, December 26th Morning Edition, even describing how the mob spaced themselves on the street to avoid detection as they made their way to the Brooklyn lock-up in what was then Anne Arundel County. The Sun even quoted words spoken as the abduction was taking place from anonymous eyewitnesses. It seemed to be a poorly kept secret to everyone. As the new year approached African-American groups, clergy, and civic leaders were distressed by the lack of progress in the investigation and the clamor captured the attention of newly elected Governor Phillips Lee Goldsborough.
Goldsborough, a former Dorchester County, Maryland, State’s Attorney, was already aware of mob rule mentality on his native Eastern Shore, particularly from the William Andrews and Garfield King lynchings in Princess Anne and Salisbury, Maryland, when he was serving as State’s Attorney. Shortly after taking the Governor’s Mansion in Annapolis in 1912, and driven by the King Johnson lynching in Brooklyn, Goldsborough set out to change things.
He started by searching for investigators outside of the local officials handling the King Johnson case. The fledgling Bureau of Investigation (predecessor to the FBI) in Washington, D.C., had a narrow focus back then and wasn’t the broad agency we know today, so Goldsborough hired the New York-based Burns Detective Agency, which was well-known nationwide for investigating cases involving public corruption and organized crime. The red-haired, flamboyant William J. Burns was born in Baltimore so there may have been a natural connection in Goldsborough’s selection. It was a seminal moment for Goldsborough as no sitting Maryland governor had ever sought outside assistance to investigate a crime in the state.
“In February last I determined to have a thorough investigation made of the lynching at Brooklyn, Anne Arundel County on Christmas Day, 1911,” Goldsborough told the press later that summer. “I promptly secured the services of the Burns Detective Agency of New York and immediately their work began. That a lynching should have occurred in this State, in the very shadow of the State Capitol, was a stain upon the fair name of the State.
“Mob violence shall not find a foothold in Maryland as long as I can help it,” Goldsborough continued, “and to prevent it, if it should occur, I will use every power and resource given to me under the Constitution and laws of the State. Crimes committed in the state will and must be tried in the courts of the State in an orderly manner. The authority and dignity of the courts must be maintained at all cost, as the rights and liberties of our citizens depend thereupon.”
Burns had built a strong reputation in the years preceding the King Johnson case, with several cases splashing across headlines nationwide. In 1909 he uncovered a graft scheme perpetrated by executives of United Railroads, a case that culminated in the company’s president being convicted. When an unknown bomber ignited a nitroglycerin bomb in the Los Angeles Times building in 1911, Burns detectives uncovered the plot and helped the district attorney secure convictions. Indeed, he and his company’s reputation grew to the point where it rivaled that of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which was the Gold Standard of the era for private investigation firms.
Burns would later become director of the national Bureau of Investigation — the predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and was the director immediately before the legendary J. Edgar Hoover. He and his agency immediately began investigating the King Johnson case at the behest of Governor Goldsborough in the spring of 1912. The anonymous letter presented to local police, but disregarded as unverifiable, proved to be a fruitful lead. Burns hired a staff of 15 people, mostly detectives, and in March 1912 they set up a bogus junk and secondhand furniture store at 645 Light Street in Baltimore. Detectives posed as store owners and workers and they loaded wagons to sell their secondhand goods every week in the Anne Arundel County communities of Fairfield and Masonville, just south of Baltimore. The locals became familiar with them, and these “good sports” quickly learned where to find the neighborhood craps games. They played often, rarely won, but always paid up, so they made fast friends. And soon they began to pick out those with knowledge of the lynching.
Locals who knew details about the lynching were brought back to the store for “bargain purchases” and were offered beers and food in the kitchen. After their guests relaxed a bit, the undercover detectives would start asking questions. The visitors had no way of knowing that the kitchen was wired with a telegraphone, one of the first audio recording devices.
Meanwhile, detectives also set up a “family home” on Duncan Alley in Baltimore right next door to the home of Tom and John Gleason, the two primary lynching suspects. “Patsy, Mammy and Jimmy Dunn” soon became friendly with the Gleasons. As they grew closer, “Jimmy” convinced John to confide in him more and even succeeded in luring him into visiting a well-appointed, Asian-themed soothsayer shop with the supposedly famous astrologer “Professor Doremus,” who was also a Burns detective. More details of the lynching were teased out. The information gathering continued when John Gleason was injured and lost his job. The opportunistic detectives actually hired him to work at the bogus second-hand store.
The details of what happened on Christmas Eve 1911 flowed so completely that Burns’ team filled a 700-page report describing what transpired. There was a sense of confidence in the Burns team, and perhaps a bit of overconfidence. While detectives gathered more incriminating information behind the lynching, the methods by which they obtained them would be challenged as legally questionable.
After six months of building their case, the Burns team submitted their evidence to Maryland Attorney General Edgar Poe and State’s Attorney Nicholas Green on August 6, 1912. As arrests were bing made, Burns explained his role in the investigation to reporters.
“Shortly before his inauguration Governor Goldsborough sent for me and stated that he proposed to break up lynching in Maryland and asked me to take up the Brooklyn case,” Burns told the Baltimore Sun that same day. “We got busy and soon had our men at work in Baltimore. They opened up a secondhand junk store on Light Street and bought and sold junk of every description. We employed one of the men arrested as a handy man about the place and got much information from him. Our detectives visited the homes of the lynchers and acquired much evidence, all of which was woven into one chord.
Burns told reporters he hoped the governor’s actions might set a prededent for others states dealing with lynchings.
“This marks the end to lynching in Maryland…the example of Governor Goldsborough in this case will serve as a good example for the entire country. And if other governors follow him lynching will soon be at an end.”
Burns’ team, led by David B. Shaw, recommended charges be brought against four men they had investigated: Frank Schwab, 37, Masonville; Thomas Gleason, 22, Baltimore; John Gleason, 33, Baltimore; and Howard Herring, of Fairfield. All four were arrested and booked, but after six hours of preliminary hearings on August 11, 1912, Justice Dennis Claude released Schwab and Herring, citing lack of sufficient evidence.
Three months later, a trial jury was convened on November 8, 1912, to hear the case against the remaining two suspects, the Gleason brothers. Burns detectives took the stand and offered their evidence, which included many alleged first-hand admissions of the lynching to detectives. But the defense, led by Louis S. Ashman, charged that John Gleason’s admission was obtained after he had been drinking and argued that the Burns detectives were “paid to obtain evidence” and “were willing to use every possible influence to get [the admissions].”
The most celebrated evidence, the recordings of the telegraphone, were dutifully documented prior to the hearing as part of the 700-page report of evidence compiled by the Burns team. But because detectives were not able to actually get the machine to work on the day of the hearing, those recordings were disallowed by the judge as evidence. Calling the remaining hearsay evidence “flimsy,” Ashman asked for charges to be dismissed. A day later the jury determined that the evidence was insufficient and charges against the Gleasons were dropped, effectively ending the most spectacular lynching case in Maryland history before it ever made it to trial.
Legal maneuvers continued even after the dismissals. The Gleasons sued unsuccessfully Burns for false imprisonment. Undaunted, Burns tried unsuccessfully to have the case retried a year later after John Gleason’s wife charged that he lied about his role in the lynching while testifying against him in a domestic violence dispute. Eventually another suit broguht by the Gleasons against the State of Maryland that was settled for less than $1,000.
The King Johnson investigation ended without the outcome Governor Goldsborough had strove so hard to achieve. Though he acted quickly, there was no guilty verdict. He would serve one four-year term as Maryland’s governor and didn’t speak much of the King Johnson case afterward. His one shining moment was acquiring the Maryland Agricultural College for the state, which eventually became the University of Maryland at College Park. In 1916 he walked away from the governorship, opting instead to run for the U.S. Senate, where he lost in the GOP primary to Joseph I. France. He returned to private practice in Cambridge, Maryland, but ran for Senate again in 1928, winning the seat while riding the coattails of Herbert Hoover; he served a single term from 1929 to 1935. Goldsborough ran for governor again in 1934, but lost in the Republican primary to Henry W. Nice, who eventually won the general election. Less than a year after his loss he was appointed as a director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Board by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where he would serve until his death in 1948.
Even though the trial ended without a conviction in the King Johnson case, Goldsborough’s actions following the Johnson’s lynching still resonated. The high-profile investigation, played out on the front pages of newspapers across the state, had a staunching effect on lynchings. Before the Johnson investigation lynchings in Maryland numbered in the dozens. After the Goldsborough-initiated investigation only two incidents — one each in 1931 and 1933 in his native Eastern Shore — were reported in the state, according to the Maryland State Archives. And none since then.
- This story was updated October 2, 2022.
