The lynching of Marie Thompson of Shepherdsville happened on June 14, 1904 in Lebanon Junction in Shepherdsville, Bullitt County, Kentucky for the murder of a white farmer. Marie Thompson, referred to by one reporter as a "negro Amazon," had attempted to break up an argument between John Irvin and her son over an alleged missing pair of pliers. Thompson claimed that she cut Irvin with a razor in self-defense.
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The murder of John Irvin
Marie Thompson was working in her vegetable garden, with her son, as a sharecropper on John Irvin's land. Irvin approached them, and demanded the return of a pair of pliers. Thompson's son said that he had already returned the pliers. Irvin then began to accuse the boy of stealing the pliers, verbally berating him, and then John Irvin kicked the boy in the back several times.
After John Irvin accused the boy of larceny, and then kicked him in the back several times, Marie Thompson confronted Irvin, and they argued. Shocked that Marie Thompson didn't just "cringe" before his insults and abuse, Irvin demanded that Thompson "get off his place." By evicting Thompson, a poor single black sharecropper in the South, John Irvin, in a matter of seconds, took Thompson's home, income, and dignity. "Angry and desperate... Thompson struck back."
According to Thompson, she complied with Irvin's demand, but "intentionally walked slowly". This intensified Irvin's anger, and he tried to attack Marie from behind with a knife. Thompson, a woman weighing 255 pounds, got the better of Irvin and cut his throat with a razor, murdering her white male landlord. Understanding the consequence of a black woman murdering a white man, even in self-defense, Thompson sold her horse and furniture to her neighbors, and was preparing to flee when she was arrested.
The first attempted lynching
Thompson was arrested, jailed, and charged with murder. That same day, the Courier-Journal published the story about Irvin's death, an armed band of about a dozen white men formed a lynch mob and surrounded the jail in Lebanon Junction at midnight on June 14, 1904 to lynch Thompson. One of the lynchers secured a sledgehammer, and began sledging at the large padlock that held a heavy iron bar in place across the door of the jail. While the mob was trying to break into the jail, a group of armed African American men had arrived just in time behind the lynch mob. The black men approached and opened fire on the whites. Since the black men had the drop on the lynch mob, the white men fled, only firing off a few wild shots in their escape from the scene. The gunfire brought most of the people of the village to the jail.
The blacks then made a fatal mistake: They dispersed after the white Sheriff and his Caucasian deputies promised to protect Thompson if the mob returned.
The lynching
Two hours later—2am—fifty white men returned to the jail. Meeting no opposition from the white authorities, the lynch mob took Marie Thompson, dragged Thompson from her cell with a rope tied around her neck, and tried to lynch her from a tree in the jail yard. When Thompson saw that begging for mercy wasn't going to work, the "Amazon Negro" began fighting the mob "like a tiger". Eventually, the 50 white men were able get the noose around Thompson's neck, and threw it over the branch of the jail yard tree. A minute later, Thompson was swinging in the air, with her feet several inches from the ground." While being pulled up in the air by her neck, Marie Thompson pulled off a vicious spin move, twisting her body around quickly. Thompson grabbed hold of one of the white lynchers by the collar, snagged his knife out of his hands, and was able to cut the hemp rope that was choking the life out of her. After cutting the hangman's noose, Marie Thompson drops to the ground, and starts swinging at the drunken men. Thompson was able to break away from the crowd that was in her immediate vicinity, and starts to run. The mob fired a hail of gunfire—over 100 shots—at Thompson, and when she finally fell, the lynchers cheered.
Marie Thompson's death
Marie Thompson died the next evening in the Shepherdsville jail from gunshot wounds. On her deathbed, Marie Thompson confided to her doctor: "I didn't want to kill him. I only wanted to pay him back for what he had done to me and my boy." Marie Thompson's defense of herself and her son shows black families postbellum South were prepared to protect their own from the physical violence integral to whites' assumed power over them.
Aftermath
Having betrayed the promise to protect Marie Thompson to the black men, the Sheriff and his Deputies and the whites in Lebanon Junction feared that the blacks would seek revenge. Whites in Lebanon Junction armed themselves, and waited several nights for an attack that never materialized.