Coatesville and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker

“A compelling narrative that moves crisply through the murder, the lynching, and the cover-up by silence that local residents thereafter affected.”— The Journal of American History On a warm August night in 1911, Zachariah Walker was lynched—burned alive—by an angry mob on the outskirts of Coatesville, a prosperous Pennsylvania steel town. At the time of his very public murder, Walker, an African American millworker, was under arrest for the shooting and killing of a respected local police offic