McDowell, Hartford Republican, June 1908

The Negro Who Killed Berry is Summarily Executed

Take Him Out of Town And Shoot Him by the Roadside.

Dixon, Ky., May 31. – Final revenge for the Providence race riot of March 14, in which two white traveling men were wounded one of them fatally and in which Marshal Smith Childers was dangerously shot, was paid by a masked band, which took Jake McDowell, Childers’ assailant, from the jail here this morning and shot him to death.

McDowell was a large yellow negro, and after the mounted and masked raiders had galloped out of town half a mile several persons who followed them heard two shots. They found McDowell’s body flung to one side of the big road with two bullet wounds and one stab wound.

All the men of whom there were about ten were masked, save the leader, and he was not known to the Jailer.

The town was quiet about 2 o’clock this morning, when the clatter of hoofs was heard from the South. The band rode up to the jail and firing a few shots, brought out the Jailer. He was told that they wanted Jake McDowell, and after being forced into submission by the muzzles of several guns he complied with the request of the raiders. McDowell was trembling and pleading when he was brought forth but the raiders said nothing to him. They merely mounted him on the back of an extra horse and went trotting out into the county. Here the negro was dispatched at once.

McDowell shot Marshal Childers who for a time lay dangerously wounded, but by the persistent nursing of his sweetheart, Miss Fannie Gallion, of Hopkins county who was attending college at Bowling Green at the time of the shooting he pulled through. Though still weak Childers is just able to be around.

The most serious part of the entire race riot of March 14 was the ambush in which the negroes lay just out of Providence. J. B. Berry of Louisville and J. B. Parks of Chattanooga, Tenn., who were riding along the road were mistaken by the enraged and frightened blacks for a descending mob of white men bent on avenging the shooting of CHilders and were fired upon. Berry died in an Evansville hospital from the effects of his wounds and Parks is still weak from the bullets which entered his body. McDowell admitted having been in the ambushing crowd of negroes and he was that night hurried to the Henderson jail for safekeeping.

Quiet was finally restored in Dixon however, and McDowell was brought back to stand trial. He was in jail expecting a speedy court test when the mob took him out this morning.

McDowell always admitted the blunder of the killing of Berry and the wounding of Parks but he declared that the beginning of the riot–the wounding of Childers–was justified. McDowell swore that Childers was mixed up with a yellow girl in the negro settlement of Providence, and declared that he would tell an ugly story on the stand. The only man in the jail delivery who spoke remarked laconically:

“Dead n___s tell no tales and kill no white men.”