Robert Lewis was a 28-year-old

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

man who was

lynched Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate people. It can also be an ex ...

Port Jervis, New York Port Jervis is a city located at the confluence of the Neversink and Delaware rivers in western Orange County, New York, United States, north of the Delaware Water Gap. Its population was 8,775 at the 2020 census. The communities of Deerpark, ...

on June 2, 1892. His lynching was attended by what the local newspaper reported was a mob of 2,000 people, and may have inspired Stephen Crane's novella '' The Monster''. Lewis was accused by the mob of assaulting a white woman, Lena McMahon, in an incident by the

Neversink River The Neversink River (also called Neversink Creek in its upper course) is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed April 1, 2011 tributary of the Delaware River in southeastern Ne ...

, after she had possibly been meeting with her estranged suitor, a white man named Peter Foley.

References

The Lynching of Robert Lewis at Port Jervis

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lewis, Robert 1892 murders in the United States 1892 in New York (state) People from Port Jervis, New York Lynching deaths in New York (state) Murdered African-American people People murdered in New York (state) Male murder victims Racially motivated violence against African Americans June 1892 events