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  • Scottsboro on the Delaware
  • Mark Krasovic (bio)
Cathy D. Knepper . Jersey Justice: The Story of the Trenton Six. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 272 pp. Notes and index. $24.95.

In September 1948, a freelance journalist named William Reuben was looking for work. He signed a contract with a start-up leftist newspaper called the National Guardian to write a series of articles on civil rights. The newspaper's stated mission was to cut through the business-oriented mainstream press and to directly "speak for you." So Reuben went to Trenton, New Jersey, to report on the case of a black member of the state Communist Party who was the target of a smear campaign. Reuben met with a local official of the Civil Rights Congress, an affiliate of the CPUSA dedicated to mass campaigns against racial injustice, who put him on the trail of a different story altogether. When the inaugural issue of the National Guardian hit newsstands late that October, its lead story, rather than championing the case of the local party member, focused on the arrest and trial on murder charges of six local black men. The headline read, "Is There a 'Scottsboro Case' in Trenton, New Jersey?"

The previous January, William and Elizabeth Horner were attacked in the secondhand store they owned by—as Mrs. Horner later told police—three light-skinned black men. It was a brazen attack, perpetrated mid-morning on North Broad Street in downtown Trenton. Mr. Horner took two of the men into the back of the store to look at a mattress. His wife, while showing the third man a stove in the front of the store, heard a commotion in the back and then was hit over the head. At about 10:30, a cigar salesman making calls a few doors down saw two men leave the Horner's store. Further north on Broad Street, a woman saw three young black men, one in metal-rimmed glasses, climb into a car—a green Plymouth four-door—parked in front of her house, before the driver (a fourth man) peeled away. A short time later, the cigar salesman watched in horror as Mrs. Horner screamed then collapsed in the doorway of her store, her face covered in blood. The police and ambulances soon arrived. Mrs. Horner survived the attack, but her husband died in the hospital later that afternoon.

The first chapter of Cathy D. Knepper's Jersey Justice: The Story of the Trenton Six revels in the many vibrant details of these events and those that immediately [End Page 145] followed. In addition to the detailed descriptions provided by various witnesses, Knepper is able to tell us what the Horner's store looked like (a "narrow path slicing through the collection of battered furniture, ancient stoves, refrigerators, and assorted bric-a-brac climbing to the ceiling"), the extent of the Horners' injuries (Mrs. Horner's eyes were swollen and bruised and she had a bloody gash on the back of her head, while her husband had a lump "the size of a golf ball" on the top of his), and the first pieces of evidence collected (an intact green soda bottle and a broken brown one). The Trenton Evening Times, in response to the murder, printed an editorial decrying the state's idling electric chair, and Knepper draws on the memoirs of a former state-prison guard to describe in detail the chair's three-inch-wide leather straps, the wet sponge and metal cap placed on the condemned's head, and the executioner's leather mask. She pulls on early journalistic accounts to describe the Tommy-gun-toting special police squad, known variously as the Crime Crushers and the Trenton Gestapo, that terrorized the local black community in the wake of the crime. And she recounts, in wonderful detail, the twisted story of how, a week and a half after the murder, the detention of one local black man named Collis English improbably led to the arrests of five more, none of whom wore glasses, let alone metal-rimmed ones. English had been detained by the local police after his father, recently released from jail for attacking his...

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