Hermann Almstedt’s Stand at Stewart Bridge

(Statement read at James T. Scott Memorial service April 30, 2011)

Arthur Hyde, who was Missouri’s governor at the time of the James Scott lynching, based his philosophy of government on seven words from the Bible: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Governor Hyde understood that because we aren’t saints, we can’t possibly love everyone as we love ourselves or our families. We can’t love all our neighbors, as he put it, “sentimentally.”

But we can love them, he thought, in a way that doesn’t rely on sentiment alone. We can remember that our neighbors are just as human as we are. We can remember that because we deserve opportunity and dignity and justice, they deserve opportunity and dignity and justice—even the neighbors we never see, and even the ones who have injured or offended us.

Just after midnight on April 29, 1923, Hermann Almstedt’s ability to love his neighbor was severely tested. He heard that a mob was about to lynch James Scott. He knew that Scott was black and that he was white, though that may have meant nothing to him. He knew that his daughter had been raped, and that Scott had been charged with the crime. Though later evidence would make him suspect that Scott was innocent, at that moment he thought Scott was guilty.

Sentimentally, to use Governor Hyde’s word, Almstedt couldn’t have loved James Scott at midnight on April 29, 1923. And, sentimentally, he certainly did love the daughter whose suffering he had witnessed for a week.

When he learned that the mob had taken Scott to Stewart Bridge, he walked there alone to meet it. Almstedt was a professor at the University, a skilled classical musician and an expert in German literature. He was a proud man, and he knew that he risked humiliation if he faced a mob of men who were frenzied past the point of rationality and, in some cases, were frankly drunk. But he did face them. He begged the mob to spare Scott’s life and to allow him a fair trial.

The crowd hissed Professor Almstedt. Someone threatened to hang him, too. But he pled for Scott anyway. “I have been wounded to the very heart by this affair,” he told the mob, “wounded far more than any of you. Don’t besmirch your hands with this deed…. I ask it of you in the name of law and order and the American flag.”

Hermann Almstedt’s plea for James Scott failed that night, but its failure doesn’t diminish its importance, or its decency, or the inspiration we can take from it.