Despite the perils of anti-Blackness, the city held exciting activities for young couples. There were “jook joints” and pubs, theaters, concerts, dances, and parks for leisurely strolls. It also offered a measure of anonymity that permitted brazen, even reckless kinds of social and sexual attachments. Lovers’ quarrels were fairly common, and shouting matches could easily devolve into more violent melees, particularly in underground haunts where liquor and carousing mixed in combustible ways.
Yet the violence that erupted between Annie and William did not occur while they were in the throes of a heated argument in a hot, packed dance hall; nor did it burst forth in a private space where the two might have cuddled up from time to time. It happened a few steps away from 1025 Arch Street, where William worked as a waiter, on a crisp spring evening in late April, in front of several witnesses.
William had been heading home when he passed and ignored Annie on the sidewalk. He had recently broken her heart by ending their engagement with the news he had married another woman. His new wife was expecting their first child. William’s failure to acknowledge Annie served as the final straw. In a statement read before the court, Annie said: “He did not look at me, and passed without appearing to see me….This enraged me more than ever. Without knowing what I was doing I took a pistol and shot him.” Not just once, either. William was struck twice and died from his injuries. Shocked witnesses disarmed Annie and detained her for the authorities. According to their accounts, she wanted to know if William was dead and begged them to let her “give him the balance of it.” An officer came and arrested her. She was charged with murder.
Attorney Elijah J. Fox initially handled her case. Though it seemed open and shut, details about her motives emerged. Annie had shared her wages with William for years in anticipation of their marriage. She had also shared her body. She charged that William had “ruined” her and then married another. Prior to the night of the shooting, Annie had written two letters—both were entered into evidence. One was to the Mettlers, apologizing and thanking them for their kindness. The second was to her mother, apologizing for what she was about to do. Reading like a suicide note, the letter contained her request to be buried in a plain white box.
Under the circumstances, Fox advised Annie to plead guilty, likely to elicit mercy from the court. Whatever Fox’s logic, it was the wrong move. The judge found Annie guilty of murder in the first degree. She burst into tears upon hearing the verdict. Fox asked that the sentence be postponed. It was. In the weeks that followed, Annie’s family, employers, and a growing number of concerned citizens worked to secure a pardon.
On October 16, 1885, Thomas E. White, Esq., presented Annie’s statement to the court. She said that shortly before their fatal encounter, William had beaten her during an argument, and that she had been driven to alcohol and despair. She said she purchased the gun as protection because she feared that he might strike her again when she confronted him. Judge Mitchell was unconvinced, particularly because the two letters indicated premeditation and because Annie had tested the gun ahead of the meeting to make certain it worked. “The sentence of the law is that you, Annie E. Cutler,” the judge said, “be taken hence to whence you came, and there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul.”
Undoubtedly, they were terrifying words for any prisoner to hear, but considering many Philadelphians’ long-standing aversion to capital punishment, Annie had a strong chance of having her sentence commuted. After the hearing, her attorney, her family, her supporters—a bevy of elite Blacks and whites among them—and the Pennsylvania Prison Society swung into action to press the board of pardons.
The specter of a double standard in the case was troubling. White women received the benefit of the doubt from the justice system and in similar cases were afforded mercy as fallen women. Wealthy Black men like Robert Purvis, who had famously financed abolitionist causes and William Garrison Lloyd’s paper The Liberator, and elite Black and white men such as William Still, John Wanamaker, and J. C. Strawbridge, all advocated for mercy and signed petitions asking that Annie’s sentence be commuted. Even the Citizens’ Suffrage Association took up Annie’s cause. Not everyone agreed. Edward M. Davis tendered his resignation from the group, citing its engagement in matters that were not “directly connected with the cause of attaining woman’s equality at the ballot.” His resignation was accepted.
Annie’s support grew, and her counsel submitted a request for commutation, asking not for life imprisonment but for a fair sentence given the aggravating circumstances, including that Annie had been poorly advised by her first attorney. Their efforts were rewarded. Annie’s sentence was commuted to eight years at Eastern State Penitentiary. Incarcerated Blacks had disproportionately higher rates of death at Eastern, but compared to a hangman’s scaffold, the new sentence seemed like a win.
Annie’s crime, sentence, and commutation played out in detail in local presses, with the Tribune likely among them. Unfortunately, the earliest archived issues of the Tribune begin in 1912. The case stirred people and mobilized collective, interracial action against the state-sanctioned killing of a Black woman. Even against the era’s rising racist tides, women and men in Philadelphia organized against the judicial double standards because they knew not just that tolerating them would amount to an unfair outcome for Annie Cutler but that such an imbalance ultimately held dangers for all.
1889–1894
LYNCHING
Crystal N. Feimster
I found that in order to justify these horrible atrocities [lynchings] to the world, the Negro was being branded as a race of rapists, who were especially mad after white women. I found that white men who had created a race of mulattos by raping and consorting with Negro women were still doing so wherever they could, these same white men lynched, burned, and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women, even when the white women were willing victims.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
In his widely accepted 1889 study, The Plantation Negro as Freeman, Southern historian Philip Alexander Bruce alleged a dangerous moral regression among post-emancipation African Americans. Black people, Bruce maintained, had undergone a salutary civilizing process through enslavement that was tragically ended by emancipation.
For Bruce, the most striking example was the alleged “increase” of “that most frightful crime,” the rape of white women by Black men. Adding insult to injury, Bruce blamed the supposedly hypersexual Black women. Black men are “so accustomed to the wantonness of the women of his own race” that they are “unable to gauge the terrible character of this offense against the integrity of virtuous womanhood.”
Bruce’s construction of the Black male rapist functioned to reinforce a variety of racist ideas in the South: that only white women were chaste and respectable; that Black womanhood was immoral and unredeemable; and that white men were honorable and civilized. The spread of such ideas in the early 1890s justified an unprecedented period of lynching.