Maurice Mays
Exonerate Maurice Mays
Nearly 100 Years Later
His Black Life Still Matters
Maurice Franklin Mays
August 30,1919, the race relations climate in Knoxville took a bloody turn and the city became one of the “Red Summer” cities during a time when race riots were erupting all across the nation. Maurice F. Mays, a handsome black man born around 1887, was accused of murdering a white woman and Knoxville erupted in violence.
"I am as innocent as the sun that shines."Maurice Mays
We are requesting that the Governor exonerate Maurice Mays from the charge of first-degree murder on the grounds that Maurice Mays was: Wrongly Accused, Wrongly Convicted and Wrongly Executed.
The time has at long last come to repudiate the racism and prejudice that led to his unjust arrest, conviction and execution nearly one hundred years ago.
Maurice Franklin Mays
During the summer of 1919, tempers flared as racial conflict erupted all over the country, and many lives were lost. The bloody summer of race riots became known as the Red Summer. In Knoxville, while the death toll remains a mystery, one man, a black man, Maurice Mays, stood at the center of the Knoxville Race Riot in which the National Guard was summoned.
August 30, 1919, twenty-seven-year-old Bertie Lindsey, a white woman, is shot and killed allegedly by a negro intruder in her home. Ora Smyth identified Maurice Mays, as the black man that killed her cousin and the race relations climate in Knoxville took a bloody turn.
Mays professed his innocence, even in his last words, “Bless those thousands who have so nobly stood by me, though we stand now in defeat: and forgive those whom the narrowness of prejudices has placed against me. The lash of prejudiced has whipped me into the shadows of death. Cleanse the sinful hearts of men who have dipped their fingers in my innocent blood. Oh, God I am innocent of the crime for which I am to die.”
Maurice Franklin Mays, at the age of thirty-five, was executed for the murder in Nashville, Tennessee, March 15, 1922. One of the darkest periods in Knoxville history.
Was justice served? How can we atone for a history of racial injustice? History must never be left alone, we must wrestle with it until all are set free and until this world is a better place for all to live.
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City of Knoxville by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Arts & Culture Alliance.
Beck acknowledges the generous support of Knox County Tennessee Defined Services Program for ongoing support of this important work.
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