Keiner Plaza

On April 28, 1836, Francis L. McIntosh, a 26-year-old free Black man from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was violently lynched in St. Louis, in an act of mob terror that shocked the conscience of the nation. McIntosh worked as a porter and cook aboard the steamboat Flora, which had just arrived in St. Louis that morning.

After disembarking, McIntosh went to visit an African American chambermaid he knew aboard another steamboat, the Lady Jackson, which was also docked nearby. As he walked through the levee district, two St. Louis police officers, who had been pursuing a white sailor allegedly involved in a fight, asked McIntosh to assist them in the arrest. When McIntosh declined, he was arrested on the spot for allegedly interfering with law enforcement, even though there is no evidence that he actively obstructed their efforts.

While in custody and being escorted by the officers to jail, a struggle ensued. In the confusion, McIntosh reportedly stabbed one officer, who later died, and wounded another. McIntosh attempted to flee but was quickly recaptured. Furious at the incident, a white mob formed almost immediately. Rather than allowing the legal system to take its course, they forcibly removed McIntosh from jail.

In a horrific act of racial violence, the mob chained McIntosh to a tree in downtown St. Louis, near what is now 7th and Chestnut Streets, and burned him alive. Contemporary accounts describe him pleading for someone to shoot him and end his suffering, but no one intervened. The mob acted in broad daylight and faced no legal consequences.

This act of racial terror was widely condemned by abolitionists and Northern observers, including Elijah Lovejoy, the anti-slavery newspaper editor who would later be murdered for his outspoken views. The incident also drew attention from Abraham Lincoln, who mentioned it in his famous "Lyceum Address" in 1838, warning about the dangers of mob rule and lawlessness in a democracy.

The lynching of Francis McIntosh became one of the early examples of racialized mob violence in the antebellum United States and symbolized the vulnerability of free Black people, even those born outside the South, within slaveholding society. It revealed the deep racial hostilities and lack of legal protection afforded to African Americans, even in a supposedly "free" context.

Despite its brutality, the event galvanized anti-slavery sentiment and is now recognized as a pivotal moment in the long history of racial injustice in St. Louis and the United States. Today, efforts are underway to more publicly commemorate McIntosh's life and the injustice he suffered, as part of the broader movement toward racial reckoning and historical truth-telling.