LYNCHING IN CALIFORNIA.


Gelatin silver print photograph, 210 x 130 mm laid down to larger board, of three hanged bodies, [San Francisco, 1920], some creasing and wear to image.On December 2, 1920, three members of the San Francisco-based bootlegging Howard Street gang lured two young girls to a home an brutally assaulted them. The three men, Terry Fitts, George Boyd and Charles Valento, fled, and engaged in a gun battle with law enforcement, killing a Sheriff and two detectives before being arrested. On December 10, an angry mob overpowered jail personnel and removed there three prisoners to the Rural Cemetery on Franklin Ave, where they were dragged beneath a locust tree and lynched. It was the next-to-last lynching in California.