Requiem For Francis McIntosh

How do we honor the life of Francis L. McIntosh? How do we remember his death? How do we speak truth about the racism, domestic terror, and genocide that killed him, that still haunts this city today, and yet, not lose sight of the man, the human being, that worked this river, that strolled these streets, that was loved and loving?

There is the tendency to focus on the trauma. On the brutality, the barbarity of the mob. On the corruption, the cruelty of quote unquote "Law Enforcement." The judge, the police who savagely scapegoated him. On the flames. On the terror. We are right to keep these close, to remember, to never forget what was done to this man. But that does not honor his life. Nor does it account for the impact of his death.

Francis was murdered, lynched, on this day in 1836. But the ripple effect of his death would be felt for decades, indeed now for almost two centuries. The abolitionist publisher and white ally, Elijah Lovejoy was so anguished by the lynching of Francis McIntosh that he declared in an edi- torial that his murder had ended all pretense of law, order, and democracy in St. Louis. The city must now be considered a totalitarian state. In the aftermath of his reporting of the McIntosh lynching, Lovejoy was forced to flee across the river to Illinois. Within a year and a half of Fran- cis McIntosh's lynching a white supremacist mob would slay him too, engulfed in flames and a hail of bullets just like the man he had tried to memorialize.

Upon hearing of these atrocities and inspired by the revolts of Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser, a young John Brown would soon swear on a Bible, "Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!" His aged father stood next to him and added, "When John the Baptist was beheaded, the disciples took up his body and laid it in a tomb and went and told Jesus. Let us go to Jesus and tell him." Here were men of a different hue, a different social location, may as well have been a different world, but they saw the divinity of Francis McIntosh and of Lovejoy after him. They understood the holy humanity in which we are all woven. It would be another twenty years, but in December of 1858, John Brown would lead a raid in Western Missouri, liberating nearly two dozen human beings from enslave- ment, from the same forces of totalitarianism that killed Francis McIntosh, and leading them on a perilous winter's journey north to Chatham, Ontario, Canada, where they were delivered unto the caring arms of freedom's greatest soldier in North America, General Harriet Tubman.

This is the legacy, the long arc, the interconnected and interdependent movement of liberation that was born of the tragic lynching of Francis L. McIntosh. Our ancestral activists, agitators, accomplices, and armed resistors that are forged in trauma but march on. And yet... and yet... we are still just telling stories. We are remembering death and speaking truth about terror and justice and yet... how do we honor the life of a man who did not consent to his martyrdom? How do we honor the life of man who should never have died like that? The birth of a movement hasn't brought back Michael or George or Breona. And it can't bring back Francis. We must listen to his words, we must hear his plea, "I feel as much as any of you."

And so we must think of what Francis felt, what he tasted, what he smelled, what he saw not just in his horrific death but in his all too short but beloved life. The flavors he would taste off the tip of his finger as he prepared a meal for his shipmates, his quiet and understated humor fashioned as a child growing up on the streets of Pittsburgh, the warm sun and spring breeze tickling his brown skin as he glided into the harbor, the butterflies he felt inside his stomach knowing that he was about to see again the woman he'd been falling for since he first laid eyes on her down in Louisville, the pleasure he took in the smell of her hair the softness of her skin, the joy and hope of finding a kindred spirit out on the murky waters of the Mississippi River.

We have to keep Francis's feelings close to our heart because they are his life. We live in a world in which he did not die in vain, in which his murder was not strictly senseless, only if we honor the sacredness of his life. His life, not just his death, continues to animate our movement today. We feel you, Francis. We love you. We honor you.

Cory W. Lovell

Members of RJCSTL’s Francis McIntosh remembrance committee gathered for a vigil in Kiener Plaza during the evening of April 28, 2021. One-hundred and eighty-five years earlier, on this date and close to this location next to Chestnut St, a mob abducted Francis McIntosh from custody and burned him to death. This is the text of the requiem written by Cory W. Lovell and read at the vigil by Cheeraz Gormon.