A Lynching You’ve Never Heard Of, Part 2

[1]

Ringleaders camouflaged by a crowd smash their way into the Santa Clara County Jail in San Jose.

4,580 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here [2])

The Fake News

With one voice, the mass media — radio, newspapers, and newsreel reports (disseminated via motion picture theaters) — played a key role in the lynchings and their aftermath.

The press recklessly attacked Holmes and Thurmond as soon as they were apprehended, heaped scorn upon them, and stirred up hatred, just as the controlled media and “social media” do today against whites and patriots.

The narrow spectrum of opinion ranged from the San Francisco Chronicle’s “moderate” view — “There is only one thing to do with the murderers of Brooke Hart. That is to hang them, legally but promptly . . . the gallows should end two lives which have forfeited all rights except that to be executed by the law” — to the San Jose News’ advocacy the day after the arrests of “mob violence” against the “human devils” in a page one editorial signed by the paper’s owner-publisher, G. Logan Payne. Two days later he ran the same front page editorial a second time.

On Sunday morning, November 26, 1933, the man the San Francisco Chronicle had posted near the San Mateo Bridge to keep an eye on the search for Hart’s body alerted the city desk that the corpse had been found. The Chronicle phoned five of its staffers in San Jose, who in turn informed the lynch Committee.

This shows how closely intertwined the controlled media and privileged classes are.

Sheriff Emig in the San Jose jail received his notification at 10 AM.

The Hart family also knew, because the husband of their unofficial “daughter” Jeannette was told to return immediately to San Jose — a three-hour drive from Sacramento — so that he could be present for “the necktie party” that night (which he was).

In order to keep a low profile, Alexander Hart sternly warned his department store employees that anyone participating in an illegal demonstration would be fired.

In a damning, if barely mentioned, revelation, even the federal Division of Investigation (FBI, and therefore the Roosevelt administration) knew what was going to happen beforehand.

Committee members immediately set their plan in motion.

The San Francisco Chronicle and G. Logan Payne’s San Jose News both knew when the lynchings would take place. Although it was Sunday, employees were ordered to report for work to produce lynching extras.

People began to gather outside the jail around 11 AM that morning, shortly after local newspapers distributed extras reporting that Brooke Hart’s body had been found.

All day Sunday and into the evening, radio stations, including KQW in San Jose, broadcast inflammatory bulletins announcing that a lynching would take place that night in St. James Park.

KFI AM, a 50,000-watt clear-channel Los Angeles station 300 miles to the south, an affiliate of Jew David Sarnoff’s NBC, was heard by millions of people up and down the west coast. That evening it broadcast the lynching as a live event (“Come on down!”) on its popular news show The Richfield Reporter, hosted by Sam Hayes [3], one of the hottest personalities on the airwaves. The size of the San Jose crowd exploded after Hayes’ 10 PM broadcast.

Radio and newspapers thus played a huge role in amassing the crowd of onlookers on short notice, many from miles away, who naïvely served as cover for the Committee’s special squad of on-scene killers, thereby enabling the media to portray the crime as an outbreak of mass hysteria rather than the carefully planned operation it really was.

Before midnight the jail would be a shambles, with Thurmond and Holmes hanging from trees in the park across the street.

In terms of staging, what happened is fundamentally no different from Charlottesville, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and countless other riots and mass crimes of violence today, except the hidden government and Soros-type funding and organization is now much more extensive and sophisticated, and conducted through innumerable front groups and individuals carefully concealed from public view by the media and government.

The media’s crucial role, in conjunction with corrupt prosecutors, judges, law enforcement personnel, businessmen, and politicians, remains basically the same.

A Small Band of On-Scene Lynchers

Already by November 23, a crowd was loitering near the county jail. Sheriff Emig strengthened his arsenal due to rumors that a vigilante committee planned to seize and kill the men.

Three days later, on November 26, the day of the lynching, aided by the evening darkness and large number of spectators drawn to the scene by newspaper and radio reports, a core group of some 50 men executed the plan from start to finish.

Most members of the “mob” thus unwittingly served as props and media scapegoats, depicted as joyously dancing and singing beneath the swaying bodies, performing serpentine dances, and so forth. It would be crucial to know to what extent these reports were exaggerated or outright fabrications (think Charlottesville and January 6) as well as how many Jews were present to watch and celebrate.

The concerted attack on the jail began at exactly 9:00 PM, by which time a large crowd of spectators was present. The number swelled to several thousand over the next couple of hours as people were drawn to the scene by radio bulletins and even notices projected onto motion picture screens in local theaters by the projectionists. Hundreds of people were at the movies, which let out at 10 PM. Many of them went to the park to see what was happening.

Most newspapers claimed the size of the mob to have been 5,000-15,000 people, or even more — a wildly imprecise range. The DOI (FBI) provided a soberer and reasonable estimate of 3,000.

Inflating the size of the crowd implied that uncontrollable white rage and hysteria were responsible for the killings; indeed, white herd mentality was immediately blamed for what happened — a fiction that has been maintained ever since.

The 50 key men appear to have been carefully selected young toughs. One was truck driver Rocky Santoro, “who had been tuned in on the preparations,” and knew ahead of time that the lynchings were going to happen. “They had the word out — a bunch of businessmen downtown, the politicians,” he said.

[4]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here. [5]

Santoro had a strong affinity for violence of every kind: killings, fires, automobile accidents. He was later hired by the San Jose Mercury News as a cameraman to photograph such events. His psychological profile reminds me of Jewish New York City crime photographer Weegee [6], partly the model for Jude Law’s memorable character in the gangster film Road to Perdition (2002).

It was this small band that from 9 to 11 PM consistently withstood the tear gas explosions, broke down the locked and barred doors of the jail with a huge iron battering ram, physically attacked officials who resisted them, violently assaulted peace officers trying to protect the prisoners, and seized the keys to the two men’s cells.

A new post office building was under construction nearby. It supplied an arsenal of bricks, stones, cement chunks, tiles, pipe fittings, and other deadly projectiles the rioters hurled at the jail and its defenders, breaking windows and injuring people both inside and outside the building.

Whether some of these objects had been pre-placed beforehand, like the pallets of bricks used by Leftists during the antifa/government-led riots in the US in 2020, is unknown.

After 10 PM about 40 of the ringleaders, mindful of their 11 PM deadline (when law enforcement authorities from several jurisdictions being deliberately held back would be released), imperceptibly faded from the crowd outside the jailhouse doors and convened in the city park across the street. After a brief consultation, they filtered in groups of twos and threes over to the post office site.

From the shadows they brought forth two battering rams made of heavy steel pipe 20 feet long, 6” to 8” in diameter, and weighing several hundred pounds. One had a cast iron tee fitting on the end with a two-foot crossbar attached. They used these to tear the jailhouse doors open. When Sheriff Emig saw the pipes from inside the building, he knew he’d lost the fight to keep the crowd at bay.

In 1985, reporter Harry Farrell was told by a San Josean who’d been a teenager at the time that he’d seen young men he thought were Santa Clara University students caching the battering rams earlier in the day.

Sheriff Emig had given a set of keys to two different men, calculating that the mob would search him. But the assailants knew exactly which of the deputies had the keys to Holmes and Thurmond’s cells, attacked them, and seized both sets. When Howard Buffington refused to surrender his keys, he was bludgeoned with a blunt instrument.

The assailants knew where the two men’s cells were, and could identify the alleged kidnappers by sight so as not to kill the wrong men.

None of this detailed intelligence came from Sheriff William Emig, who, with a handful of his men, appear to have been the only honest and courageous government officials in the entire city and state apart from Lieutenant Governor Frank Merriam, originally an Iowan: “His nine deputies and the eight state traffic patrolmen whom they had as their only allies fought with their hands and with gas bombs, and took fearful beatings,” one newsman reported.

All other law enforcement officials — local, state, and federal — purposely withheld aid from Emig, leaving the sheriff and his handful of men to battle the Committee’s thugs alone.

J. N. Black’s police force milled about doing nothing, just like contemporary cops do in Kenosha, Wisconsin and everyplace else antifa/BLM riots are staged or American monuments are torn down.

The Sheriff had earlier made the decision not to use firearms. He relied instead on improvised barricades, beefed-up fortifications, and especially tear gas bombs. The gas canisters held the ringleaders at bay for three hours.

Emig had forbidden his men to use even clubs, so when the gas ran out and the jailhouse was stormed, they were forced to fight with their hands. Unable to retaliate effectively, several suffered tremendous beatings. They were knocked down, trampled, and choked by the attackers.

Emig and a deputy were hospitalized in serious condition after the attack — the sheriff delirious from a possible skull fracture, the deputy with a brain concussion caused by a blow to his head — both serious felonies.

The ringleaders feared no legal reprisals, nor did they suffer any. As with BLM and antifa “mobs” today, high-level orchestration, funding, approval, and corrupt prosecutors, judges, and “journalists” made crime easy for the right people to commit.

As for what transpired inside the jail, Jewish journalist Harry A. Lerner’s account in the Oakland Tribune sounds more reliable than Royce Brier’s Pulitzer Prize-winning [7] version in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Lerner extensively quoted a Sheriff’s deputy [8] who witnessed it all, whereas Brier, who had ties to the lynch Committee, dished up a melodramatic scene in which several lynchers knelt and prayed for Thurmond’s immortal soul before brutally dragging him out and killing him.

Brier also claimed, “They all knew one another — remember that — the mob and the officers. This was not a masked job.” But the deputy quoted by Lerner says one of his attackers spoke to him from behind a mask, and men who later threatened photographers in the park also wore masks.

According to Lerner, again quoting the sheriff’s deputy, prisoner Thomas Thurmond “put up a fight. He fought like a demon for a minute but he was soon a mass of blood. They tied the rope around his neck and dragged him down to the second floor.” No prayers were mentioned in that account.

As for Holmes,

Fists crashed against his face. He went down on the floor, still crying for mercy. Then he was kicked and then they spat on him. His head was knocked against the floor. Dragging him on the end of the rope [around his neck], they pulled him head first down the stairs.

Contemptuous spitting on people is a common Jewish trait.

Innumerable felonies were committed by the Hart-government forces: threats, use of deadly force, assaulting and physically destroying the jail, inflicting serious bodily injury on multiple law enforcement officers, and two murders (deliberate, organized, willful, and premeditated). The list goes on.

All of which was shrugged off and ignored by everyone then and since.

Carolyn Anspacher

Carolyn Anspacher [9], a newly-hired Jewish writer for the San Francisco Chronicle — though, of course, nothing identified her as Jewish — crafted a cunning women’s angle for thousands of female readers in her front page story, “Hell Rips Loose — Women Laugh — Women Sob and Cheer On Frenzied Mob”:

Hundreds of that mob were women. Old women, young women, and girls in their teens. Earlier many of them had whispered words of encouragement to their men — egged them on.

“I hope they hang them. This is one case when I believe in lynch law.”

All evening long this admonition was heard from many feminine lips.

During the day they had recalled Brooke Hart’s fate, stirring their men folk on to taking the law into their own hands. . . .

These gentle, timid housewives and stenographers and ranchers’ wives, these debutantes and sub-debs and school girls dropped all refinement.

Impelled by the Biblical edict of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” they cast their robes of femininity from them and roared their approval of the fate meted out.

The purpose of fake news is to mold public beliefs, not report facts.

The great-granddaughter of one of Oakland, California’s early Jewish settlers, Anspacher remained on the Chronicle staff until her death in 1979 [10], covering the murder trial of Negro Communist Angela Davis and the kidnapping and trial of white newspaper heiress Patty Hearst by black terrorists.

“String ’em up!”

Hauled from jail, Holmes and Thurmond were kicked, tortured, and beaten into semi-consciousness as they were dragged across the street to their doom: “Both Victims Beaten, Kicked Viciously by Their Executioners,” Harold Fitzgerald wrote in the Oakland Tribune.

As they were “pulled and jerked through the densely packed crowd,” male and female onlookers vied for the chance to “strike, kick, or spit upon the two” (emphasis added). A man who tried to save the victims — more than one did, private citizens, not law enforcement officers, each acting individually, taking on the teeming multitude singlehandedly — was “picked up bodily and hurled almost over the heads of the crowd.”

Thomas Thurmond was hung first, from the low-hanging branch of a mulberry tree. Three or four times he was lowered and then jerked up again, the top of his head striking the limb as the noose around his neck strangled him.

His trousers and underwear “were torn from him while he hung twitching in his death agony.”

Thurmond thrashed about, swinging to and fro “in a last spasm of life. For perhaps three minutes he swayed there, his face blackening slowly, his tongue extended,” Brier wrote.

The executioners taunted the dying man: “Brookie Hart — Brookie Hart.”

A few minutes later, John Holmes was strung up from a nearby elm. He, too, was jerked up and down by the neck as Thurmond had been. Before he died, the Hart forces stripped him completely naked in front of the crowd.

The newspapers did not lavish as much loving detail on his death as they did on Thurmond’s.

[11]

The murderers stripped the clothing from their victims in St. James Park in San Jose, California on November 26, 1933, four days before Thanksgiving.

The entire affair from start to finish lasted 26 minutes. Both men were dead by 11:26 PM.

The bodies hung in the park for less than half an hour.

Shortly before midnight, squads of officers from San Francisco were finally ordered to appear, causing the crowd to disperse. These were the troops Sheriff Emig had requested from Governor Rolph a half hour before his prisoners were seized.

As intended, the state reinforcements arrived too late to do anything.

Scores of reporters, photographers, newsreel cameramen, officials, and crowd members witnessed what happened and knew who the guilty were.

As with today’s ubiquitous smartphone and surveillance cameras, everything at this particular crime scene was thoroughly observed, documented, and known to key elements of the press and officialdom. The power structure then — as today with antifa, BLM, and other PC gangs — knew who the perpetrators were. But photographs of the violence were deliberately smudged to conceal individual identities.

Also like today [12], physical threats and criminal violence were perpetrated against independent photographers. An inner core of criminals moved through the crowd, faces masked with handkerchiefs, identifying men with cameras and systematically smashing them and exposing the film. Hart partisans even had System vigilantes hold guns to the heads of recalcitrant photographers, threatening to kill them if they did not comply.

The organizers and their politicians, cops, prosecutors, judges, and “journalists” must have relished memories of the affair for years afterward, just as their counterparts do today with antifa riots, Charlottesville, and January 6.

There is little difference between such events and movies, plays, elections, football games, rock concerts, and other public spectacles these people excel at producing. “Tardy Bemoan Missing Show,” the Associated Press announced over its wires the next morning.

The day after the lynchings, local newspapers sold 1.2 million copies — twice their normal daily run.

Rabbi Joseph Karesh Present

As previously noted, the Hart family synagogue was Congregation Bikkur Cholim of San Jose. Its 25-year-old rabbi-lawyer was present at the lynching [13] — Joseph Karesh, a Southern Jew who later became a federal and state judge in San Francisco. In 1933 he was a “friend and spiritual adviser to the Hart family,” sometimes dining at their mansion, where many domestics were employed.

In 1978, Karesh presided over one of Huey Newton’s trials. A co-founder of the Black Panthers who has been lionized by the Establishment from that day to this, Newton murdered a white police officer and wounded another in a 1967 shootout. Karesh knew about that.

Under Karesh, Newton was acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon for pistol-whipping his tailor, but sentenced to two years in prison (later reduced to probation) for being a felon in possession of two handguns.

Karesh’s 1996 obituary states [14], “During the Newton trial, Karesh kept his demeanor in check, repeatedly asking the defendant, ‘Are you finished?’ when Newton would mouth off in court. Karesh later explained that it would have ‘served no purpose for me to lose my temper.’”

According to two authors, Newton told a friend that he’d ordered the 1974 murder of Betty Van Patter, a white bookkeeper for the Panthers, four years before the Karesh proceedings occurred.

Van Patter had been introduced to the group by then Left-wing, now neoconservative David Horowitz, the son of Stalinist Jews, for whom she’d worked at the extremist Ramparts magazine, “the leading white [sic] propaganda agency for the Black Panther party.” Described another way by Horowitz’s colleague Peter Collier: “The Panthers were a wholly owned subsidiary of Ramparts.”[1] [15]

Tortured and raped before she was killed, Van Patter had objected to the Panthers’ shady accounting practices. Five weeks after her disappearance, her corpse was fished from San Francisco Bay, the skull crushed from a heavy blow. The Panthers were universally understood to have killed her, but Left-wing prosecutors never charged anybody. They claimed they lacked sufficient evidence.

Newton basically remained free his entire life until his murder at age 47 by another black criminal.

In 1975, Karesh oversaw the trial in San Francisco of four of the Zebra killers [16], members of a black-on-white murder cult. The four Negroes were not executed, but sentenced to life in prison.

Systematic racial murders and brutal crimes against whites have occurred on a massive scale for more than half a century, aided and abetted by the System of which Karesh and his people are leaders.

Karesh was the United States Commissioner before whom Francis Parker Yockey appeared following his San Francisco arrest by the FBI in 1960. Karesh put Yockey in jail, where he committed suicide at age 42. According to Willis Carto’s Right magazine (August 1960 [17]), Yockey’s “bail was set at $50,000 by Judge Joseph Karesh, an ordained rabbi. (At one time Karesh said he wished it was $150,000.) The 8th Amendment bars excessive bail. Normal bail for passport fraud — the only charge against him — is $5,000.”

In 1933, Rabbi Joseph Karesh had conducted Brooke Hart’s funeral, and a Jesuit priest delivered the eulogy.

In sum, Joseph Karesh, a rabbi at the Harts’ synagogue, the family’s friend and spiritual adviser, attended the Holmes-Thurmond lynchings.

Whether or not he played some non-passive role in the crime on behalf of the Jewish community, the lynch Committee, or the Hart family, is unknown.

Brooke Hart’s Kid Brother Also Present

Another witness who saw the naked bodies of the accused dangling in the park that night was 13-year-old Alexander Hart, Jr. [18], Brooke’s younger brother. He later took over the family business.

As noted, his unofficial “sister’s” husband had also been notified ahead of time, and was present.

[19]

Alexander Hart, Jr. saw the naked bodies of the lynch victims hanging from trees in St. James Park. The Jewess who wrote his syrupy 2010 obituary called him a “civic and community leader” and “social arbiter.” He sold the family department stores in 1976.

Alexander Hart discreetly told a fellow Jew decades later that the killings were “absolutely” a statement of support by “the community” for his family. Holmes and Thurmond “got what they deserved.”

Given the alleged out-of-control “mob” atmosphere and recent murder of one son, it seems unlikely that the 13-year-old was permitted to be in the park alone, without bodyguards. Perhaps he enjoyed a box seat in an upper window of the Elks Club across the street with his “brother-in-law” and other VIPs.

Were other members of the Hart family or the “Jewish community” actively or ceremonially present? We do not know.

Aftermath

Journalist Harry Farrell, the Establishment chronicler whose body now lies a-moldering in the grave, was not troubled by the lynchings. To be sure, he would have been livid if any black, guilty of a crime no matter how heinous, had been lynched by whites, and apoplectic if a guilty Jew had been lynched after indictment, arraignment, trial by jury, conviction, and innumerable appeals as the wealth, power, and media of the nation’s elite employed every dirty trick in the book to spring him.

[20]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country here [21]

Such crimes would have outraged him.

But the Hart family and the community to which it belonged were precious; John Holmes and Thomas Thurmond were whites whose lives did not count.

The two men were guilty of Brooke Hart’s murder by a “preponderance of the evidence,” Farrell proclaimed. He meant limited and highly selective preliminary investigative and reportorial evidence, for there was no trial.

“Preponderance of the evidence” is a technical term whose meaning Farrell understood. He did not claim that Holmes and Thurmond were guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the standard of proof necessary to impose criminal punishments, much less execute somebody. Nor did he say that guilt had been shown even by “clear and convincing” evidence. No, after examining the known facts, he carefully said a “preponderance of the evidence.” That is not a high standard.

There were lingering doubts, he admitted, about the validity of the confessions; the timing did not fit, and alibi evidence placed Holmes elsewhere at a key moment. There was “pretty clear evidence there were some other accomplices who were never caught,” Farrell said, quickly correcting himself: “There were some things that hinted that.”

The possibility of accomplices was alluded to in the formal charges brought by the federal government: “In the indictments handed down by the federal group the possibility of accomplices was mentioned. The conspiracy indictment named ‘others whose names are not known to the jury.’”[2] [22]

Even Alexander Hart believed Holmes and Thurmond had been assisted in the kidnapping and murder of his son by one or two other men. Ransom notes continued arriving at his home after they had been jailed.[3] [23]

Neither man had a criminal record.

John Holmes’ father, a respected local tailor, paid prominent San Francisco attorney Vincent Hallinan a retainer of $10,000 in cash to defend his son, which must have been his entire life savings. (America would have been better off without Hallinan, his father [24], and his son [25]. All three were walking arguments against unrestricted immigration.)

The day after the lynching, Hallinan announced a civil suit on behalf of Holmes’ parents seeking heavy damages against California Governor James Rolph, San Jose and Santa Clara County officials, and the city and county of San Francisco. But nothing came of it.

The only evidence against Holmes was his alleged confession. A statement Hallinan issued to the press said there “is a grave question of doubt whether or not an innocent man was hanged when Holmes was lynched”:

Every time Holmes had an opportunity to speak unhampered, he asserted the confession was obtained from him by third degree police tactics. He claimed the officers threatened to turn him over to the mob for lynching if he did not confess. His innocence or guilt is beside the point. The claim for damages rests on the failure of officers to protect him from violence and guarantee him a fair trial.[4] [26]

Holmes’ wife Evelyn and two small children, David, 5, and Joyce, 4, filed a separate lawsuit seeking $50,000 in compensatory and $1 million in punitive damages against California Governor James Rolph, the San Jose News, San Jose radio station KQW, and 12 identified and 100 unidentified persons for felonious acts, including murder and conspiracy. The suit was dropped after Rolph died from a heart attack.

Later in 1934, Mrs. Holmes filed a second suit for $20,000 against Sheriff Emig and some of his deputies on behalf of her children for failure to properly protect her husband while he was in custody. This, too, went nowhere.

Reporter Farrell spoke to Mrs. Holmes, “still very sharp,” when she was in her 80s. She continued to maintain her husband’s innocence, saying that his confession had been coerced. So heavily suppressed was information about the lynching after it occurred that no cop, FBI agent, reporter, or writer had spoken to her once during the intervening years.

[27]

Jail photo of Union Oil salesman John M. “Jack” Holmes, 29. Depicted as the “brains” of the operation, he claimed to be innocent. His family — father, mother, wife, and two children — shared that view, and never wavered from it.

By contrast, Thomas Thurmond’s family took no action on his behalf, and never again spoke of the affair. They did not try to deny his confession, and said he was insane, even though he, too, had had a good reputation and no criminal record prior to his death.

During his brief incarceration, Thurmond was represented by attorney J. Oscar Goldstein of Chico, California, a strongly identified Jew [28].

Goldstein presumably volunteered his services pro bono, because Thurmond appears to have had no money during the depths of the Great Depression. Whether Goldstein provided genuine representation or functioned as a fox in the henhouse is impossible to say. He visited his client in jail, meaning he was able to feel him out and study the interior of the building. According to his daughter [29], Goldstein was also a lay rabbi (a curious parallel with Joseph Karesh), who maintained a Torah in an ark in his house where other Jews came to pray.

There is no way to know for sure if the defendants were guilty, because they had no legal representation and were never tried. Their lawyers had no time to do anything for them.

Reprinted with the permission of the author from National Vanguard [30].

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Notes

[1] [32] Mother Jones, May 1987, pp. 31, 32.

[2] [33] Slayers Return to San Jose Jail [34],” Madera [Calif.] Tribune, Nov. 23, 1933, p. 1.

[3] [35] Oakland Tribune, November 27, 1933, p. 5.

[4] [36] Madera [California] Tribune [37], Nov. 28, 1933.