A young white woman’s car runs out of gas in the Dorchester section of Boston, and she walks to a service station for some fuel.
While returning to her car, and carrying a full can of gas, she encounters six black youths. They surround her and bully her into an alley, shout racial slurs and order her to pour the gasoline over herself. When she is drenched in gasoline, they throw a lit match on her. They laugh as they run away.
The woman lived long enough to tell police what had happened. I still remember the wire story in my local newspaper in Medford, Ore., reporting her hair had been burnt to a stubble. I remember my mother and an aunt talking about how difficult it would be to catch the guys.
“Nobody will turn those boys in,” my Aunt Ferol said.
I’ve never forgotten the story of the woman burned alive, but I had long forgotten her name. I was reminded of that fact recently during still another interview with black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.
This has been his year. His memoir and letter to his son, “Between the World and Me” has been lavished with praise and awards. On still another NPR interview, Coates recently recounted how the book was motivated by the killing 15 years ago of his black friend, Prince Jones, shot dead by a black police officer who mistook him for a criminal suspect.
The focus of this NPR interview with Coates was on his rumination of his friend’s death and how Prince Jones had been forgotten. Nobody remembered Prince Jones’ name, Coates said.
It got me to ruminating: Who was that white woman who was burned alive by those black guys? I could not remember her name. Was anyone ever caught?
As it turns out, apparently no one was ever arrested for Evelyn Wagler’s murder in 1973.
Among the stories I found online about her case was one from the Harvard Crimson critiquing the media coverage of Wagler’s death and another murder about the same time of a white fisherman believed to have been stoned to death by blacks. Jeff Leonard of the Harvard Crimson wrote:
“Banner headlines reading ‘Woman Torched to Death’ and ‘Man Stoned to Death by Youths’ on successive days were sensational, especially when compared with the actual circumstances. … Instead of using neutral words such as ‘set afire’ in headlines, the papers went to sensational, emotion-packed words like ‘torched.’”
As the Crimson was relieved to report, the white man who was supposedly stoned to death was actually stabbed to death.
Wagler was fresh on my mind when Chicago police recently released the dashcam video of an officer shooting and killing a young black man running away. The video carried the warning, “extreme graphic violence,” and protesters took to the streets in Chicago and elsewhere.
Maybe it was because I was still carrying images in my mind of Wagler, rolling around on the ground trying to put out the flames consuming her, that the dashcam video didn’t shock me. The Chicago cop has been identified and is facing murder charges.
No such justice for Evelyn Wagler.
I called the Boston Police Department and spoke to a homicide detective. He had never heard of Evelyn Wagler. (The sergeant in charge of cold cases wasn’t in.) I ran a few details past the detective. Did anything sound familiar?
“Not to me personally,” he said.
So what, you might say — that was 42 years ago. True, but Emmett Till died in 1955. No one would dare dismiss his death as “Oh, well. That was 60 years ago.” Emmett’s mother at least got to see her son’s killers stand trial. Although they were acquitted by a jury, they were condemned by the public and will continue to be condemned by history.
Certainly the students at Lewis & Clark College, or the University of Missouri, or Western Washington University, or the University of Chicago know who Emmett Till is.
Recent protests at these schools reveal a desperate need to find anti-black racism and anti-black racists on college campuses.
At Lewis & Clark College, it looked like students were jumping on the University of Missouri’s bandwagon.
While Missouri students succeeded in getting the university president fired for what they considered his weak response to racism, Lewis & Clark students took over the space outside the president’s office and presented a list of demands.
They were upset over an alleged assault of a black student and by anonymous online posts on a site called Yik Yak, including one that called for a return to slavery. (Actually, slavery has not gone away. It’s alive and thriving in West Africa.)
Lewis & Clark President Barry Glassner (perhaps seeing his career flash before his eyes) reassured them that he was committed to fighting racism.
The source of the Yik Yak posts has not been confirmed. It may or may have been a student. He/she may or may not have been white.
Neither is the source known for some recent “Ku Klux Klan” fliers distributed in the Portland suburbs of Gresham and West Linn.
What stands out here is an eagerness to revel in Oregon’s history of racism. At one anti-Klan rally, a member of the Portland chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice called on residents to “say no to anti-black racism.”
How about saying no to racism? Or is anti-white racism tolerable?
There’s another ugly side of racism these students and activists could also speak out against. It’s more dangerous than anonymous online posts and older than the Internet. It’s the refusal by blacks to help police catch black criminal suspects.
A recent front page story in the Portland Tribune told how one aging member of the Crips gang helped rush an aging member of the Bloods to the hospital after he’d been shot in the face. The two old gangsters finally have decided to do something worthy with their lives besides crime; they want to help young gang members cut down on the violence.
“This younger generation, they’ll talk about fighting and then just shoot,” said Stefan Johnson, who helped rescue Tamir Hassan Rush’dan Lawrence. (Could that eagerness to shoot contribute to police being trigger-happy as well?)
However, one thing the two old gang members don’t intend to do is help the police find the shooter who wounded Lawrence. That would be snitching, they told Tribune reporter Peter Korn.
Nothing new there.
Look at Wagler’s killers. How could six teenagers get away with such a gruesome killing that, at least for a couple of weeks, attracted national attention? Teenagers talk, and these guys had something to brag about.
Even 42 years ago, my now-deceased aunt in Oregon, who had never been to Boston, knew nobody would turn in Evelyn Wagler’s killers.
— Pamela Fitzsimmons
UPDATE: Lt. Michael McCarthy of the Boston Police Dept. contacted me Dec. 1 to say that Evelyn Wagler’s case is still considered active.
The Boston Police Dept. will soon start a video project called “Search for Justice,” where victims, and friends and families of victims, talk about cold cases. The Wagler case might be included.
I asked Lt. McCarthy what he thought happened to those six guys who burned Wagler alive.
“They probably ended up in the system, somewhere doing time for other crimes.”
If so, let’s hope the Innocence Project didn’t knock itself out freeing them from another case.
Related:
This happened on November 23:
16 People Shot at New Orleans Playground During Music Video Shoot
Did you know?
Didn’t get the airplay the rape and race crisis on campus has been receiving. Don’t think any white guys were around the NO gun play except the EMTs.
I’m reluctant to admit it, but I bought a copy of Colin Flaherty’s White Girl Bleed a Lot. No one was writing or talking about what I was discovering from digging in to news stories online.
You recall a couple years back when two reporters, a man and a woman, both white were beaten by a black mob that had trapped them in their car on a city street (might of been just the male who was beaten). Might have been a border state. Their editor didn’t want the racial aspect mentioned. Seemed like the reporters were OK with that, too.
I don’t know if I am repeating myself, but I’ll run the risk and it will urge me to concision.
My great grandfather was born down towards Grants Pass in 1855. An uneducated pioneer, he scrambled to make a living in property, insurance, restaurant and chuck house establishments, and everything else.
While researching his story I learned that he had been a member of the Klan. I called a retired Prof named Horowitz at the University of Portland.
Professor Horowitz edited the most comprehensive record of Klan doings that we have. I think that’s right. A judge had dropped dead in Central Oregon and it turns out he had been a recorder or secretary of a Klavern (?) during the KKK resurgence of the 1920s. All this is if memory serves me. Anyway, his complete records of meeting were found.
Professor Horowitz told me that the Klan was rather like a civic group or something. An organization non-professional strivers joined for status and networking.
The primary adversaries in Oregon were “black crows” (parochial school nuns), those who opposed temperance, Jews, and the yellow peril. Statewide they did make life miserable for more than one black but it was primarily an anti-Catholic and temperance outfit. As best I recall. I’ve long notes and articles squirreled away for use someday.
I mentioned this in passing to a black friend of mine, a software professional whose mother is from Sierra Leone, I believe.
He’s a passionate activist and quick with the Gandhi quotes, etc. he asked me how I felt about that family history. I answered that I thought it pretty interesting and was enjoying the research and the peripheral history.
Clearly, he wanted more from me. Deep repentant feeling, I suppose. But, I honestly didn’t feel it. My great grandpa had never been to any school, grew up during the Indian Wars and was in his 80s. I doubt he and his fellows had done much harm. I could wish he’d never been associated with such a group, but since he was I was glad of the history I was learning.
White guilt, scrape it off of the bottom of your shoes.
Here’s the flip-side of your family’s history. The singer, John Legend, was on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s ancestry show. It turns out that Legend’s ancestors were not slaves but were free men. Good news, right? Wrong. Legend clearly was disappointed.
I wonder what he would have done had his ancestral records revealed that his black ancestors owned slaves. This is a little known bit of American history that receives scant attention. Some freed slave bought relatives to free them, but some freed slaves acquired land — and slaves to work that land.
I understand why you’re not thrilled to have a great grandfather who was a member of the Klan. At the same time, there’s no reason to assume he lynched someone or was even violent — anymore than we can assume that all young black males would like to burn white women alive.
The Klan was a major political force in Oregon and many other northern states like Indiana in the 1920s, but they were never a “civic organization.” With few black people to harass they went after Jews, Catholics, or in Astoria a large Chinese community. They may not have committed violent acts but they were a stain on Oregon history (to which many prominent families participated and now have attempted to scour their family history).
Oh, things balance out I suppose: my Clatskanie great-grandfather was shot up with the 9th Michigan Infantry (Co. I) during the Civil War. After invaliding out he came to Oregon as an unskilled Irish laborer and had 5 daughters and a son, the boy having got a round in the heel by the Kaiser’s boys.
No one ever looks at me with anticipation atonemental pride if I bring that bit of Union history up.
Gates, like Sharpton, never disappoints.What a ghastly thing, burning a woman to death. And yes, slavery has not gone away.
Once I was working with a petite young black woman who practiced and studied the history behind Afro-Caribbean dance. She spoke of the African slave diaspora with understandable interest. I asked if she’s ever looked into slavery’s eastern and North African face. She said, no, she didn’t think much about it.
Don’t Let’s Go to…was an excellent read although I found her Scribbling the Cat less satisfying and her political activism out of Wyoming upsetting. It put me in mind of a wonderful S. African couple I used to know.
She was in marketing and he in architecture. They were ceaseless in their amused criticism of Bush and the America he represented. I said nothing but it galled that this pair of very fine people had benefited from generations of white ascendancy in Africa and then decamped to my country when the former subjects became masters.
I would have done the same thing doubtless, but I also would have been a little less outspoken about my new countrymen’s supposed deficiencies.
Sound like Jason is more right than I am civic organization-wise.
I grew up in Washington state and remember my parents talking about this case. My dad was ready to grab his hunting rifle and head to Boston. That’s probably why the media hushed it up so fast. Nowadays the media is egging on a black-white race war, or at least it seems.
I hope the lieutenant’s right about what probably happened to those guys. Burning someone alive is a real hateful way to kill someone, kind of like when that black guy was drug to death behind a pickup truck. Thankfully his killers were caught and convicted. Aftre all this time, I don’t think that’s going to happen for this poor woman.
Thanks for that reminder. James Byrd was dragged to death in 1998, and three men were convicted in his death. One of them Lawrence Brewer, was executed in 2011. John King remains on death row, and the third man, Shawn Berry, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
After Brewer ordered a 3,500-calorie, multi-course last dinner before his execution, the state of Texas banned last meals. The meal included pizza, ice cream, chicken-fried steak, fajitas, fried okra. He declined to eat it when it was delivered.
According to news reports, Berry, who knew Byrd, offered him a ride when he saw him walking on a country road. Brewer and King, who were affiliated with a white supremacist prison gang, were also in Berry’s pickup truck.
“Mr. Byrd, 49, was beaten unconscious and urinated upon before being bound to the vehicle by his ankles with a heavy logging chain and driven for three miles.”
[…] The Ghosts of Evelyn Wagler […]
My wife and I moved to southern New Hampshire in September 1973. Our news, aside from the Union Leader that most of us refused to read, was piped in from Boston and filtered through the Boston Globe. Perhaps due to Boston’s filters, I knew nothing about the immolation death of ‘Rene’ Wagler until a week ago, 2017, while reading Anthony Lukas’ magnificent book about the desegregation war ignited by a pampered Kennedy-clone suburbanite, Judge Garrity.
Forced busing didn’t really begin until September 1974, almost a year after Wagler’s death that was peripheral to Lukas and his story. He alluded to it twice and quickly moved on, but at least he mentioned it in a story for which the lingering iconic image — one I’ve seen often over the years — is the photo of a black Harvard-trained lawyer being thumped by an American flag held by a white boy. Very photogenic racism indeed, unlike a young woman being burned alive by six black “youths”.
Thank you for your comment. This past weekend was the 25th anniversary of the Rodney King riots. So much has been written about King’s beating and the riots, but the media are finally showing interest in the untold stories of Korean-Americans in L.A. These families — including the kids — worked hard to make a living in some of the roughest neighborhoods in L.A., and many of them lost everything.
Certain images and stereotypes stick in the media. The whole truth can be hard to find.
I remember that incident. I just came home from Vietnam Nam in the summer of 72. The atrocities I saw as a grunt were still fresh. The smell of burnt flesh will never leave me. I just can’t under the sickness of someone doing that to another person in Boston Massachusetts…..the world. This kind of hatred really exists here. Are conditions really that bad for blacks that they can do that and laugh? Life in America is so bad it hardens people that much? Back in the jungle, as crazy as war is to some people, it made some kind of sense. At least a lot more sense than people killing each other here in modern America. I’ve been to S.E Asia and Africa as well. People here in America do not have a reason to hate that much ……..really.
Thank you for remembering Evelyn Wagler.
You’re right, Americans don’t have a reason to hate that much. I think a large part of the problem is that race hatred is a money-maker for some politicians of both major parties, particularly the Democrats.
Some organizations have seized on “The New Jim Crow” as a cause (a book with that title was published a few years ago). It’s almost as if some people want to revive slavery and Jim Crow to give themselves a purpose — or an excuse for why their lives haven’t turned out the way they had hoped.
There is an interesting comment on the Celebrate Boston page about this murder and possible aftermath.
http://www.celebrateboston.com/crime/evelyn-wagler-murder.htm
I wonder if Whitey Bulger would talk about what he heard…
“Tyrone J.
3-17-2015 11:40
That was the Ma Dixon…killing. A white guy who worked in Orchard Park and Chandlers ended up tracking four of the [alleged perpetrators] and [allegedly] killed them by skinning them alive. He [allegedly] worked for Martorano and lived at Triple O’s for years. He took Polaroids that Whitey Bulger showed off. True story. I worked for Boston Cab.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l76v4JW2BtQ
The above video is another theme that the “lame stream media” did not report nearly as much as they have droned on and on about in the recent George Floyd alleged murder.
With this type of editorial silence and obvious pro-black racial discrimination, no wonder white American youths are kneeling before black thugs and apologizing for their white privilege.
Not only have American media ignored the murders of white South African farmers, but some media have actively downplayed the violence: “It’s a simple fact that there is an element of racial vitriol to some murders of white farmers.”
Kissed off as a simple fact. In the American media, some racial hatred is accepted.