Praise for The Rope

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

February 12, 2021

‘The Rope’ Review: The Accused and the Crusader

In a New Jersey resort town, a terrible crime ignited a tinderbox of racism.

By Nancy Rommelmann

Alex Tresniowski, the author of “The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP,” tells us at the book’s outset that “the story of Tom Williams is also the story of two individuals, a man and a woman, one white, one black, born at different times in different parts of the country, fated never to meet but linked by a passion for justice, and by a single legal case in a town called Asbury Park.”

Mr. Tresniowski then sets us in that New Jersey township, in November 1910. He introduces us to Williams, who lives there, “but only in the shadows of other people’s lives, a peripheral figure, a black man for hire, no one of note. This was how both he and the city wanted it.”

Williams, a onetime amateur boxer who went by the name Black Diamond, knows to keep his head down; knows that it would never be a fair fight should he get on the wrong side of the law; knows that “black codes, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, segregation, lynching” are “insidious, suppressive, and terrorizing.” That terror could ignite immediately, as it does after a 10-year-old white girl named Marie Smith goes missing while walking home from school. Mr. Tresniowski, a journalist and prolific author of human-interest and true- crime books, shows us through brisk and cinematic writing the horror confronted by Marie’s parents—her mother running from their home to the schoolhouse, her father searching by lantern, in vain, under every tree and bush. There is no sign to be found of the “sunny child” who left for school wearing a blue satin ribbon in her hair.

While no evidence points to Williams, the public nevertheless demands a villain. Williams is arrested and jailed. A local newspaper fans the flames of civic outrage with large-type headlines such as, “NEGRO IS PLACED AT SCENE AT THE TIME OF BRUTAL MURDER.” Asbury Park is susceptible to such outrage, having been founded several decades earlier as a resort for white people. The black hotel and service workers who walk its boardwalks are considered, as reported by the New York Times, to be “intruding themselves in places where common sense should tell them not to go.”

The white people who march to the jail where Williams is held yell “Diamond will never leave this town alive!” and “Lynch him!” Mr. Tresniowski tells us that en route they broke into a stonemason’s store, emerging “with an arsenal—a twenty-pound sledgehammer, a long pinch bar, a steel crowbar, an ax, an iron roller.” These instruments of torture, wielded by white mobs, appear again and again in “The Rope” as the author recounts stories of other lynchings in other cities, scenes of such savagery it is terrible to know that humans harbor this capacity. And yet they are more than capable: They are eager to see the entrails of entirely innocent men smeared in the streets, to set men on fire, to hang them from trees as a warning to others, to give action to spasms of hate and destroy the rights and progress made by black Americans after the Civil War.

It is during the Civil War in Mississippi in 1862 that Ida Wells is born. Her parents, former slaves, are now free. After yellow fever kills them both within hours of each other, it is up to Wells, at 16, to be the sole support for her six younger siblings. She becomes a teacher. Riding the train to work, she is pulled from the first-class compartment—for which she has a paid ticket—by white conductors. Wells takes the railroad company to court and wins, only to have the victory overturned. “I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief,” she writes in 1887. “If it were possible, I would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them.”

Nearly 25 years later, Williams would likely have wanted to fly with Wells, his fate all but sealed after Marie is found, the blue satin ribbon knotted around her throat, her skull caved in, her tiny body showing signs of sexual assault. Thinking he will crack under pressure, the police bring Williams to see Marie, whom he had known in passing. “Unprompted, he placed his hand gently on Marie’s face, as if blessing her,” writes Mr. Tresniowski. “Slowly, he said, ‘I thank God I can say I didn’t do it. I am sorry for her and for her family, but I didn’t do it, so help me God.’ ”

I admit that, at this point, I wondered how Mr. Tresniowski would conjoin the stories of Williams and Wells, which occurred several decades apart. Was it a bit of a literary feint? A marketing nod to the issues of race and policing currently wracking our country? And yet the stories are so vividly told, so filled with velocity, I thought: Who cares? We’re watching heroes and villains change history; let’s see how they do it.

The link, however tenuous, is private detective Raymond Schindler, new to the East Coast and consulting on his first murder case. Schindler had honed various undercover skills in San Francisco working for a former Secret Service agent whose “deceptions and setups were elaborate and complex, and . . . risky.” Three years later he followed his employer to New York. Schindler believed criminals had a deep desire to unburden themselves of sin, whether through confessing to God or to the police. “The challenge to outsmart, to analyze the workings of a guilty mind and cause that person to assist you in obtaining evidence against him,” he wrote, “is fascinating.”

Schindler is dispatched to Asbury Park, where he immediately suspects a young German immigrant named Frank Heidemann, the last person to see Marie alive. So begins a months long game to get Heidemann to confess: Schindler plants fake news stories and both portrays and hires others to portray characters who variously intimidate and chum it up with Heidemann, all against the backdrop of a turn-of-the-century milieu replete with boardinghouses and loose women. Of Heidemann, one of Schindler’s undercover operatives writes, “he is a moral degenerate of the lowest type.”

Wells meanwhile continues to fight a larger moral degeneracy. In hundreds of articles and lectures and as someone whose work is integral to (if not always welcomed by) the fledgling NAACP, Wells uses her voice, Mr. Tresniowski writes, “to fight the most extreme and violent injustice of all . . . the extrajudicial lynching of black Americans by the thousands.”

That the “link” between Wells and Schindler is slight—a small donation from the NAACP to Williams’s defense fund—turns out not to matter. Each makes the other’s dedication shine more brightly. And while Mr. Tresniowski notes that up to now Wells and Schindler “are not linked in any textbooks, or in any telling of the crime and its aftermath,” with the publication of “The Rope,” they are. I think they would have appreciated each other.

Ms. Rommelmann is the author, most recently, of “To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder"

THE WASHINGTON POST

March 19, 2021

"THE ROPE" Review

A child’s murder, a lynch mob and the early days of the NAACP

By Jerald Walker

In January, a mob erected a gallows on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Purportedly it was to be used on Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, but, for many rioters, bearing their white-supremacist insignia and Confederate flags, the vice president and the House speaker were mere stand-ins for the Black Americans whose votes largely determined the outcome of the presidential election. In an earlier time, these aspiring lynchers would have gone directly to the source. Their chief antagonist would have been Ida B. Wells, one of the subjects of Alex Tresniowski’s thriller, “The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP.”

Anyone interested in Wells’s evolution from obscure schoolteacher to civil rights icon and co-founder of the NAACP will find “The Rope” compelling and inspirational. They may find it plenty upsetting, too, as Tresniowski documents harrowing incidents of mob law, including one that took the life of Wells’s close friend. The book’s driving force, however — the thing that accelerates the page-turning — is the mystery surrounding the sexual assault and murder of a 10-year-old girl in Asbury Park, N.J., in 1910.

A 10-year-old White girl, that is. It’s important to stress, too, that the crimes against Marie Smith were committed in the early 20th century. This was a time in our nation’s history, Tresniowski reminds us, when “the dark-hearted mentality behind slavery remained in place, not in the corners and fringes of the country but on its main streets and in its town halls and courtrooms.” That dark-hearted mentality resulted in a Black man, Tom Williams, being detained by the police in Marie’s assault and murder on scant evidence — namely that, as a day laborer, he’d done work for her family. But scant evidence for some was proof of guilt for others, requiring swift retribution. “Up in his cell in the Asbury Park jail,” writes Tresniowski, “Tom Williams heard the men clamoring on the street below, calling for his blood. He listened as they crashed through the outer door and barreled into the station.”

There were more than 600 men. Standing between them and Williams were only 20 officers. Among the officers was the police chief, who, in an effort to stall the mob as Williams was being hastily smuggled out the station’s back door, “told a lie in the service of good”: The prisoner had an alibi, one credible enough to warrant investigation. Miraculously, it worked. But Williams would remain a prime suspect, even as, over time, a more probable one emerged. Enter Raymond Schindler, a private detective who, like the mob that rushed the station, wielded a rope of his own. His, however, referred to a new investigative technique whereby potential crime suspects were befriended in hopes that evidence of their guilt would be revealed. Schindler doesn’t set out to rope Williams, however, but rather turns his sights on a shadowy White man who had been seen in the vicinity where Marie disappeared. Is he guilty? If so, can Schindler prove it before Williams is formally charged with the crime? Will Williams be lynched before he even stands trial?

Conflict established, Tresniowski, like all good storytellers, milks it. For the book’s duration, he slowly and meticulously dramatizes Schindler using his roping technique on the White suspect, resulting in a confession, conviction and execution, and Williams’s exoneration. To heighten the suspense en route to this outcome — and because these plotlines will ultimately converge — Tresniowski intersperses the roping scenes with key markers of Wells’s rise to prominence. The first step in her emergence was a highly publicized though unsuccessful racial discrimination lawsuit she brought against a railroad company. “Despite the loss in court,” notes Tresniowski, “the case gave Wells something that was systematically denied black men and women in the post-Civil War South — it gave her a voice.” It was a fortuitous time to have one, for the pressing question of the day regarding her race was how to deal with its continued subjugation, often enforced by lynching.

Lynching, by Wells’s own admission, was motivated by reasons she largely misunderstood. Like many people, she’d assumed that the practice “was irregular and contrary to law and order,” spurred by “unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape.” Further, she believed that “perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.” The truth, she would come to learn, was that the real aims of the practice were terrorism and economic oppression. In fact, the lynching of her close friend Thomas Moss was a result of his Black-owned grocery being considered a threat to a competitor’s White-owned grocery. Motivations such as this were all too common; Wells made this clear in 1892 when, now working as a journalist, she published an article titled “The Truth About Lynching.” In it she listed more than 700 lynching victims, only a third of whom had been accused of rape. The article would become, in the words of one scholar, “the founding rhetorical text in the anti-lynching movement.” It would also make Wells’s name synonymous with the cause. “Her influence on the movement,” explains Tresniowski, led to the establishment of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, “which helped to clear a path for the eventual founding, in 1909, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — the NAACP.”

Wells did not, however, have much involvement with the organization. This was in part because of the demands of parenthood but also a result of lingering bitterness she felt about the sexism she experienced at the organization’s inception, including from W.E.B. Du Bois. And yet the NAACP will forever bear her imprint, even its establishment of a legal wing intended to defend the rights of African Americans. The third case that drew the attention of that legal wing, consequentially, “involved a black worker arrested on suspicion of killing a ten-year-old schoolgirl in Asbury Park, New Jersey.”

One day in 2017, Tresniowski, having learned of this killing, wandered among the headstones in Brooklyn’s Holy Cross Cemetery, searching for the schoolgirl’s grave. With the aid of the groundskeeper, he located it, marked only by a few rocks and stones. “As close to forgotten as you can get,” Tresniowski writes of Marie Smith’s final resting place, “without having nothing or nowhere at all.” This outstanding, meticulously researched book will serve to commemorate her stolen life, as well as the countless Black lives stolen by lynch mobs. Like the lynch mob that came for Tom Williams. Like the lynch mobs Ida B. Wells valiantly crusaded against. Like the lynch mob, in fact, that descended on our nation’s Capitol.

Jerald Walker is a professor of African American literature and creative writing at Emerson College. His latest book, “How to Make a Slave and Other Essays,” was a nonfiction finalist for the 2020 National Book Award.

“This thrilling true crime story documents a critical chapter in the crusade against racial violence in America.” – Publisher’s Weekly

"This suspenseful, well-written true-crime tale will be an eye-opener for anyone who assumes that after Reconstruction, lynching remained a serious threat only in the South. High-velocity historical true crime." — Kirkus Review

"Journalist and author Tresniowski details[s] the life and career of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and her work with the newly formed NAACP as they launched their first legal battles to defend wrongly-accused victims... The parallel stories are engrossing, and the action continues apace as the two strands come together. The satisfying conclusion describes the trial and its aftermath, and fills in the later lives of Williams, Tarbell, and Schindler. An indictment of lynching on a stark, personal level." — Booklist

“Tresniowski breathes life into a largely forgotten murder mystery in this gripping true crime story… An important reminder of the many layers of injustice still present in the United States… Timely, relevant.”—Library Journal

"In this riveting true story, Alex Tresniowski tells the intertwined stories of a crusading reporter, an innovative detective, and a man unjustly imprisoned... You’ll read this in a night, I promise!" —Crime Reads, 2021 Most Anticipated Books of the Year

“Fascinating, important and colorfully reported. When a white detective and a former slave work separately but toward the same goal in an unspeakable murder case in 1910– justice is served. Their moral audacity and persistence highlight a question relevant to today: what kind of America do we want to live in?” - Walter Isaacson, author of New York Times bestsellers Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci

"In Alex Tresniowski’s brilliant and kaleidoscopic retelling of the infamous Marie Smith murder investigation, we see crack detectives, the bravery of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and a civil rights organization gaining its footing, all linked in an effort to bend justice unto a white child - and a black man. Asbury Park is riveting and quite relevant for the society which we inhabit today." - Wil Haygood, author of Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America

“Alex Tresniowski has breathed new and incredibly relevant life into an obscure and largely forgotten murder mystery with The Rope, a page-turner of historical true-crime that transports readers to the turn of the century in a legendary New Jersey shore town. The shoe-leather detective work at the center of the narrative is gripping on its own, but what makes this story all the more compelling and timely is the backdrop of civil rights and racial justice, carried along by none other than Ida B. Wells. It's a book to make Bruce Springsteen proud.” – Joe Pompeo, journalist, Vanity Fair

“This book is a timely and powerful history lesson wrapped inside a compelling true crime thriller. It examines the persistent and devastating inequalities between races in America, but also highlights the heroism of activists who fought to bend the country away from hate and toward justice. It takes a unique look at the early days of the NAACP by drilling into the courageous and often unheralded efforts of Ida B. Wells, a writer turned revolutionary who believed mere protests were not enough to challenge entrenched racist practices like Jim Crow, Black Codes and lynching, and whose bold actions laid the groundwork for a century of black American activism. Vividly and dramatically told, this story of two ordinary citizens who refused to buckle under the weight of systemic racism and instead struggled mightily to spare a single black life, is especially relevant and powerful in today’s regressive political times.” – Ben Jealous, former NAACP President