THE ISAIAH FOUNTAIN CASE

A nonfiction book examines a miscarriage of justice that resulted in the execution of a Black man in Jim Crow–era Maryland.

Isaiah Fountain, a Black resident of Talbot County, Maryland, narrowly avoided being lynched by a local mob after he was charged in April 1919 with raping a 14-year-old White girl named Bertha Simpson. But the hangman’s noose caught up with him 15 months later, the culmination of an appalling miscarriage of Jim Crow justice on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that made him what Koper calls the “second victim” of the assault on Simpson. “Even having a solid and compelling alibi provided by three prominent and disinterested White citizens wasn’t enough to overcome the pervasive Jim Crow sentiment of the time,” the author observes in a book that provides a coherent and detailed picture of the case based largely on newspaper accounts. In the Jim Crow South, nothing was more likely to ignite White rage than allegations of a sexual assault of a White girl or woman by a Black man, as the cases of Emmett Till and the Scottsboro Boys graphically show. Fountain’s alibi put him in the town of Easton, where he had been looking for his wife, at the time Simpson was assaulted about seven miles away in the underbrush beside a rural road. The county sheriff appears to have concluded that Fountain's horse and buggy had not been at the crime scene and he was, therefore, not the assailant. But none of that mattered to State’s Attorney Charles Butler or the judge, William Adkins, who presided over a trial in which the outcome was preordained, with the jury returning a guilty verdict in nine minutes. That verdict was overturned on appeal, but a three-judge panel convicted Fountain in the retrial, shockingly fabricating its own timeline so that he “had the opportunity to commit the crime after all.” The book lacks the color and character development that would really bring the material alive. But Koper’s dogged dissection of the record includes the “lost” diary of a 16-year-old girl—“At 3:13 this morning…Fountain was hanged in Easton,” she wrote—and he leaves no doubt that the defendant “was denied the justice he deserved.”

This rigorous account clearly shows that Isaiah Fountain suffered a fate he didn’t deserve.