100 years ago near Sandpoint: Police use racist tactics in response to killing in Hope

Guns blazed after a posse challenged two men suspected of robbing and killing a pool hall operator when they attempted to cross the Pack River bridge near Sandpoint. After being ordered to halt, the two men leapt into the river and swam to shore. The posse believed that they had winged one of the men, because when they continued their pursuit, they found “profuse blood stains” in the brush.

The chase was continuing, with bloodhounds on the trail.

The two men were suspects in the fatal shooting of a Hope, Idaho, pool hall proprietor, during a robbery. The two robbers were described as “Negroes,” and all during the next day, police were “besieged with telephone calls from people who have seen ‘suspicious-looking Negroes’ prowling around,” the Spokane Daily Chronicle wrote at the time.

“Officers have been instructed to arrest all Negroes,” said a Sandpoint correspondent.

The result was that several Black men had already been wrongly detained. A Spokane police officer arrested two Black men when they got off a train from Sandpoint, but were released the next day after witnesses to the shooting said they did not resemble the two suspects. The two men requested, and received, a letter from the police department “attesting to their good character and setting forth that they were not implicated in the Hope, Idaho shooting.”

The posse was unable to tell whether the two men at the Pack River Bridge were Black men or not, since they were apparently too far away.

“But their failure to answer the challenge, coupled with their hurried flight, is said to indicate that they are the men who did the shooting,” said the Chronicle.