Biography

Thomas Coleman’s life was marked by tragedy. He arrived in Salt Lake City in 1848, enslaved to John and Nancy Crosby Bankhead, converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from Mississippi. Thomas was likely baptized a Latter-day Saint in Mississippi around the same time that his enslavers converted, but membership records do not survive to definitively make that determination. Even still, a Salt Lake City newspaper reported that he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was known as Thomas Bankhead in early records, but used Coleman (sometimes Colburn) as his surname, likely in remembrance of his mother. He participated in the rescue of fellow Latter-day Saints stranded in a winter storm in Wyoming, the only known enslaved man to do so. He was convicted of manslaughter three years later. Sadly, his life was cut short by violent death in 1866, a racial lynching in which his body was dumped on Arsenal Hill (now Capitol Hill) on the north bench overlooking downtown Salt Lake City as a public warning against race mixing.[1]

Two white enslavers from Mississippi, John Crosby and his wife, Elizabeth Coleman Crosby, likely inherited Thomas Coleman’s mother from the estate of Elizabeth’s father, Joseph Coleman. This probably accounts for the Coleman surname that Thomas used as an adult. He was born on the Crosby plantation around 1833. Then, when Nancy Crosby, Elizabeth and John Crosby’s daughter, wed John Bankhead in 1842, she almost certainly brought nine-year-old Thomas with her into the marriage.[2]

Two years after John and Nancy wed, Latter-day Saint missionaries preached in Monroe County, Mississippi and Nancy responded to their message. She joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1844 and then John converted the following year. One of the Crosby’s enslaved women, Martha Ann Morris, was likely baptized around the same time, although a baptismal record does not survive.[3] Thomas must have embraced the Latter-day Saint message too. He would have been approximately eleven years old at the time. He and Martha are the only people enslaved to John and Nancy Bankhead known to accept baptism, although Latter-day Saint record keeping at the time was spotty at best. It is only through later sources that Martha and Thomas’s baptisms become evident. For Thomas, a newspaper account published in the wake of his murder describes him as a Latter-day Saint.[4]

John and Nancy Bankhead migrated to Utah Territory in 1848, one year after the vanguard group of Latter-day Saint pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. They brought young Thomas with them on the overland journey. Thomas appears in Utah on two census records, one an 1850 population census and the second an 1851 slave schedule. Thomas is listed on the latter as eighteen years old, Black, and one of nine people enslaved to John and Nancy Bankhead at the time.[5]

By 1856, when Utah conducted a territorial census, Thomas lived in the Sugar House area of the Salt Lake Valley. He lived in relative proximity to other Black people, including free Black Latter-day Saints Isaac and Sylvester James, and Shepherd Camp, another enslaved man. According to a belated remembrance, these men worked with Brigham Young’s son-in-law Charles Decker as freighters.[6]

That same year, Decker helped organize a rescue mission to bring in Latter-day Saint immigrants stranded in Wyoming by an early winter storm. The immigrants consisted of two handcart companies that had left late in the season and ran out of provisions after they were trapped by untimely snowstorms. Thomas joined Decker’s rescue company and thus became the only known enslaved person among roughly four hundred rescuers. He traveled to Wyoming in severe winter weather and helped bring the stranded migrants back to the Salt Lake Valley.[7]

John and Nancy Bankhead, Thomas’s enslavers, eventually moved north of Salt Lake City, first to Box Elder County, then to Cache County, on Utah’s border with Idaho. Thomas, however, stayed in Salt Lake City. It is not clear if the Bankheads sold Thomas or hired him out. If they sold Thomas and they followed Utah law, Thomas would have given his consent for the sale to a probate judge, in private, without the Bankheads present.[8] There is no record of such a sale that survives in state archives, however. Whatever the circumstances, by 1859 a “Col. J. H. Johnson” enslaved Thomas in Salt Lake City. It is possible that this Johnson was Joel Hills Johnson, a Latter-day Saint hymnwriter who headed a Latter-day Saint immigrant station in Nebraska at the time and may have left Thomas in Salt Lake to run his affairs while he was absent.[9]

Evidence indicates that Thomas worked alongside and associated with another enslaved man, Shepherd Camp, who was initially enslaved to Williams Camp but was then sold to William H. Hooper. In 1859, the relationship between Thomas and Shepherd, however, soured. The two men apparently vied for the attention of two enslaved women, Caroline and Tampian Hoye. On April 18, the jealousy between the two men led to an argument which escalated into a fight. Thomas eventually pulled out a pistol and fired three shots at Shepherd, two of which struck him. One broke Shepherd’s collarbone and inflicted “a severe wound in his right shoulder.”[10]

Thomas fled toward Wyoming but lawmen arrested him and returned him to Salt Lake City. Shepherd eventually died from his wounds and local authorities charged Thomas with murder. Latter-day Saint Hosea Stout served as Thomas’s defense attorney and described in his diary his assessment of the incident: “the negros had got into a row about two wenches belonging to T. S. Williams and love and jealousy was the main cause of the fuss.” Stout then added, “Like their masters under such circumstances would probably would [sic] do they went to shooting each other.”[11]

At Thomas’s trial two Black men were allowed to testify, among other witnesses. Stout, as Thomas’s attorney, seemed to focus on presenting the jury with evidence of self-defense as a key component of his strategy. One witness in particular seemed crucial. A man named William Woodland testified “to having seen Shep draw a revolver on Tom and threaten to shoot him in March last, and also that if he could not kill him then he would at some other time.” An unnamed Black man then testified regarding “the quarrelsome relations of the negroes at the time of the killing.” In light of such evidence, the jury found Thomas guilty of manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced him to one-year hard labor and a $100 fine.[12]

After serving his sentence, Thomas worked in Salt Lake City, eventually finding employment at the Salt Lake House, a hotel operated by relatives of Charles Decker, the man who Thomas had accompanied in 1856 as part of the handcart rescue mission.[13]

Even though he was free from prison, it is not clear when Thomas gained his freedom from enslavement. In 1862, the United States Congress passed An Act to Secure Freedom to All Persons within the Territories of the United States, a bill which Abraham Lincoln signed into law on June 20 of that year. The act was designed to free enslaved people in all U.S. territories, including Utah. Even still, there is no indication how or if enslavers in the territory responded to the bill or if they believed that it applied to them in the first place. It is possible that Thomas gained his freedom in 1862, but it is also possible that he had to wait until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which outlawed slavery nationwide at the end of the Civil War.[14]

If Thomas had to wait until the end of the Civil War, he would have only enjoyed roughly one year of freedom before he was murdered. The exact circumstances surrounding his murder remain a mystery. What is known is that on the afternoon of December 11, 1866, several boys playing on Arsenal Hill overlooking Salt Lake City found his body dumped next to the Arsenal building there. The Arsenal building no longer exists. It was destroyed a decade after Thomas’s murder in an explosion. Maps from that era, however, do exist, which allow researchers to identify with good proximity the location where Thomas’s body was found. Arsenal Hill is now Capitol Hill, the site of the Utah State Capitol building. The Arsenal building sat just to the North and East of what is now the intersection of 300 North and Main Street. That particular spot is currently green space associated with the Capitol building grounds.[15]

News spread quickly regarding the murder. Brigham Young Jr., the son of Brigham Young, wrote in his journal the night that the body was discovered, that “a nigger was found dead above the Arsenal[;] from his appearance it was surmised he had been dead several days.”[16] The Salt Lake Daily Telegraph and Commercial Advertiser first broke the news the following day with a headline titled “Found Dead.” The Telegraph told readers that “Thomas Coleman, generally known as ‘Nigger Tom,’ was found about 9 p.m. last night by the police with a stab in the right breast and his throat cut.”[17]

The ensuing coroner’s inquest concluded that Thomas was "beat on the head with a large stone, which was lying by his head with blood on it." With his own knife, Thomas was also stabbed twice in the chest and his throat cut. A sign was left on his body that read, “Notice to all Niggers. Take warning. Leave white women alone.”[18]

Latter-day Saint leaders at the time were vehemently opposed to race mixing, as was the nation as a whole.[19] In 1852, the territorial legislature made it a crime for a white enslaver to “have sexual or carnal intercourse with his or her servant or servants of the African race,” a provision meant to protect Black enslaved people from being raped or sexually exploited by their white masters, as was common practice in the plantation South. The 1852 Utah law went even further. It also stipulated that “if any white person shall be guilty of sexual intercourse with any of the African race, they shall be subject on conviction thereof to a fine of not exceeding one thousand dollars, nor less than five hundred, . . . and imprisonment not exceeding three years.”[20]

For Brigham Young, there were theological implications to race mixing as well. Brigham Young believed that Black people were cursed descendants of Cain, the Bible’s first murderer and were thus barred from holding the Latter-day Saint lay priesthood. In an 1852 speech to the legislature, Young warned against race mixing because he insisted that the offspring of such unions would inherit the priesthood curse: “let my seed mingle with [the] seed of Cain [and it] brings the curse upon me and my generations; [we will] reap the same rewards as Cain,” Young insisted.[21] In 1863, he delivered a public sermon at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City in which he was even more direct: “if the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot.”[22] It was an extreme position, even in an extreme nineteenth-century context. Young’s hyperbole was never codified into Utah law, but it no doubt shaped attitudes about race mixing in the territory.[23]

The Salt Lake Telegraph reported that Thomas was "found in company of a white woman" and then speculated that a "rival friend" of the woman must have taken vengeance on Thomas after learning of their rendezvous outside the Arsenal wall. In this version of events Thomas was killed for violating racial boundaries. The coroner’s jury concluded that those who committed “said murder to the jury are unknown” and no one was held accountable.[24] An editorial in The Daily Union Vedette (a newspaper published by soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Douglas) criticized the nature of the investigation and the conclusions of the jury. The Vedette pointed to the sign left on Thomas’s body as evidence of premeditation and remained unconvinced that the murder was happenstance.[25] In either case, the public dumping of Thomas’s body with the attached placard were clearly calculated to enforce racial segregation and terrorize those who might contemplate violating it.

Following the coroner's inquest, Thomas’s body was buried in the pauper’s section of the Salt Lake City Cemetery. The entry created for Thomas in the Salt Lake County Death Record reads, “Coleman, Thomas; Known as Nigger Tom, abt 35 yrs old. found murdered near the arsenal.” It then lists his place of interment as “Pottersfield.”[26]

On Saturday, June 11, 2022, Sema Hadithi and the Salt Lake County Community Coalition, in coordination with the Equal Justice Initiative, hosted a soil gathering ceremony at the lynching sites of Thomas Coleman and William “Sam Joe” Harvey (another Black man lynched in Salt Lake City). Black community leaders, ministers, and a representative from the governor’s office joined a poet, a singer, and students from the BYU Black Menaces to commemorate the lives of Coleman and Harvey and to publicly acknowledge and condemn their murders.[27]

The event began on the steps of the Utah State Capitol, near where Thomas’s body was found in 1866. After attendees collected soil from the site of Thomas’s murder, they marched down State Street to 100 South, where Harvey was lynched on August 25, 1883. Participants held a second ceremony there and again collected soil.

Two jars containing the soil were sent to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to be displayed at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice alongside the soil collected from other lynching victims across the United States. Additional jars remain in Utah, to be displayed as part of Utah Black History exhibits.

By W. Paul Reeve, James Tabery, and Kirk Huffaker

[1] See “The Life and Murder of Thomas Coleman,” Racial Lynching in Utah; and “Thomas Coleman,” Church History Biographical Database.

[2] Amy Tanner Thiriot, Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2022), 58, 83, 165-166.

[3] Benjamin Kiser and W. Paul Reeve, “Martha Ann Morris Flake,” Century of Black Mormons. Martha was the future wife of Green Flake, a celebrated Black Latter-day Saint and 1847 Pioneer into the Salt Lake Valley.

[4] Thiriot, Slavery in Zion, 57-59, 165; “The Recent Murder,” Union Vedette (Salt Lake City, Utah) 13 December 1866, 3.

[5] “Thomas Coleman,” Church History Biographical Database; United States, 1850 Census, Utah Territory, Salt Lake County, Salt Lake City; Utah Territory, 1851 Census, Slave Schedule, Salt Lake County, MS 2672, folder 6, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah; Thiriot, Slavery in Zion, 165.

[6] Utah Territory, 1856 Census, Salt Lake County, Sugar House Ward; Thiriot, Slavery in Zion, 83, 165.

[7] Thiriot, Slavery in Zion, 83, 165-166; Daniel W. Jones, Forty Years Among the Indians (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1890), 62-75; Chad M. Orton, “The Martin Handcart Company at the Sweetwater: Another Look,” BYU Studies 45, no. 3 (2006); 4-37; LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, Handcarts to Zion: The Story of a Unique Western Migration, 1856-1860 (Arthur H. Clark Co., 1960); David Roberts, Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy (Simon and Schuster, 2008).

[8] See W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (Oxford University Press, 2024), chapter 6.

[9] Thiriot, Slavery in Zion, 84, 165-166.

[10] “Aspiring Darkies,” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) 20 April 1859, 4; “Shooting Affair,” Valley Tan (Salt Lake City, Utah) 19 April 1859, 3; Thiriot, Slavery in Zion, 84, 166.

[11] Juanita Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, vol. 2, 1848-1861 (University of Utah Press, 1964), 2:695; “Shooting Affair,” Valley Tan (Salt Lake City, Utah) 19 April 1859, 3; Thiriot, Slavery in Zion, 84, 166.

[12] “Third Judicial District Court,” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) 21 September 1859, 5.

[13] Thiriot, Slavery in Zion, 84, 166.

[14] Reeve, Rich, Carruth, This Abominable Slavery, chapter 10.

[15] The account of Thomas Coleman’s murder offered here is an expanded version of “The Life and Murder of Thomas Coleman,” found at Racial Lynching in Utah, an ongoing collaboration between Sema Hadithi African American Heritage and Culture Foundation, based in Salt Lake City, the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson and based in Montgomery, Alabama, and Professors James Tabery and Paul Reeve in the Philosophy and History Departments at the University of Utah.

[16] Brigham Young Jr., Journal, MS 1236, box 2, folder 2, item 1, volume 8, page 20, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[17] “Found Dead,” Salt Lake Daily Telegraph and Commercial Advertiser, 12 December 1866, 3; see also, “Murder,” Union Vedette (Salt Lake City, Utah) 12 December 1866, 2.

[18] “The Inquest,” Salt Lake Daily Telegraph and Commercial Advertiser, 13 December 1866, 2; “Found Dead,” Salt Lake Daily Telegraph and Commercial Advertiser, 12 December 1866, 3; “The Recent Murder,” Union Vedette (Salt Lake City, Utah) 13 December 1866, 3.

[19] W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 4; Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2009).

[20] Territorial Legislative Records, 1851-1894, series 3150, reel 1, box 1, folder 55, 704-706, Utah Division of Archives and Records Services, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[21] Brigham Young, February 5, 1852, CR 100 912, Church History Department Pitman Shorthand transcriptions, 2013-2021, Addresses and sermons, 1851-1874, Miscellaneous transcriptions, 1869, 1872, 1889, 1848, 1851-1854, 1859-1863, Utah Territorial Legislature, 1852 January-February, CHL.

[22] Brigham Young, “The Persecutions of the Saints,” March 8, 1863, Journal of Discourses, 26 Vols. (Liverpool: F. D. and S. W. Richards, 1855-86), 10:110.

[23] W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015), 135-136.

[24] “The Inquest,” Salt Lake Daily Telegraph and Commercial Advertiser, 13 December 1866, 2.

[25] “The Recent Murder,” Union Vedette (Salt Lake City, Utah) 13 December 1866, 3; “The Killing of Thomas Coleman Monday Night,” Union Vedette (Salt Lake City, Utah) 15 December 1866, 2.

[26] “The Inquest,” Salt Lake Daily Telegraph and Commercial Advertiser, 13 December 1866, 2; Utah, Salt Lake County Death Records, 1849-1949, Thomas Coleman.

[27] This and the following two paragraphs are taken from “Soil Collection Ceremony,” Racial Lynching in Utah. For additional coverage, see, Courtney Tanner, "Two Black Men were once Lynched in SLC. Here's what we know about their stories," Salt Lake Tribune, 12 June 2022.

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