On November 16, 1900, a crowd of over three hundred white men gathered near Limon, Colorado, to watch a horrifying spectacle. A 15-year-old Black boy named Preston John Porter Jr. was chained to a steel rail and burned alive. His alleged crime was the murder of an 11-year-old white girl named Louise Frost. But like so many other Black suspects during that time, Preston’s “confession” came only after four days of brutal torture.
Preston was born on April 25, 1885, in Hamilton County, Ohio. He lived in Lawrence, Kansas, with his father, Preston Sr., and his brother, Arthur. In 1900, the three of them traveled to Colorado looking for work in railroad construction. They were poor but hardworking, trying to build a better life. They lived a quiet, working-class life, and by all accounts, the young Preston was an ordinary teenager.
Everything changed on November 8, 1900, when young Louise Frost was found near her home in Limon. She had been stabbed multiple times and later died from her injuries. With no real evidence, suspicion quickly fell on any Black man in the area. Newspapers spread fear and anger, and it didn’t take long before police arrested the first Black family they could find, the Porters.
Preston Jr., his father, and brother were arrested in Denver on November 11. The police had no solid proof linking them to the crime, only speculation. But that didn’t matter. The public wanted someone to blame, and the color of Preston’s skin was all the justification they needed.
Over the next four days, Preston Jr. was locked in a “sweatbox,” a small, scorching cell where he was beaten and tortured. He was told that if he didn’t confess, his father and brother would be lynched. Under unbearable pain and fear, Preston finally gave the confession his captors demanded. It was a forced confession, the kind extracted from countless Black suspects across the South and West during that era.
Even before he was transported to Lincoln County for trial, newspapers predicted that a mob would stop the train and lynch him. Those predictions turned out to be true.
On November 16, 1900, as Preston was being transported by train to Hugo, Colorado, the train stopped in Limon. A mob of armed men stormed the train, overpowered the sheriff, and dragged the scared teenager away to the exact spot where the girl’s body had been found. There, they argued over how he should die. Some called for hanging, but in the end, they all agreed that burning him alive was better. They then spent almost an hour getting woods ready and also waiting for spectators to arrive from around the county.
As all this was happening, Preston was allowed a few moments to pray. He held his Bible, trembling, and read from the Gospel of Luke. He was then chained to the steel rail and surrounded by piles of wood. When the fire was lit, Preston screamed for mercy and begged to be shot instead, but no one helped him. He was burned alive as the crowd watched in silence. Afterward, some men took pieces of his burned body as souvenirs, which was sadly common in those days.
The mob acted calmly and without fear. Reporters noted that the lynching was carried out “coolly and deliberately,” as if it were an execution sanctioned by the law. After Preston’s body was burned to ashes, the mob dispersed. No one was ever arrested or punished.
The governor of Colorado at the time, Charles S. Thomas, showed no remorse. He told reporters that “hanging is too good for Porter” and openly supported the lynch mob’s actions. This reflected the attitude of the time: when a Black person was accused of harming a white person, justice was replaced by vengeance.
It was not until more than a century later that Preston’s story was publicly honored. In 2018, the Colorado Lynching Memorial Project collected soil from the site of his murder and sent it to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Two years later, in 2020, a historical marker was installed in downtown Denver to honor his memory and acknowledge the tragedy that took his life.
Sources:
https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/why-people-are-honoring-this-colorado-lynching-victim-with-a-soil-ceremony/
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/colorado-racial-terror-lynching-victim-preston-porter-jr-remembered/
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/nov/16?__cf_chl_tk=HjcuaHPaKuNES7br.D1rfm2Uq5JlHi1nA05XiSZyzl0-1746230221-1.0.1.1-D4RgQ7CKzn2ynOjydH.HfzZ1jgUafxJXqbrNhsv_yhM
