William “Sam Joe” Harvey

William “Sam Joe” Harvey, about 35, an Army veteran who had recently arrived in Salt Lake City seeking work and set up a bootblack stand downtown, was lynched by a mob of up to 2,000 people on August 25, 1883, hours after his arrest. Harvey had argued with the owner of a restaurant over a job offer; when police arrived to investigate, Harvey reportedly fired a gun, killing Police Chief Andrew H. Burt and wounding another official. Officers took Harvey into custody and beat him severely at police headquarters — striking him, kicking him, and beating him with billy clubs, brass knuckles, and shackles — before a growing mob outside began chanting for him to be handed over. The Salt Lake Tribune itself reported at the time that police “gave up their victim to the crowd, which proceeded to hang him.” The mob beat Harvey further, hanged him from a shed's roof-beam near the jail, and when he tried to hold onto the rope to avoid strangling, a mob member kicked his hands loose. After he died, the mob cut down his body and dragged it through the streets until the mayor personally intervened and broke up the crowd. A coroner's jury convened that same afternoon and, despite the public, unmasked lynching, ruled that Harvey died “by means of hanging with a rope by an infuriated mob whose names were to the jury unknown.” No one was ever charged, including the officers who turned him over.

Salt Lake City, UT · Salt Lake County

• 1883: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• Victim identity, background, and the August 25, 1883 date and circumstances, per the University of Utah's Marriott Library exhibit on racial lynching in Utah, drawing on contemporaneous newspaper accounts and a 1985 academic study of the case.
• A coroner's jury the same day ruled Harvey's killers “unknown” despite the lynching occurring in public before an unmasked mob; no one, including the complicit police officers, was ever charged.

• Harvey's exact birth name and background before arriving in Salt Lake City were never reliably documented; a man identifying himself as Harvey's half-brother told a local paper his birth name was Joseph Samuels, a native of Louisiana.
• The identities of individual mob participants, though numbering close to 2,000 and unmasked, were never formally investigated.

• University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library — “Racial Lynching in Utah” exhibit
• Utah State Historical Society — “African Americans and Salt Lake's West Side”
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs