James C. Scurry, a 37-year-old white man serving as a law enforcement officer in Georgetown, South Carolina, lived in a community where tensions between Black and white residents simmered just beneath the surface at the turn of the twentieth century. Georgetown was a majority-Black town, its politics and daily life shaped by the unsettled legacy of Reconstruction and the newer, harsher structures of Jim Crow that were beginning to solidify across the South.
Within this fraught atmosphere, Scurry carried out the routine but often thankless work of enforcing court orders and collecting taxes, duties that could turn dangerous when they intersected with race, poverty, and political rights.
On a Saturday afternoon in late September 1900, Scurry went to the barbershop of John Brownfield, an African American barber who had fallen behind on a poll tax. The poll tax was more than a simple revenue measure; it was one of the tools used to restrict Black political participation, and Brownfield's refusal to pay it carried a heavy symbolic weight. As later accounts describe it, Scurry arrived to serve a court order requiring payment. Brownfield reportedly asked to see the warrant, and the exchange quickly grew tense. In the cramped barbershop, words escalated into a struggle. During the scuffle, Scurry's revolver slipped from his pocket and fell to the floor. Both men must have understood, in that instant, that control of the weapon would decide the outcome. Brownfield seized the fallen pistol and fired repeatedly at the officer, striking him several times.
Scurry was gravely wounded. Contemporary reports describe him as “shot and fatally wounded” in the line of duty, and he died soon after the attack, his injuries too severe for doctors to reverse. For his neighbors, who had known him as a native son of the county with many friends, the news was both shocking and deeply personal. The killing of a local officer in so violent a manner, with his own weapon turned against him, cut through the small community, and word of the shooting spread quickly through Georgetown and the surrounding countryside. The barbershop confrontation, which might have remained a tragic but local crime, instead became the spark for a much larger racial crisis.
Brownfield attempted to flee the scene, but he did not get far. He was captured and disarmed by a policeman—accounts emphasize that the arresting officer was himself Black—and was taken to the local jail. There, the story took on a different shape. Rumors raced through Georgetown's Black neighborhoods that white residents intended to lynch Brownfield in retaliation for Scurry's death. Whether those rumors began as whispers or deliberate threats, people believed them. By Sunday, as Scurry lay dead or dying, as many as a thousand Black residents converged in Georgetown's streets, shouting “Save John” and vowing to protect Brownfield from mob violence, even threatening to burn the town if he were harmed. Women were described marching with hoes and rice hooks in their hands, a vivid sign of how deeply the fear of lynching resonated and how determined the crowd was not to see Brownfield taken and killed without trial.
City officials tried to defuse the crisis. The mayor and prominent townsmen went out among the crowds, urging them to disperse, while local militia companies—the Georgetown Rifle Guards and others—were placed on alert. Yet the mass gatherings continued into Monday, keeping the town on edge. Concluding that local measures were not enough, Georgetown's leaders wired the governor for help. The response was swift and overwhelming: state troops from Sumter and Charleston were ordered in, including infantry and cavalry units, along with Hotchkiss and Gatling guns meant to make it unmistakably clear who commanded force in the town. A military parade was staged through the streets to demonstrate that, as one observer put it, “the white man was in the saddle,” a chilling phrase that captured both the show of power and the racial politics behind it. Only after that display, and after several alleged ringleaders from the demonstrations were tried in the mayor's court and sentenced to fines or the chain gang, did the streets grow quiet again.
While troops and local officials concentrated on restoring order, the machinery of the criminal justice system turned its focus to Brownfield and the killing of James Scurry. Brownfield was charged with murder and brought to trial in Georgetown later in 1900. The case immediately raised questions that went far beyond a single confrontation in a barbershop. Brownfield was an African American defendant in a county where Black residents made up roughly four-fifths of the population, yet no Black citizens served on the grand jury that indicted him or on the petit jury that would decide his fate. Represented by attorneys Julius L. Mitchell and W. J. Whipper, Brownfield's defense challenged the jury selection process, arguing that systematically excluding Black citizens from juries violated his constitutional rights to equal protection and an impartial jury.
Despite these arguments, the trial ended with a conviction. Brownfield was found guilty of murdering Scurry and sentenced to death by hanging. The defense carried the case to the South Carolina Supreme Court, which examined the record and ultimately upheld the conviction. In its opinion, the state high court acknowledged the arguments about racial discrimination in jury selection but concluded that Brownfield's lawyers had not introduced sufficient evidence to prove that qualified Black citizens were intentionally excluded from service. At the end of its decision, the court affirmed the verdict and ordered the case sent back to the trial court so that a new date could be set for the execution, leaving Brownfield still under a death sentence for Scurry's killing.
The legal battle did not end there. Brownfield's attorneys then sought relief from the United States Supreme Court, framing the case as a test of whether a Black defendant could ever hope for equal protection under laws administered by all-white juries in a county where Black citizens were the majority. In 1903, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered the Court's opinion. The justices did not revisit the facts of the shooting itself; instead, they focused narrowly on procedure. The Court held that the record did not clearly show that the defense had actually introduced evidence of racial discrimination in the selection of jurors, and on that technical ground it declined to disturb the state court's judgment, leaving the conviction and death sentence in place.
By the time the appeals were exhausted, the death of James C. Scurry had become more than a local crime; it was a turning point in Georgetown's racial and political life. His killing triggered days of fear, near-riot, and military occupation, and it provided the pretext for the town's white leaders to abandon the fragile “fusion” arrangements that had allowed some measure of Black political participation after Reconstruction. At the same time, the prosecution and conviction of John Brownfield entered legal history as a stark example of how questions about race and jury composition could reach the highest court in the country and still leave a defendant's fate unchanged. For Scurry's family and for the neighbors who had known him, what remained beneath the trials and political consequences was the raw fact that a local officer, carrying out what was supposed to be a routine enforcement of a tax order, had been shot with his own pistol in a Georgetown barbershop and never came home.
