“If Vancouver were south of the Mason Dixon line there would be a lynching today,” began an editorial in the Daily World on 9 October 1922. The occasion was the death of 23 year-old Robert McBeath, a Victoria Cross recipient and one of Vancouver’s finest. Constable McBeath was fatally shot at the corner of Granville and Davie by Fred Deal, a black sleeping-car porter. Deal was allegedly driving erratically when McBeath and Detective Quirk jumped on the running boards and ordered him to pull over. Passed out drunk in the passenger seat was Marjorie Earl, a white woman known to police because of the bawdyhouse she ran out of her Granville Street apartment. The officers yanked Deal out of the vehicle and before long McBeath lay dying on the sidewalk. Detective Quirk, also wounded in the affray, commandeered a car and rushed McBeath to St Paul’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead from the gunshot wound just below his heart.

The World assured its readers that British justice did not lag behind the lynch-mob justice of the Jim Crow south. It predicted Deal would “surely hang at the end of hempen rope by due process of law, after his guilt has been formally established in court.”

Mayor Tisdall responded to the incident by instructing the chief constable to “rid the city of all undesirables.” Raids were to be carried out on pool rooms, “questionable” hotels, dance halls, and “lower class clubs” and police were to monitor boat and train arrivals for suspicious-looking “riff-raff” looking to settle in Vancouver. Chief Anderson soon announced the formation of an armed flying squad that would assist regular police patrols in the crackdown. He issued Order No. 382 authorizing retaliation “in view of the recent tragic murder of our brother officer.” Police were to find evidence that would “secure the conviction or deportation of idle and degenerate men and their paramours” and to arrest “all vagrants of every description: poolroom loafers, drug fiends, bootleggers, and so on.”

Officialdom did not specify the race of undesirables to be culled from the city, but black residents knew the fall-out would hit them hardest because Fred Deal was one of them. Nora Hendrix (grandmother of Jimi) recalled the backlash: “Everybody was all mad about this coloured boy shooting a policeman. Well, you know, that put a damper on where the coloured boys were working in different places, it made it hard for them, they want to bar them out.” This was the reason Ross Hendrix, her husband and a former Chicago police special, was rejected for a job he had been promised cleaning the men’s restroom at the corner of Main and Hastings. “There was some excuse,” Nora Hendrix reflected decades later.

Underlying the backlash was the assumption that not only did Fred Deal somehow represent his race, but also that Robert McBeath exemplified his. McBeath joined the police force two years earlier, shortly after arriving from Scotland and at a time when it was understood only Scots need apply to the police department. There were some exceptions by the 1920s, but for most of the force, McBeath was a compatriot as well as a fellow officer. His Victoria Cross symbolized that he was the best the British Empire, Scotland, and the Vancouver Police Department had to offer.

As extraordinary as the incident was, it was not unprecedented. In 1917, Bob Tait, described as a “drug-crazed negro” in the press, initiated a shoot-out with police and killed Chief Constable MacLennan and an eight-year old boy before committing suicide. That grisly drama began with the landlord and his hireling breaking into Tait’s apartment, intimidating his white “paramour,” demanding rent, and threatening to kick Tait’s face in. By killing himself, Tait denied police the chance to avenge their chief, although they did try, unsuccessfully, to have his companion convicted for MacLennan’s murder.

The 1917 cop-killing was fodder for celebrated suffragist and magistrate Emily Murphy to propagate the image of black men as dangerous “dope-fiends” in her anti-drug screed, The Black Candle. Published the same year McBeath was killed, The Black Candle links race and drugs and uses the Tait case to illustrate dope-fiend tactics. For Murphy, the evil of drugs was not their ill-effects on users, but that non-white men used them to corrupt white women. One lurid photograph illustrating her book shows a black man in bed with a white woman with the caption implying he lured her there with drugs. Another target of The Black Candle was drug-addicted sleeping-car porters with “ignoble and swinish appetites.” Murphy could not imagine “anything more dangerous than a filthy-minded drug-addict in charge of a coach of sleeping people, whatever his color may be.” But though drug addiction was colour-blind, employers in 1922 were not; sleeping-car porters were exclusively black men like Fred Deal. When the World characterized him as a “drink and drug crazed negro,” it hardly mattered that he had never taken drugs.

Marjorie Earl, the woman with Deal that night, was also not the innocent white woman conjured in The Black Candle. Described with euphemisms like “powdered and painted woman” and “woman of the streets,” the middle-aged Earl owned the car and the police revolver used to kill McBeath. Originally from Kentucky, she was a Southern Belle gone astray, known for keeping company with black men. Fred Deal had been staying with her and was probably employed as her driver. Dressed in furs and accompanied by a younger protégé at the trial, Earl basked in her newfound notoriety and charmed the reporters. Two of them offered to write her life story, feeling her “obvious education and good breeding coupled with her present position in life” would make “good copy.”

Support for Fred Deal was mobilized through the city’s only all-black church. The Fountain Chapel opened in 1918 at 823 Jackson Avenue in Vancouver’s East End (today’s Strathcona), just a few blocks from where Chief MacLennan was murdered the previous year. Nora Hendrix explained that she and other black residents got together and decided, “Well, ‘we should get a church of our own.’ Yeah. ‘Ain’t got any other business of our own, so got to get a church anyway, if nothing else.’” The Fountain Chapel housed the local chapter of the African Methodist Episcopal Church until the mid-1980s. Few other traces of an East End black community had survived the construction of the Georgia Viaduct off-ramp that obliterated Hogan’s Alley in the early 1970s.

The black population was thinly spread across the city except for a small concentration around Hogan’s Alley. Sandwiched between Prior and Union streets, Hogan’s Alley extended from the Fountain Chapel on Jackson to Park Lane, the alley just east of Main. This three-block alley stretch was notorious for illicit gambling and drinking that attracted revellers and rowdies from all over the city, including the occasional policeman and politician. Reflecting the East End’s immigrant composition, Hogan’s Alley was a cultural hodgepodge. But with the Fountain Chapel at one end and various southern-style juke joints for dancing and live music, it had a distinctive black flavour not found elsewhere in the city.

The best-known Hogan’s Alley resident until his death in 1937 was Fielding William Spotts, who came as an infant with a group of black pioneers that migrated to Vancouver Island in 1858 to escape the racism they suffered in California. More typically, black men came to Vancouver like Fred Deal, as railroad porters. Many were recruited from the American south by railroad companies looking to undermine their unionized white employees and which then segregated railroad work as a concession to the white-only union. Black men also worked as janitors, but few other legitimate occupations were open to them.

William Johnston avoided the racialized job market by betting on racehorses. Johnston had lived on Granville Street in the Green Hotel, owned by a black man and where Johnston, Deal, and other black men congregated. After the shooting, he fled to Seattle to escape the racial backlash, but returned in time for the trial, this time choosing to live near the Fountain Chapel on Jackson Avenue. Black women might find domestic work, as did Nora Hendrix, a vaudeville dancer originally from Tennessee who earned money in Vancouver doing laundry. The Fred Deal case brought members of this nebulous community together, not because they were convinced of his innocence, but because they believed he was a victim of racism.

For people like the editor of the World, it was an open-and-shut case and a trial was merely an obligatory formality. After all, the incident seemed to affirm the fear-mongering of contemporary racists: a “crazed negro” denizen of the underworld murders a heroic white police officer in cold blood. Judge W A McDonald wanted justice to be swift and saw no valid reason for prolonging the process. He denied motions to have the trial moved out of Vancouver and postpone it to the spring assizes. Both had been filed by Deal’s lawyer in an attempt to offset the hostile racial climate that followed McBeath’s death. Less than a month after the shooting, Fred Deal was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang by the neck until dead.

According to the Vancouver Police Department’s official history, Fred Deal’s sentence was commuted to life in prison because he was beaten while in custody. In reality, the police brutality basis on which his lawyer appealed the verdict was the brutality Deal claimed he was subjected to by Constable McBeath and Detective Quirk well before any shots were fired. The Court of Appeal ordered a retrial scheduled for March 1923. Meanwhile, Reverend U S Robinson visited Fred Deal on death row, baptized him, and brought him reading material. No doubt buoyed by the generous moral support he received, and by the defence fund set up through the Fountain Chapel, Deal later said he went into the second trial with a hope he did not have in the first one. With his life hanging in the balance, Fred Deal needed all the support he could get.