Vigilante Mob Targets Interracial Couple in Walla Walla
A masked group forcibly removed a man and his wife from their home, subjecting them to a brutal public assault.
Walla Walla, June 9—Fifty masked men, heavily armed, took Joseph Fossati and a colored woman who runs a house of ill-repute, and applied to them a coat of tar and feathers early this morning. Shortly after midnight, a body of men wearing masks over their faces went to the house occupied by the woman. A hack was driven up to the front door; the men broke open the door and, going to a bedroom, dragged Fossati and the woman from the bed and carried them to the hack, which was driven to the outskirts of the city. Their clothes were torn off and a heavy coat of tar and feathers applied, and the two were ordered to leave the city. The affair was well planned and executed, the thoroughfare through which the hack passed being guarded by armed men, and any attempt to stop them would have been futile. Although Fossati is the son of a highly respected family and has had more than the average advantages in life, he persisted in living with this woman, and on Friday they went to Dayton, where they were married.
“Their clothes were torn off and a heavy coat of tar and feathers applied, and the two were ordered to leave the city.”
This horrific act of vigilante violence against an interracial couple in 1895 highlights the brutal enforcement of social and racial hierarchies in the Pacific Northwest. While the legal landscape has shifted, the history of such 'expulsion' tactics remains a dark chapter in Washington's struggle with systemic exclusion.
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