On the way, however, a section of the angry crowd encountered the first
resistance when they confronted a black barber named Scott Burton. When
he saw the mob approach, Burton decided to protect his property and stood
in the doorway with a shotgun. The mob wanted to destroy the barber shop
because it was owned by a black man and because he had a white wife, but
they did not want to get killed themselves. Out of fear Burton fired a blast
of buckshot into the crowd. The crowd returned the fire and Burton was killed.
His barber shop was burned and his body was paraded from his porch to a
place several blocks away where it was hanged from a tree outside a saloon.
Burton's corpse became the symbol of the mob's hatred of blacks and was
riddled by bullets until the militia came and put a stop to that action.
