Bell and Swain v. State

Examination of the cases of Black youths Robert Bell and Grady Swain shines a powerful light on the ordeals encountered by African Americans accused of committing crimes in Arkansas during the years of segregation. If African Americans managed to avoid the extralegal threat of lynching and made it into the criminal justice system at all, they then faced the prospect of law enforcement officials using torture to extract confessions, the racial prejudices of all-white courtrooms and all-white juries, and the fickleness of state politicians and state government.

On the afternoon of Thursday, December 29, 1927, sixteen-year-old Robert Bell and fourteen-year-old Grady Swain were playing outside the white-owned store of William Bunge “Bunn” McCollum in Greasy Corner (St. Francis County). Their playmates were Bunn McCollum’s eleven-year-old son, Julius McCollum, and the store’s nineteen-year-old Black resident handyman, Elbert Thomas. Bell, who lived with his family on a nearby homestead, had just finished helping his father Samuel carry mail between rural post offices on horseback. Swain lived with his family on Russell Collier’s plantation about a mile away and was at the store on an errand.

Late in the afternoon, an alarm was raised when it was discovered that Julius had gone missing. A search eventually led to Julius’s uncle, Ransom McCollum, recovering his nephew’s drowned body from Cut-off Bayou some 200 yards from the store. Although there were no obvious signs of foul play, handyman Elbert Thomas became the community’s prime suspect in a murder inquiry. A lynch mob was formed to track Thomas down. Meanwhile, several other African Americans were caught in a dragnet by local law enforcement officials and placed in the jail at Forrest City (St. Francis County) on December 30. These included Robert Bell and his father Samuel Bell, Grady Swain, A. P. Campbell, and Elbert Thomas’s brother Willie Thomas.

As the hunt for Elbert Thomas continued, county sheriff Joseph M. Campbell told the press that he believed Swain was an accomplice to the murder of Julius. According to Swain, while he was in jail, Sheriff Campbell whipped a murder confession out of him using a leather strap. Campbell also tried to whip a confession out of Samuel Bell; after he was released without charge, threats and harassment from whites in the community convinced him to flee the state with other family members in fear of their lives.

Grady Swain was transferred to the Arkansas State Penitentiary in Little Rock. Soon after, on January 6, 1928, Elbert Thomas’s drowned body was discovered in Cut-off Bayou. Locals claimed that Thomas had drowned while trying to save Julius from an attack by Bell and Swain. At the state penitentiary, Warden Shelby Lee Todhunter whipped Swain to make him confess that he had murdered Elbert Thomas and that Bell had murdered Julius McCollum. Bell was brought to the state penitentiary, where he was also whipped by Todhunter on three separate occasions to secure a confession. They signed such a confession on January 29, 1928.

Bell and Swain were taken back to Forrest City and tried for the murders of McCollum and Thomas at the St. Francis County Circuit Court on March 27, 1928. The court appointed two white attorneys, William J. Lanier and George B. Knott, to defend them. Despite the attorneys’ best efforts, Bell and Swain were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, with the execution scheduled for June 15, 1928. The trial lasted two days, and the all-white jury took just twenty minutes to reach a verdict. Lanier and Knott appealed the cases to the Arkansas Supreme Court. On September 24, 1928, the court upheld the appellant’s contention that there was no independent evidence to prove a murder had taken place. The court ordered new trials for Bell and Swain.

When Knott left the case, Lanier enlisted the assistance of Little Rock (Pulaski County) attorney Roy D. Campbell for the second trial. Campbell was a prominent white landowner in the Arkansas Delta, and Lanier believed that he could exercise some influence with the local white community. Lanier and Campbell successfully argued for a severance of the two cases and for a relocation of the trials to the neighboring Woodruff County Circuit Court in Cotton Plant (Woodruff County).

Bell’s second trial began on March 5, 1929. At the trial, the state prosecution produced precisely the independent evidence that the Arkansas Supreme Court had said it was previously lacking. This came in the person of German Jones. Jones, an African American from Osceola (Mississippi County), claimed that he had witnessed Julius McCollum’s murder while working as a sharecropper in the area. Jones’s very limited and sketchy account of events cast doubt upon its veracity, however. There were also complaints from defense attorneys when Judge William D. Davenport influenced the jury members to reach a unanimous verdict at the trial, which they did on March 8, 1929. Bell was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder.

After the trial, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent Ruth Moore, a white special investigator, to gather intelligence on the ground in Arkansas. The civil rights organization had taken an interest in the cases, and it had provided financial assistance in the defense of the two youths. Moore spent almost two weeks in the state in early April 1929, visiting Little Rock, Forrest City, and nearby Round Pond. From her inquiries, Moore concluded that Thomas had been lynched by a white mob led by the McCollum family, and that Bell and Swain were being framed for the murders of Julius McCollum and Elbert Thomas as part of a cover-up.

At Bell’s second appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court on October 7, 1929, the court once again reversed the lower court verdict. This time, the court said that the state had failed to prove that Bell’s confession was not secured under duress. On March 5, 1930, Bell was tried for a third time, alongside Swain for a second time, at the Woodruff County Circuit Court. Struggling to round up enough jurors and swiftly approaching the end of the court’s term, Judge Davenport offered Bell and Swain a plea deal. Davenport said that in exchange for pleading guilty to second-degree murder he would hand them each a ten-year prison sentence. The sentence would be backdated to their first convictions in March 1928 and include time already served. This meant they would be eligible for parole in one year and four months’ time.

Attorney Lanier advised Bell and Swain to accept the deal as their quickest route to freedom. They agreed. The NAACP continued to maintain an interest in the youths’ plight, but the organization was leery of Lanier and his handling of the cases. Instead, it backed two African American attorneys from Little Rock, brothers William A. Booker and Joseph Robert Booker, to take over.

There was optimism that the national media attention garnered by the cases might assist in the release of Bell and Swain. In January 1931, the cases were mentioned in a Scribner’s Magazine article about the use of forced confessions to secure convictions. The cases also attracted the attention of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (known unofficially as the Wickersham Commission), which released volume eleven of its ongoing investigation and report in June 1931. Established by President Herbert Hoover, the commission scrutinized suspect law enforcement practices in the Prohibition era, including the use of the “third degree” to extract confessions.

But this national attention apparently carried little sway in Arkansas. The Arkansas Parole Board turned down the Booker brothers’ parole application on behalf of Bell and Swain in December 1931. The board insisted that their ten-year sentences must start from the time of their guilty pleas in 1930—not from their initial convictions in 1928. This was at odds with the plea deal they had struck with Judge Davenport. The Bookers then petitioned Governor Harvey Parnell to grant an indefinite furlough to secure the youths’ release. Although he was seemingly amenable, the political timing never appeared quite right for Parnell to act.

The Bookers tried again in 1933 after the election of new Arkansas governor Junius Marion Futrell. Futrell unsuccessfully attempted to encourage the Arkansas Parole Board to act. The governor then found himself under political pressure from the Arkansas General Assembly not to intervene. More specifically, this pressure emanated from the recently elected Representative Bunn McCollum, the head of the family suspected by the NAACP of having lynched Thomas and of framing Bell and Swain for murder to cover its tracks.

Futrell eventually released Bell and Swain from prison by executive clemency on September 25, 1935, after they had served seven and a half years of their sentences. It may not have been a coincidence that by then Bunn McCollum’s one and only term as a state representative had ended. After being released, Swain married Georgia Lee West at Gould (Lincoln County) in June 1940. The couple moved to Little Rock in 1942, where Swain died at the United Friends Hospital on February 17, 1948, while receiving treatment for a liver abscess. Bell’s fate after his release is unknown.

For additional information:
Bell and Swain v. State 177 Ark. 3468 (1928), series IV, box 107, folder 3486, Arkansas Supreme Court Briefs and Records, University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law/Pulaski County Law Library, Special Collections, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Bell v. State 180 Ark. 3561 (1929), series IV, box 110, folder 3561, Arkansas Supreme Court Briefs and Records, University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law/Pulaski County Law Library, Special Collections, Little Rock, Arkansas.

“Bell, Robert, and Grady Swain, 1928–1930,” 5 folders, box I:D47, and “Bell, Robert, and Grady Swain, 1931–1933,” 4 folders, box I:D48, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Kirk, John A., Kathleen Burell, Brittany Fugate, Christy Hendricks, Ellis Eugene Thompson, Michael White, and Logan H. Yancey. “Criminal Justice in the Age of Segregation: The Arkansas Cases of Robert Bell and Grady Swain.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 81 (Spring 2022): 19–45.

John A. Kirk
University of Arkansas at Little Rock