Johnson (Lynching of)

On August 19, 1876, a white man named Johnson was lynched in Clarendon (Monroe County) for allegedly having murdered two people.

According to an account from the Arkansas Gazette, Johnson had been arrested “for the murder of Parks and Young a short time ago” and placed into the jail at Clarendon. On the night of Saturday, August 19, 1876, “a band of masked men” took Johnson from the jail at Clarendon. Apparently at the urging of this mob, Johnson “confessed to the killing, and exonerated from all participation his accomplice, Mobley.” He went on to confessing “to having killed in Georgia a negro family, consisting of man, wife and three children, and then to having set fire to the house and burned them up.” He reportedly also confessed to having killed “two or three other men who were in pursuit of him.” The short account of the lynching ends thusly: “He began to implicate some females in some way, but the mob would hear no more, and swung him up by the neck.”

The event in question does not appear to have been widely reported in the surviving newspapers of the period, making it challenging to determine the names of the people mentioned in this brief account.

For additional information:
“City and General Items.” Arkansas Gazette, August 25, 1876, p. 4.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas