Jordan Phillips (Execution of)

Jordan Phillips was an African American man hanged at DeWitt (Arkansas County) on May 22, 1896, for murdering his wife five years earlier.

Jordan Phillips was born in Georgia in 1856 and later lived in Texas before moving to Arkansas County. In June 1891, he shot and killed his wife and then, the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic reported, fled to Central and South America. In September 1894, “Thinking the deed had been forgotten…Phillips went to New Orleans where he was captured…through a stratagem” of the Arkansas County sheriff. The Daily Graphic reported on September 19 that “he will be taken to Arkansas County today, and will doubtless never leave that county again alive.”

No accounts of Phillips’s November 1895 trial appear to exist, but he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang on December 27, 1895. His attorney, Hercules King Cannon White of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), who, the Daily Graphic wrote, “has worked hard and faithfully to save his client’s neck,” won an appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court on November 27, but the court affirmed the sentence of February 29, 1896.

In April 1896, J. C. Pinnix of Pike County, who served as president pro tempore of the Arkansas Senate, became acting governor when Governor James Paul Clarke was out of state, and “his first official act was to designate May 22 as the day upon which Jordan Phillips…shall expiate his crime on the gallows.”

As the date of Phillips’s execution neared, a rumor spread that his hanging would be in public instead of behind a barricade, “and at an early hour…the highways and byways were teeming with wagons, buggies, horsemen and footmen, all eagerly pressing toward the place where a fellow creature was to be launched into eternity.” By 2:00 p.m. on May 22, when the execution was scheduled, “perhaps 800 or 1,000 people had gathered around the jail.”

At 1:30 p.m., Sheriff L. C. Smith entered the jail and asked Phillips if he wished to address the crowd. After he answered in the affirmative, Smith took him outside and told him that “he could have all the time to speak that he desired.”

Phillips “warned all persons against the commission of crime, and especially of shedding the blood of their fellow-men,” the Arkansas Gazette reported, and then he preached his own funeral from the gospel of Luke. “He talked about thirty minutes, giving some sensible advice to those who heard him,” the newspaper reported. The condemned man then asked the crowd to join him in singing “The Old Time Religion,” which “he led in a clear, distinct tone of voice” before leading “an earnest, well-worded prayer.”

After telling the sheriff he was ready, Smith led him into the enclosure, where Phillips sang another song “and offered up his last prayer.” After the black cap and noose were placed at 2:30 p.m., Phillips “voluntarily stepped upon the trap door, the trigger was sprung, [and] the soul of Jordan Phillips was launched into eternity and the majority of the law was vindicated.”

The Gazette erroneously reported that Phillips’s hanging was the first legal execution in Arkansas County; the first recorded hanging in Arkansas Territory occurred in the county in 1820 when Thomas Dickinson was executed at Arkansas Post.

For additional information:
“Acting Governor Pinnix.” Arkansas Gazette, April 12, 1896, p. 16.

“Escaped Murderer Captured.” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, September 19, 1994, p. 1.

“Given an Appeal.” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, November 27, 1895, p. 1.

“Preached His Own Funeral.” Arkansas Gazette, May 26, 1896, p. 5.

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas