Entries - Entry Category: Early Twentieth Century - Starting with G

On May 29, 1925, an African American man identified only as George was shot by a mob near Camden (Ouachita County) for allegedly attempting to attack a white woman in nearby Louann (Ouachita County). George, originally from Little Rock (Pulaski County), was working in the oil fields that had sprung up around Camden in the early 1920s. According to a later report, early on May 29, George had come to the home of a widow near Louann, where she lived with her three children. He approached her on the porch and said he had been watching her for some time, “waiting to get [her] alone some time, and now’s good enough.” He grabbed her, but she managed to escape. At …

On December 23, 1920, in what one newspaper called “One of the most dreadful tragedies that the Negroes of the City of Helena has [sic] ever been called on to witness,” Professor Jacob William (J. W.) Gibson was killed by a night watchman in Helena (Phillips County). Depending on how the word “lynching” is interpreted, this may have been an incident of police brutality, or Professor Gibson may in fact have been lynched. The Arkansas Gazette filed no report on Gibson’s death. The only national coverage appears to be a rather belated report in the Dallas Express, an African-American newspaper published in Texas. Not much is known about Gibson. According to the Express, not only did Gibson teach in Helena, …

Albert Giles was one of twelve African-American men accused of murder following the Elaine Massacre of 1919. After brief trials, the so-called Elaine Twelve—six who became known as the Moore defendants and six (including Giles) who became known as the Ware defendants—were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Ultimately, the Ware defendants were freed by the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1923; after numerous legal efforts, the Moore defendants were released in 1925. Albert Giles was born in Louisiana on November 22, 1898, to Sallie T. Giles and an unidentified father. He moved to Phillips County, Arkansas, sometime in the early 1900s and was residing in Elaine (Phillips County) when he was drafted into the U.S. military on September …

On May 26, 1916, Felix Gilmore (sometimes referred to as Felix/Phelix Gilman or Gillmore) was hanged by a mob near Prescott (Nevada County) for allegedly attempting to assault a seventeen-year-old girl. At the time of the federal census in 1910 (six years before the incident), Gilmore was listed as a ten-year-old African American living in Prescott with his parents, Frank and Pearl Gilmore. His father was working in a sawmill, and his mother was a washerwoman. They were renting their home, and they could all read and write. If the census record is correct, Gilmore was only sixteen at the time of his death, although newspapers reported him to be older. He had apparently been in trouble before. According to …

On July 19, 1903, a twenty-three-year-old African American man named Crane Green was lynched near Warren (Bradley County) for allegedly assaulting the daughter of a white sawmill worker named Baker. Baker and Green were employees of Childs’ mill near Warren. Green allegedly assaulted Baker’s thirteen-year-old daughter on Saturday, July 18, leaving her “considerably injured.” Green escaped, but the word went out, and local officers sent his description to law enforcement officers throughout the region. He was eventually captured in Lanark (Bradley County). A posse started out to take him to the county jail, but on the way they encountered a mob. According to the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, the mob had assembled on the Kingsland Road about five miles north …

In 1910, an Arkansas tenant farmer named Steve Green fled the state to Chicago, Illinois, after allegedly killing his employer, William Sidle (sometimes referred to as Seidel or Saddle), near Jericho (Crittenden County). He narrowly escaped extradition back to Arkansas after his case was taken up by prominent African Americans in Chicago, including Ida Wells-Barnett. There is no record of Steve Green in Arkansas census records. According to an article written by W. E. B. Du Bois in the November 10, 1910, issue of The Crisis, Green was born in Tennessee in 1862 and was totally uneducated. There was an African American named Steve Green living in Civil District 15 in Shelby County, Tennessee, in 1900. He was born in …