Entries - Entry Category: Law Enforcement - Starting with J

Boge Jackson was an African American man hanged at Hamburg (Ashley County) on November 18, 1881, for the shotgun slaying of an elderly Black man the previous year. Boge Jackson and Reuben Jordan initially argued over the placement of a boundary fence sometime in 1880; Jackson threatened Jordan, who apparently ignored him. Jackson and his friend Henry Hill went to a dance on Bayou Bartholomew near Jordan’s house sometime later, and the older man accused Jackson of stealing whiskey from him. They would quarrel again a few days later. “Soon after this old Jordan was found dead in the road,” the Arkansas Democrat reported. “Suspicion pointed unerringly to Jackson and Hill as the authors of the foul crime.” Authorities soon …

On May 22, 1885, an African American man named Goodwin Jackson was executed in Clarendon (Monroe County) for the murder of another African American, Sandy Redmon, in November 1884. Jackson and Redmond both appear in Monroe County census records. In 1870, an illiterate “mulatto” man named Goodwin Jackson, age twenty-two, was living near Indian Bay in Jackson Township of Monroe County with his wife, Charity. He was still there in 1880, and by that time, he and Charity had four children. Newspaper reports were not kind to him. The Arkansas Gazette noted that he “had the appearance of not being very intelligent,” while the Memphis Daily Appeal referred to him as “a bad negro,” noting that he had “attempted to …

Four men were hanged together on June 22, 1883, in Clarksville (Johnson County) for a botched train robbery in which the train conductor was shot to death. Thirty-six-year-old Gove Johnson, a Civil War veteran who had served in the Union army’s Ninth Kentucky Infantry Regiment, plotted to rob a Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad train, planning to “stop the train, terrify the passengers, and rob the express car, in which they had learned there was to be a large amount of money.” He recruited his teenage cousin James Johnson, along with twenty-eight-year-old James Herndon and thirty-three-year-old Monroe McDonald, to participate in the crime. As the time for the robbery neared, though, Herndon and McDonald had second thoughts but stayed …

Anthony “Andy” Johnson, an African American man described as a “desperado,” was hanged at Dumas (Desha County) on June 21, 1895, for murdering his wife’s lover in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). The 1880 federal census shows laborer Andy Johnson, age twenty-eight, living in Pine Bluff with his wife Rose, twenty-seven, and their three daughters. Laborer Howard Johnson, twenty-five, also lived in Pine Bluff with his wife Mattie, twenty-three, and their three children. Andy Johnson was enslaved by Joseph William Bocage of Pine Bluff but after the Civil War became deeply involved in local Reconstruction politics. Although he was described as “quarrelsome, loud-mouthed and uneducated” and “a desperado…universally feared by his race,” he was elected as the bonded constable of Jefferson …

William Johnson was a young African American man hanged near Monticello (Drew County) in 1883 for murdering the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Calvin Williams, “a respectable colored man,” disappeared in the fall of 1880 from his place on Jacob Pruitt’s plantation near Tillar (Drew and Desha Counties). Authorities suspected William Johnson, who was “a terror among the negroes of the county, and many poor white people feared him,” and Matilda Williams, the missing man’s wife, in the disappearance, but there was no evidence. Johnson and Matilda Williams then lived together until she left him after an argument and he made it known to her that he “knew enough against her to have her …

In an event that was described by several newspapers as a lynching, an African-American man named Charles Jones was hanged in Spadra (Johnson County) on October 31, 1881, for allegedly attacking a Mrs. F. J. Jones. Mrs. Jones, a white woman, was not related to Charles Jones, and there is no information in public records for either F. J. Jones or Charles Jones. According to reports, Charles Jones attempted to attack Mrs. Jones on Tuesday, October 25. Her screams attracted the neighbors, who came running, but Charles Jones managed to escape. A search was organized, but Jones was not captured until Sunday, October 30, when the authorities found him in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and arrested him. They took him …

Jesse Jones was hanged at Ozark (Franklin County) on December 6, 1895, after being convicted of killing, dismembering, and burning a pair of horse traders from the Indian Territory, a crime he denied committing to the end. Jesse Jones was born around 1872 near Eureka, Spencer County, Indiana, one of six children in the prominent farming family of Charles S. Jones and Lewesa Jones. He left home in 1892 and traveled to Florida; St. Louis, Missouri; and Texas before ending up in the Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), where he was hired to run a wagon and cook for horse dealers Charlie and Jesse Hibdon. The three men left Paolo in the Chickasaw Nation in early 1894 to drive a herd …