Entries - Entry Category: Law

Lavey, John Thomas “Jack”

John Thomas “Jack” Lavey was one of a handful of Arkansas lawyers who made equality claims for African Americans in courts and defended civil rights activists who were jailed during the turbulent civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His cases in federal courts established the right of African Americans and women to equal pay and promotions in public and private workplaces. Jack Lavey was born on October 19, 1932, in a northern suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, to Francis Lavey and Theresa Lavey. His mother was Italian, and his father, who was Irish, was a telephone lineman and a union member. Lavey played football and graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received a …

Lavy, Thomas Lewis

Thomas L. Lavy was an accused terrorist who committed suicide, hanging himself in his jail cell in Little Rock (Pulaski County) while awaiting trial in December 1995. While his death ended the ongoing investigation, it also left numerous questions as to what he had done and what he had intended to do. Thomas Lewis Lavy was born on December 18, 1941, in Winfield, Missouri, the second child of Littleton Lavy and Cora Yates Lavy. He was raised in Troy, Missouri, where he received his basic education. Following school, Lavy apparently joined the U.S. Army, although there are questions about the time and nature of his service. While there are reports that he was a military policeman in the Korean War, …

Law

Law develops out of the customs practiced by groups of people. In Arkansas, as in other places, the law has evolved over time with different cultures and interest groups within them. In the early eighteenth century, French colonizers replaced the familial and village-wide chiefdom systems of law developed by the natives with legal rules and regulations developed in France. These new rules appeared more sophisticated and complex than those developed by small groups of native hunter-gatherers. However, in many respects, they reflected a similar hierarchical structure with a hereditary ruler at the top. Given the geographical distance from which these laws were applied, they had to be adapted to fit the circumstances of frontier living. As had the natives, local …

LEARNS Act

aka: Act 237 of 2023

The LEARNS Act (Act 237 of 2023) was the signature piece of legislation promoted by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders during the 2023 session of the Arkansas General Assembly, her first session as governor of the state. After her election, Sanders indicated that her top priority would be a bill to change the public elementary and secondary education system in the state. On February 8, 2023, she held a press conference at the Arkansas State Capitol together with various Republican Party officials to announce some of the basics of her plan, which was still being drafted in secret. These included: a starting teacher pay set at $50,000, the creation of a voucher program (called “education freedom accounts”) that could be used …

Lebow (Lynching of)

A group of men lynched a white man named Lebow (also spelled as Lebo), described as a “villain, murderer and horse-thief,” in Polk County in August 1877, apparently ending a series of crimes by which he had terrorized the area. The Fort Smith Independent reported on August 8, 1877, that “an old man named Lebow was hung by a party of men last week in Polk County, for foully murdering two men who were travelling in the direction of Hot Springs. Lebow has been a terror to the citizens of Polk County for many years.” He apparently operated from his home on one of the major roads through the county to kill and steal. “Many travelers have lost their horses, …

Lee County Executions of 1881

Two African American men convicted of murder, Isaac Green and John Harden, were hanged in Marianna (Lee County) on July 15, 1881, in what were the first judicial executions in Lee County. John Harden (or Hardin), age twenty, a native of Lewisburg, Tennessee, reportedly killed William Brown on August 21, 1879, at Barton (Phillips County). Harden suspected Brown was having an affair with his wife and struck him with a briar hook, “almost severing his head from his body,” with one newspaper stating that “one blow with the weapon was sufficient to take the life of the man he hated.” Harden’s trial was delayed for some time, but he was convicted in May 1881 and sentenced to hang on July …

Lee, Daniel Lewis (Execution of)

Convicted along with an accomplice of a triple murder and robbery that took place in Arkansas, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed by the U.S. government on July 14, 2020. Lee was born on January 31, 1973, in Yukon, Oklahoma. His mother said that he suffered from seizures and a neurological impairment. He spent time in mental health facilities but was removed at least once due to violence toward staff members. At the age of seventeen, Lee participated in the murder of twenty-two-year-old Joseph Wavra III in Oklahoma City. He pleaded guilty to a robbery charge, the murder charge was dropped, and he received a five-year suspended sentence. At some point before April 1996, Lee lost his left eye, reportedly in …

Leflar, Robert Allen

Robert Allen Leflar was one of Arkansas’s most renowned legal scholars, a champion of racial equality, longtime dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville (Washington County), and president of two state constitutional conventions. Robert Leflar was born on March 22, 1901, in Siloam Springs (Benton County), the son of Lewis D. Leflar—who was a drayman, former deputy U.S. marshal in “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker’s court, and former Alma (Crawford County) town marshal—and Viva Mae Pilkenton of Siloam Springs. The oldest of eight children, Leflar later said that his mother, a high school graduate, was the chief influence on him and his siblings getting an education. Leflar worked his way through the University of Arkansas (UA), beginning …

LeSane, Henry (Execution of)

Henry LeSane was an African American sharecropper hanged at Marianna (Lee County) on May 16, 1902, for the ambush murder of a local farmer. John Greenwood, who was thirty-five at the time of the 1900 census, was a Black farmer who owned his home and lived in Lee County’s Union Township with his wife Hattie and their six children. Henry LeSane (sometimes spelled Lessing) was a twenty-two-year-old sharecropper who lived next door to Greenwood with his wife and daughter, likely renting from Greenwood. In late January 1901, Greenwood was driving a wagonload of cotton to the cotton gin at Oliver Owens’s farm when LeSane allegedly shot him in the back five times with a .44-caliber Colt pistol. “Greenwood was killed …

Levels, Jacob (Execution of)

Jacob Levels was an African American man hanged in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on June 21, 1878, for murdering another Black man the previous year. Jacob Levels was a single man, and Robert Swan’s wife cooked for him. On June 8, 1877, Swan “quarreled with his wife concerning her intimacy with Levels.” When Levels spoke up for the wife, Swan cut his cheek with a pocketknife. Levels went for a shotgun, but Swan fled. Two days later, Swan went to Levels’s house with another man and attempted to apologize, without success. On June 12, Swan went into Little Rock (he presumably lived outside the city) and told an acquaintance that he and Levels had reconciled, but that evening Levels went …

Levine, Sam M.

Sam M. Levine was a lawyer and politician in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) who served two stints in the Arkansas General Assembly, first in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, each time in the House of Representatives and then the Senate. A leader in the second-largest Jewish community in the state, Levine made history by delivering a filibuster in the Senate in the final minutes of the biennial legislative session in March 1959 that undermined the last efforts of Governor Orval E. Faubus and white supremacists to keep Little Rock (Pulaski County) schools closed to avoid integrating. Levine’s famous thirty-three-minute speech, which began as the clock in the Senate ticked toward noon and adjournment sine die on March 12, …

Lewis, David S. (Execution of)

David S. Lewis was hanged at Batesville (Independence County) on April 29, 1859, for murdering his father-in-law in White County about a year earlier. David S. Lewis, twenty-four, was the son of Abner and Mary Lewis of Pickens County, South Carolina, and was married to a daughter of Will C. Bewler. Lewis, described as “a drinking, worthless scamp,” was immigrating to Texas with Bewler and his wife, the family’s three daughters, and Lewis’s child when he and Bewler had an argument over some property. Lewis then left the party, riding ahead to Searcy (White County). Lewis proceeded to get drunk “and had his passions highly inflamed by the suggestions of some rowdys [sic]…concerning the aggravating character of his father-in-law’s treatment …

Lewis, Sanford (Lynching of)

At midnight on March 23, 1912, a mob hanged Sanford Lewis from a trolley pole in Fort Smith (Sebastian County). He had been suspected of shooting Deputy Constable Andy Carr, who sustained a fatal wound above the eye. Although the Arkansas Gazette refers to this as the first lynching in Sebastian County, it was actually the first lynching of an African American there. The murder of a white man named James Murray in the county on December 6, 1897, was described in many media outlets as a lynching. Deputy Constable Andy Carr was probably the Andy Care [sic] listed on the census as living in Ward 4 in Fort Smith in 1910. Living with him were his wife, Della, and …

Lightfoot, G. P. F. (Lynching of)

In December 1892, African-American Baptist minister G. P. F. Lightfoot, referred to in most accounts as “Preacher Lightfoot,” was murdered by a group of African Americans in Jackson County in retaliation for taking their money and promising them nonexistent passage to Liberia. Interest in immigrating to Africa started early in the United States. The Back-to-Africa movement dates back to 1816, when the American Colonization Society (ACS) was established to help free blacks resettle in Africa. The Republic of Liberia was established in 1847 and was recognized by the U.S. government in 1864. Following the Civil War, many newly freed Arkansas slaves became interested in the movement, especially those in majority-black counties in the Arkansas Delta. The Liberian Exodus Arkansas Colony …

Little River County Lynching of 1878

According to a letter published in the Arkansas Gazette on December 1, 1878, a lynching was perpetrated in Little River County in late November of that year, precipitated by a murder carried out for the purposes of robbing a man. The names of the principals in the affair were not named in the Arkansas Gazette’s account, although an abbreviated version in other papers named the lynched man as Hilliard and the murder victim as Ferris. The letter in question is written by a person named only as “J. F. B.” and described as a “friend” from the community of Lockesburg (Sevier County). The letter relates that two white men traveling from Texas crossed the Red River together at Harris’ ferry. …

Little Rock Executions of 1885

A pair of African American men, Rush Johnson and Lige Parker, were hanged together in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on February 12, 1885, after being convicted of first-degree murder. Rush Johnson, described as a “young, muscular black negro,” was employed on the Pulaski County plantation of former governor Henry Massie Rector in the spring of 1884. On May 18, a steamboat arrived at the Rector place on the Arkansas River, and Carrie Johnson, “a heavy-set, copper-colored, depraved woman,” bought whiskey from it and got drunk. She went to the plantation store and got into an argument with superintendent John Wall, who kicked her out, with Johnson accusing him of striking her. Rush Johnson, described as Carrie Johnson’s “paramour,” was heard …

Little Rock Executions of 1892

Tom Bailey and L. D. Slaughter, two African American men convicted of first-degree murder, were hanged together at Little Rock (Pulaski County) on May 6, 1892. J. F. Hackman, a traveling salesman for the Tunison Map Company of Jacksonville, Illinois, arrived at McAlmont Station near Little Rock on December 22 (some sources say December 28), 1889, where he met Tom Bailey, a local man. The two quarreled over the price of a map, and Hackman attempted to strike Bailey, who “then knocked Hackman down and went off, but came back and, while Hackman was in a comatose condition, cut his throat.” Bailey then robbed the salesman’s corpse, dragged the body to a lake, and tied it to a cypress knee …

Little Rock School Desegregation Cases (1982–2014)

aka: Little Rock School District, et al v. Pulaski County Special School District et al.

From 1982 until 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Western Division, handled Little Rock School District, et al. v. Pulaski County Special School District et al. At least six federal district judges presided over the case during this span of time. In 1984, the district court ruled that three school districts situated in Pulaski County were unconstitutionally segregated: the Little Rock School District (LRSD), the Pulaski County Special School District (PCSSD), and the North Little Rock School District (NLRSD). One reason for the ruling was that the population of Little Rock was approximately sixty-five percent white in 1984, while seventy percent of Little Rock School District students were black. Those who brought the case feared …

Livingston, Abe (Lynching of)

Although apparently only one Arkansas newspaper covered it, in late August 1884 an African-American man named Abe Livingston was hanged in Desha County for allegedly robbing and threatening a white man named William Kite. A search of public records revealed no information on either Kite or Livingston. According to an August 26 article in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Daily Independent, which was reprinted a week later in the Batesville Guard, Livingston was a “dangerous negro” who, sometime earlier in 1884, had robbed Kite. He was arrested at the time and put in jail in Arkansas City (Desha County). At some point in July, he escaped from jail. While he was free, he allegedly made several attempts to kill Kite and also …

Livingston, Frank (Lynching of)

Former soldier Frank Livingston was burned alive at age twenty-five near El Dorado (Union County) on May 21, 1919, for the alleged murder of his employer. Livingston’s lynching was among several similar incidents in Arkansas involving returned African-American World War I–era servicemen. In 1900, Frank Livingston was living in Cornie Township in Union County with his widowed father, Nelson. He was five years old at the time. (His mother was likely Lucy Willingham, whom Nelson had married in 1885.)  By 1910, Nelson had remarried, and Frank remained in Union County with his father and stepmother, India.  Although the 1910 census record indicates that he was born around 1893, subsequent draft records give his birthdate as November 1, 1892, in Shuler (Union …

Lockhart v. McCree

Lockhart v. McCree was a 1986 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court holding that it was not a violation of the requirement that a jury be a fair representation of a community if a court removed from the jury pool—prior to jury selection—all potential jurors who had expressed their opposition to the death penalty. Building upon its 1968 ruling in Witherspoon v. Illinois, the Court clarified the concept of fair representation for a jury of one’s peers. The case of Lockhart v. McCree began in 1978 when Ardia V. McCree stood trial in connection with the shooting death of gift shop and service station owner Evelyn Broughton in Camden (Ouachita County) on February 14, 1978. While McCree denied his involvement …

Lockhart, Art

Alvie L. (Art) Lockhart was as an administrator in the Arkansas prison system for twenty years. He moved to Arkansas in the early 1970s at the behest of Terrell Don Hutto, then head of the Arkansas Department of Correction (ADC). Lockhart worked as the superintendent at Cummins Unit maximum-security prison for ten years before being made head of the ADC in 1981. Lockhart proved a controversial figure and was accused of wrongdoing during the blood plasma scandal. He was forced to resign on May 29, 1992, as he was being investigated for misuse of state funds and fraud. Art Lockhart was born October 14, 1940, in White Hall (Jefferson County). He later moved to Texas, where he attended high school …

Logan County Lynching of 1874

aka: Sarber County Lynching of 1874

Brothers William G. Harris and Randolph Harris and their brother-in-law Robert Skidmore were lynched in the early morning hours of August 6, 1874, after a mob took them from the jail in Roseville (Logan County), where they were being held for stealing horses. William Harris, age twenty-four, led a gang that had terrorized the area for several years. He had been arrested for the May 2, 1872, murder of a man named McCoy and McCoy’s son who had recently moved to Arkansas from Alabama; a contemporary newspaper article reported that “the trouble was about a saddle blanket, and was unprovoked by the McCoys.” Harris was freed on $10,000 bond, owing to “the flexible conscience of the judge and prosecuting attorney …

Lonoke County Lynching of 1910

On April 4, 1910, Frank Pride and Laura Mitchell were lynched near Keo (Lonoke County) for allegedly murdering Pride’s wife and Mitchell’s husband, Wiley. The lynch mob was composed entirely of African Americans, one of a number of such lynchings in Arkansas. According to historian Karlos Hill, such lynchings were the result of African Americans’ lack of faith in the white judicial system. The lynchings often occurred in close-knit plantation societies and were an attempt to enforce community morals. Most, as in this case, occurred in domestic situations. There is almost no information available on Frank Pride or Laura and Wiley Mitchell. Newspaper accounts indicate that Pride was fifty years old, and Laura Mitchell ten years younger. Frank Pride was …

Lonoke County Race War of 1897–1898

The situation in Lonoke County was dire for African Americans during the latter half of 1897 and early 1898. In June 1897, a Black normal (teacher-training) school was ransacked and one of the teachers severely whipped. In September, that same teacher was found dead. In December, Oscar Simonton, an African-American merchant, was attacked and his store ransacked. In February the following year, notices were placed on the doors of Black residents warning them to leave the county on pain of death. This was closely followed by the burning of Black homes and schoolhouses. Trouble had flared up several times in the county dating all the way back to Reconstruction. Many of the reports on the 1898 events refer to a …

Lowery, Henry (Lynching of)

The January 26, 1921, lynching of Henry Lowery stands out for its barbarism, as well as the national and international attention it received, happening at a time when the U.S. Congress was debating anti-lynching legislation. The brutal murder of Lowery was used in a national campaign to pass such legislation, though this proved unsuccessful. Henry Lowery was an African-American tenant farmer in Mississippi County. Lowery is reported to have disputed a matter of payment with a local planter named O. T. Craig, whose land was adjacent to that of Lee Wilson, owner of the largest cotton plantation in the South. On Christmas Day of 1920, Lowery, forty years old at the time, became intoxicated, according to reports, and decided to …

Luciano, Charles “Lucky”

aka: Salvatore Lucania

Charles “Lucky” Luciano was an Italian-American gangster who was said by the FBI to be the man who “organized” organized crime in the United States. In many ways, he was the model for the character Don Corleone in the popular book and movie, The Godfather (1972). He evaded arrest and survived attempted gangland assassinations only to meet his downfall in 1936 while vacationing in Hot Springs (Garland County). Luciano was born Salvatore Lucania on November 24, 1897, in Lercara Friddi, Sicily, the third of five children to Antonio Lucania and Rosalie Capporelli Lucania. His mother kept house, and his father worked in the sulfur mines as well as doing whatever work he could find in the poor hillside village near …

Lynching

Lynching was an extra-legal form of group violence, performed without judicial due process. Scholars enumerating cases of lynching consider only those cases in which an actual murder occurs, though some states had laws against the crime of “lynching in the second degree,” in which death did not result to the victim. Lynchings, especially in the American South, have typically been perpetrated on marginalized groups—predominately African Americans, but also Jews, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and labor movement members, often on the basis of allegations of criminal misdeed. In his 1999 dissertation on lynching, Richard Buckelew documented 318 lynchings in Arkansas, 231 of which were directed against black victims, but additional research since then has increased the number. According to the traditional …

Madden, Owen Vincent

Owen Vincent “Owney” Madden was a gangster and underworld boss in New York City in the 1920s who retired to Hot Springs (Garland County) in the 1930s. Though his role in Arkansas politics and history will forever remain enigmatic, he was a powerful figure (from about 1935 until his death) during the heyday of illegal gambling in Hot Springs and an emblem of the bad old days of machine politics. Owney Madden was born on December 18, 1891, in Leeds, England, to Irish parents, Francis and Mary Madden. He spent his early childhood in Wigan and Liverpool, where Francis worked in textile mill sweatshops until his death in 1902. Mary then took her family, including Madden and perhaps two siblings, …

Magee, Leach (Lynching of)

On June 4, 1887, an African-American man named Leach Magee (sometimes referred to as Zach Magee) was hanged in Clarendon (Monroe County) for allegedly assaulting a woman named Mrs. J. M. Park, a relative of Sheriff J. W. B. Robinson. Neither Mrs. Park nor Leach Magee appear in any public records for Monroe County. In 1880, a single man named James W. B. Robinson, age twenty-four, was farming in Pine Ridge Township. County records indicate that he was sheriff in Monroe County from 1886 until 1890. He apparently later moved to El Paso, Texas, where he died in 1928. The first account of the alleged assault appeared in the Arkansas Gazette on June 3. It said that, on June 2, …

Maggio, Michael A.

Michael A. Maggio, a former Faulkner County circuit judge, was removed from office and later convicted in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas for accepting a bribe to reduce a nursing-home-negligence verdict and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. He was released in 2021. Michael Maggio was born in 1961, the oldest of four children of Henry Anthony Maggio, who was a psychiatrist and medical officer in the U.S. Army, and Bobby Padgett Maggio. Born in southern Louisiana, he spent his early childhood there and in Texas before the family settled in southern Mississippi after his father opened a psychiatry practice in Gulfport, Mississippi. Maggio graduated from St. Stanislaus High School in Bay St. …

Mahone, Hall (Execution of)

Hall (or Hal) Mahone was a young African American man hanged at Van Buren (Crawford County) on November 7, 1902, for rape. His was one of five public executions of rapists in the state between 1901 and 1904. Mrs. Rebecca McCloud, “a small woman, only 16 years old,” was staying with a Mrs. Clark at Haroldton (Crawford County) on September 5, 1902. She and ten-year-old Edgar Clark walked to the home of Dr. J. L. Young to get some medicine for Mrs. Clark’s sick infant. While they were heading home, Hall Mahone, “but 22 years of age and a giant physically,” allegedly came out of the undergrowth around the Bazort plantation just south of Van Buren and “dragged her into …

Maledon, George

While much of his life is shrouded in legend, according to a number of sources, George Maledon was the most prolific executioner in the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century. Working as the hangman for the famed Judge Isaac Parker for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas in Fort Smith (Sebastian County), he reportedly performed as many as eighty-one executions, although more recent historical accounts put the number at closer to fifty. George Maledon was born in Germany on June 10, 1830. He immigrated with his parents, about whom little is known, to the United States, settling in the Detroit, Michigan, area, where they joined the small German Catholic community that had …

Malpass, Charles (Lynching of)

On September 27, 1911, a white man named Charles Malpass Sr. was lynched in Desha County following a shootout in which his sons murdered two police officers. According to newspaper accounts, Charles Malpass was a descendent of early French settlers at Arkansas Post. In 1850, the Malpass family was living in nearby Red Fork Township. Farmer Rubin Malpass was living with his wife, Rebecca, and five children, including four-year-old Charles. The family was still in the area in 1860, but by this time there were eight children, among them sixteen-year-old Charles. According to the Arkansas Gazette, Charles began living with a “mulatto” woman named Bettie West in 1868. West had resources of her own, having inherited several thousand dollars when …

Mankiller, Smoker (Execution of)

An eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Cherokee man named Smoker Mankiller was one of six prisoners executed at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) on September 3, 1875. He was accused of shooting and then fatally stabbing a white man named William Short a year earlier. In a September 4, 1875, article, the Arkansas Gazette noted that Mankiller could both read and write in Cherokee and, employing stereotypes, described him as having the “usual Indian stoic indifference” of his tribe. On July 15, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat had given a fuller description, noting that Mankiller was “Medium-sized, full-faced, thick-lipped, [had] coarse hair of intense, dull blackness, face pock-marked and yellowish tinted, dark eyes and countenance apathetic and apparently listless.” At the time of his …

Manley Brothers (Execution of)

On September 9, 1881, Amos Manley and Abler Manley (sometimes referred to as Abner), eighteen- and twenty-year-old Creek brothers, were hanged in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) for the murder of farmer Ellis McVay (sometimes identified as Eli McVay or Ellis McVeigh). The September 9, 1881, edition of the Arkansas Democrat gives an account of the crime, which it called “one of the bloodthirstiest pages in the criminal annals.” On December 3, 1880, the Manleys stopped at McVay’s farm near Eufala on the Choctaw/Creek border on their way to the Choctaw Nation. According to the Democrat, the Manleys were out hunting on the snow-covered prairie when they got lost. Hungry, cold, and exhausted, they came upon the cabin of a white …

Mansfield, William Walker

William Walker Mansfield was a lawyer, legislator, circuit judge, and associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. The Sebastian County town of Mansfield is believed to be named in his honor. William Walker Mansfield was born on January 16, 1830, in Scottsville, Kentucky, the son of Colonel George Washington Mansfield and Frances Cockrill Mansfield. Mansfield received a “common-school” education before studying law under Judge William V. Loving in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1852. A short time later, Mansfield corresponded with fellow Kentucky native and noted Arkansas politician and attorney David Walker in Fayetteville (Washington County) about possible opportunities in the legal field within the state. Despite Walker’s encouragement to consider a practice in …

Maples, Cheryl Kathleen Smith

Cheryl Maples was a prominent attorney in Little Rock (Pulaski County) and throughout the state. An outspoken champion of equal rights for all, she was particularly well known for her work on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. Cheryl Kathleen Smith was born on March 2, 1950, in Santa Monica, California, to Harvey Smith and Patricia Ware Smith. She lived in Pacific Palisades until 1962, when her family moved to Arkansas, eventually settling in Fayetteville (Washington County). Smith graduated from Fayetteville High School in 1968 and married Richard Maples, a student at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville, that same day. The couple had two sons and three daughters. In 1980, at the age thirty, Cheryl Maples began college, studying …

Marion Lynching of 1910

On March 18, 1910, two African-American men, Robert (Bob) Austin and Charles Richardson, were lynched in Marion (Crittenden County) for allegedly assisting in a jailbreak. The victims were taken from jail by a mob and hanged in front of the Crittenden County Courthouse. There is very little known about the two victims. At the time of the 1900 census, Bob Austin was living in Jasper Township with his stepfather, Bennie Ross, and his mother, Henriette. Bennie was a farmer who was renting his farm, and nineteen-year-old Bob was a farm laborer. The men could neither read nor write, although Henriette could do both. Census records provide no information about Charles Richardson. According to the Arkansas Gazette, a jailbreak occurred on …

Marisa N. Pavan, et al. v. Nathaniel Smith

aka: Pavan v. Smith

Pavan v. Smith (2017) was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that clarified the legal parenting rights for the non-biological partner in a same-sex marriage. Rather than hearing oral arguments on the matter, the Court summarily rejected the decision of the Arkansas State Supreme Court denying a wife of a mother the opportunity to be listed as a parent on the couple’s child’s birth certificate, a privilege that was presumptively granted to husbands under Arkansas law. In 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws that barred same-sex marriage violated the Due Process and Equal Protections Clauses of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. Following that victory for marriage equality advocates, the Arkansas State Supreme Court acted …

Markle, John Lawrence

John Lawrence Markle was the perpetrator of a headline-grabbing crime in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in November 1987. The son of Academy Award–winning actress Mercedes McCambridge, Markle murdered his wife and two daughters before taking his own life on November 16, 1987. John Markle was born on December 25, 1941, in Hollywood, California, to Mercedes McCambridge and William Fifield. McCambridge was a radio actress who eventually moved into films, and Fifield was a writer. They divorced in 1946, and when McCambridge remarried in 1950, her second husband, film and television director Fletcher Markle, adopted the boy. John Markle was eight when his mother, who would become known to a later generation through her role as the voice of the demon …

Marmaduke-Walker Duel

aka: Walker-Marmaduke Duel

The Marmaduke-Walker Duel was fought during the Civil War between Confederate brigadier generals John Sappington Marmaduke and Lucius Marshall (Marsh) Walker. Marmaduke was originally from Missouri and was the son of a former governor. Walker was originally from Kentucky and nephew of President James K. Polk. Both graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. They made their way to Arkansas during the war; Marmaduke was stationed there, while Walker was granted a transfer to Arkansas due to trouble with superiors. Disagreement arose between the two in the summer of 1863 over military actions at Helena (Phillips County) and Little Rock (Pulaski County), where Walker failed to carry out operations as planned and exposed Marmaduke and his men to enemy troops. …

Mays, Richard Leon

Richard Leon Mays was an early civil rights attorney during the struggles to integrate public facilities and end bias in Arkansas courts and law enforcement. He was in the first group of African Americans to be elected to the Arkansas General Assembly in the twentieth century and became the second African American to be a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Governor Bill Clinton appointed him to the court in 1979. He was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2016. Richard L. Mays was born on August 5, 1943, in Little Rock (Pulaski County), the younger of two sons of Barnett G. Mays and Dorothy Mae Greenlee Mays. Although the family lived in an integrated neighborhood on …

McBroom, Alexander (Execution of)

Alexander D. McBroom was a young Union infantryman who was executed by a firing squad at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) on April 21, 1865, for desertion and larceny. Alexander D. McBroom, thirty-four, a native of Cannon County, Tennessee, enlisted in Company B, First Arkansas Infantry Regiment (US) at Fayetteville (Washington County) on February 4, 1863. He was reported to be five feet eight inches tall and had dark hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. A farmer, he had a wife and two children. He was listed as absent without leave on February 25, 1863, and deemed a deserter that summer. Confederate service records indicate that he joined Company B of Crawford’s Cavalry Battalion on March 2, 1863. He returned …

McClain, Doc (Lynching of)

Doc McClain (whose name is sometimes rendered Dock McLain or McLane) was lynched in Ashdown (Little River County) on May 13, 1910, for allegedly stabbing wealthy young farmer Ernest Hale. According to the 1900 census, farmer Doc McClain (whose age was not given) was living in a rented home in Franklin (Little River County) with his wife Mary (aged thirty) and their two children, Lizzie (seven) and Ezekil (three). They had been married for ten years. Neither Doc nor Mary could read or write. According to numerous accounts, Doc McClain stabbed Ernest Hale in a store sometime in April 1910. Hale survived the attack and was hospitalized. At the time, it was feared that he would die. Local citizens threatened …

McClure, John “Poker Jack”

John McClure was an Ohio-born lawyer who came to Arkansas as the Civil War was ending and played a starring role in the political tumult that followed. Often ridiculed as “Poker Jack” owing to his fondness for gambling (he had been expelled from the Union army for playing poker), McClure was chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court during the latter years of Reconstruction. Democrats and a Republican faction accused him of malfeasance during the Brooks-Baxter War and its aftermath, and the Arkansas House of Representatives impeached him. The Arkansas Senate refused to convict and remove him from office and instead awarded him $2,000 for the trouble that the impeachment had caused him. When federal Reconstruction ended and conservative Democrats …

McCollum, Ed (Lynching of)

Early in the morning of October 4, 1903, an African American man named Ed McCollum was lynched in Sheridan (Grant County) for having allegedly assaulted a police officer. According to an early report in the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, around 11:00 p.m. on the night of Friday, October 2, 1903, Constable Ed M. Crutchfield “attempted to arrest McCollum on a warrant charging McCollum with having assaulted another negro.” McCollum resisted arrest and shot Crutchfield in the arm. He was arrested the following morning and put in the jail at Sheridan. Around midnight, “a mob of 15 to 25 strong broke open the jail, took McCollum out, tied him to a tree nearby and riddled his body with bullets.” In keeping …

McCool, John Thurman (Murder of)

John Thurman McCool, a prominent businessman of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), was rebuilding his life after serving a prison sentence for forging state treasury warrants when he was shot to death outside Sheridan (Grant County) in 1962. McCool’s murder remains unsolved. The mystery surrounding the killing and the strange circumstances of his life in the six years prior to it made the murder a subject of rumors of a mob killing, of revenge, and of silencing a man who knew too much, although no evidence of any of those motives ever emerged. Thurman McCool was born in Sheridan on August 18, 1913. He grew up in Pine Bluff, married a Pine Bluff woman, and was prominent in the business and …

McCoy, Hosey (Lynching of)

On March 9, 1902, an African American man named Hosey McCoy was lynched in Little River County for allegedly having raped a white woman. A relatively detailed account of the event was published in the March 13, 1902, edition of the Fort Smith Times. This account relied upon “authentic advices” received at Texarkana (Miller County) from New Rocky Comfort—now Foreman (Little River County)—on the morning of March 10 and later transmitted onward. According to this account, the woman “criminally assaulted” was one “Mrs. John Lemon, a white woman and wife of a drummer.” This was perhaps Dora Lemons, age twenty-two, who is listed in the 1900 census as the wife of a John Lemons of Little River County, age twenty-nine, …

McCulloch, Edgar Allen

Edgar Allen McCulloch was a lawyer in eastern Arkansas who achieved renown in a long career that included twenty-four years as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, nineteen of them as chief justice, and a critical span of six years as chairman or member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where he established important law in the regulation of public utilities in the United States. At the FTC, he personally took on an extensive investigation of public-utility holding companies in America requested by Congress, which resulted in a raft of energy regulation laws during the New Deal. Edgar McCulloch was born in Trenton, Tennessee, on August 1, 1861, to Dr. Phillip Doddridge McCulloch and Lucy Virginia Burrus McCulloch. McCulloch’s …