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Jordan, Bob (Lynching of)

In August 1892, an African-American man named Bob Jordan was shot by members of a mob near Camden (Ouachita County) for allegedly insulting a white woman. According to the Arkansas Gazette, a Constable Wright had arrested Jordan and was en route to Camden with his prisoner on the night of August 8. Along the way, six miles from town, a group of masked men intercepted them. The men told the constable to leave and then shot Jordan. The incident was reported in a number of newspapers across the country, with the Postville, Iowa, Graphic reporting that Jordan had attempted to assault a woman. Historian Kenneth C. Barnes, in his book Journey of Hope, noted that the incident was indicative of …

Judiciary, State

The judiciary of Arkansas comprises men and women in government who exercise or have exercised various forms of judicial power of the state and territory of Arkansas. The purpose of the judiciary is to decide cases and controversies between parties that come before it. Judicial power has best been defined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the case of Prentiss v. Atlantic Coast Line as that power which “declares and enforces liabilities as they stand on present or past facts and under existing laws.” Judicial power is distinguished from legislative power in that the latter looks forward and tries to remedy problems growing out of changing societal conditions. The Arkansas Supreme Court has adopted the Prentiss definition of “judicial …

Kahl, Gordon (Shooting of)

aka: Smithville Shootout
Gordon Kahl was a North Dakota farmer and World War II veteran who, starting in the late 1960s, refused to file his federal income taxes on the grounds that the American government operated under the Communist Manifesto and violated his religious principles. After over a decade of militant tax evasion and a year in prison, Kahl was shot during an attempted arrest in Smithville (Lawrence County) by County Sheriff Gene Matthews in an incident that made national headlines as the “Smithville Shootout.” Kahl’s life and the circumstances of his death have since become a popular subject for conspiracy theorists and those on the far right of the political spectrum. Gordon Wendell Kahl was born in 1920 in Heaton, North Dakota, …

Kaplan, Philip Edwin

Philip Edwin Kaplan was a noted lawyer in Little Rock (Pulaski County). As a nationally known attorney focusing on civil and human rights, he helped inmates in the Arkansas prison system fight unjust treatment. He also argued cases against the teaching of creationism in Arkansas’s public schools and in support of a professor who lost his job for being a communist. Phil Kaplan was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, on January 4, 1938, and grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, with his parents and one brother. He studied government at Harvard University and graduated in 1959. He graduated from the University of Michigan with an LLB degree in 1962. He was licensed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but soon relocated to St. …

Kees, Willie (Lynching of)

On April 29, 1936, a nineteen-year-old African-American man named Willie Kees was shot near Lepanto (Poinsett County) for allegedly attempting to attack a white woman. It was both the first recorded lynching in Poinsett County and the last recorded lynching in Arkansas. On April 18, Kees allegedly attacked the woman on a bridge just outside of town. She screamed, and two men came to her rescue. Kees was turned over to city marshal Jay May and put in jail. That night, May intercepted a mob that was coming to the jail to get Kees and dissuaded the citizens from doing so. He told reporters for the Arkansas Gazette that, because of the darkness, he was unable to identify anyone in the mob. Kees had …

Kemp, Joseph (Execution of)

Joseph (Joe) Kemp was hanged at Evening Shade (Sharp County) on October 3, 1879, for fatally wounding a man ten years earlier at Oil Trough (Independence County). Joe Kemp was born in Wayne County, Tennessee, in October 1854, and he later moved to Arkansas, settling in Oil Trough bottoms in Independence County in 1868. There, he became the close companion of his cousin Jesse Dowdy. Dowdy had ongoing problems with neighbor Marion D. Hulsey because he was “in the habit of dogging Hulsey’s stock, catching his hogs and cutting their hamstring.” Hulsey, in turn, was seeking Dowdy’s arrest for harming his livestock. Dowdy determined to see Hulsey dead and enlisted Kemp’s assistance in killing him. On the evening of July …

Kennedy, James (Lynching of)

James Kennedy was a white man lynched in Dallas County in 1866, apparently for his open Unionist leanings. His murder shows the risks that many people who had allied with the Union during the Civil War faced in parts of Arkansas in the immediate postwar period, when pro-Confederate vigilantes perpetrated with impunity a number of assassinations and attacks under the guise of lawfulness. The August 3, 1866, lynching of forty-four-year-old James Kennedy and other men made news in the August 10, 1866, Little Rock Daily Gazette (under which name the Arkansas Gazette then operated) as follows: “We learn from a reliable source that on Wednesday night last a party of ten or twelve men went to the residence of James …

Kessler v. Strecker

Kessler v. Strecker was a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1939 concerning the arrest and planned deportation of Joseph George (a.k.a. Josef or Joe Georg) Strecker, a Hot Springs (Garland County) restaurant owner, for alleged membership in the Communist Party. This case happened around the time Texas congressman Martin Dies was publicly demanding the deportation of International Longshoremen’s Association head Harry Bridges for similar reasons. When Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins refused to act on Bridges’s case until Strecker’s case was settled, Republicans began impeachment proceedings against her. Born on August 29, 1888, in Galicia, then a part of Austria-Hungary, Strecker immigrated to the United States in 1912 and worked in coal mines before settling in Hot Springs, running a …

Key, Lee (Lynching of)

On May 10, 1901, an African-American man named Lee Key was shot by a masked mob near Knoxville (Johnson County) for allegedly terrorizing other Black residents in the area. Newspaper reports described Key as “obstreperous,” “notorious,” and “troublesome.” According to the Arkansas Democrat, he had been terrorizing other African Americans and “making himself obnoxious in various ways.” He reportedly had shot and wounded another Black man in Knoxville several years earlier, and had served time in the state penitentiary for other crimes. On Friday night, May 10, a group of masked men went to Key’s house and called to him to come out. Key grabbed a shotgun, but before he could fire, a member of the mob shot him with …

King, Frank (Lynching of)

On June 17, 1895, an African-American minister named Frank King was hanged in Portland (Ashley County) for allegedly shooting and seriously wounding one of his deacons, William Toney. Frank King may be the twenty-two-year-old man who the federal census shows married eighteen-year-old Sophia George in Ashley County in September 1887. According to one report, King, a Baptist pastor, was “on intimate terms” with William Toney’s wife. On Monday, July 16, when the two men met on the street, King allegedly pulled a pistol and shot Toney twice in the abdomen. King tried to escape but was captured and placed in jail in Portland. That same night, a mob of African Americans took King from the jail and “stealthily and quietly” …

Kirkendall, Mose (Lynching of)

On July 20, 1878, an African American named Mose Kirkendall was hanged in Boone County for allegedly attempting to rape a “Miss Walters,” a young white woman. This was reportedly the first lynching in Boone County. Although there was no Mose Kirkendall recorded as living in Boone County at the time of the 1870 census, there was a thirteen-year-old named Moses Kirkendale living in the household of farmer J. M. Moore and his wife, America, near Searcy (White County). There were other unrelated people living with the family, including fifteen-year-old A. Kirkendale, who may have been Moses’s brother. The alleged victim may have been Martha Walters, who was thirteen years old by the 1870 census and one of six children …

Kirkland, John (Lynching of)

John Kirkland was shot to death in Howard County on October 8, 1888, after he attempted to kill a local doctor. A Dr. Chisholm hired Kirkland, a white man, to do some work for him on October 6, 1888, after which the pair had “a difficulty.” They apparently did not solve the issue, and Kirkland “waylaid” the doctor that evening and shot at him, but Chisholm escaped the ambush. A group of armed men set out after the unsuccessful assassin, “but he defended himself and escaped.” Kirkland was captured on October 8 and placed in the custody of a constable. As the lawman transported Kirkland toward the nearby jail, though, they were intercepted by “several masked men with Winchesters” who …

Kitts, James (Execution of)

James Kitts was hanged on July 25, 1902, at Arkansas City (Desha County) for the first-degree murder of a gambler; he was one of six men executed on the same date in Arkansas. On the morning of November 13, 1901, gambler James Johnson testified “in the mayor’s court of Arkansas City” against James Kitts, “a traveling ventriloquist and gambler,” for pulling a gun on a man, a crime for which Kitts was fined. Kitts got drunk later in the day and, around 9:00 p.m., went to Johnson’s “craps dive” and shot him to twice; Johnson “died instantly, shot through the heart.” Kitts fled to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he was captured thirteen days later and returned to Desha County for trial. …

Kizer, Bernice Lichty Parker

Bernice Lichty Parker Kizer was a lawyer and a path-breaking state legislator and judge in Arkansas in the second half of the twentieth century. After almost fifteen years in the Arkansas General Assembly, Kizer stepped down to seek election as a probate judge. Her subsequent victory made her the first woman in state history to be elected to a judgeship. Bernice Lichty was born on August 14, 1915, in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) to E. C. Lichty and Opal Lichty. She graduated from Fort Smith High School in 1932 and worked for two years as a grocery checker at Fort Smith’s first self-serve grocery store in order to save money for college. She initially attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, …

Knox, Robert C.

Robert C. Knox, scion of a southern Arkansas family of politicians and lawyers, built a thirty-year legal and political career on advocacy for the Democratic Party and its powerful leaders—notably Governors Charles Hillman Brough and Homer M. Adkins. Adkins appointed Knox in 1942 to his final and preeminent job, justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He was a justice for twenty months, although a heart attack and its impairments limited his service. Before that, he had been the mayor of Monticello (Drew County), briefly the county judge, a chancery judge, an assistant attorney general, a state senator from Pulaski and Perry counties, and chairman of the Arkansas Corporation Commission. Robert Carr Knox was born on April 19, 1892, in Plantersville, …

Krieger, Heinrich

Heinrich Krieger was a German lawyer instrumental in providing knowledge of American race law to Nazi policy-makers. As an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1933–34, he engaged in an in-depth examination of American Indian Law. Some of his research later served as the basis for the Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the early Nazi regime. Heinrich Krieger’s date of birth is unknown. There is no information about what brought him to Arkansas. Upon his return to Germany, Krieger produced a memorandum—presumably based on research he had begun in Arkansas—that was used in a critical 1934 meeting for planning what would become the Nuremberg Laws. The memorandum described American …

Labor Day Bombings of 1959

The Labor Day bombings in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1959 represented the last gasp of opposition to the desegregation of the capital city’s Central High School. Coming almost two years to the day after the Little Rock Nine’s first attempt to attend Central High, the coordinated set of explosions evinced a stark and violent reminder of the continuing racial tensions in Arkansas’s capital. The damage was limited, however, and the effort was arguably more symbolic than substantive. At the same time, the bombings highlighted the fact that, while the determined effort to resist the integration of Central High had finally been overcome—with the historic high school having opened its doors for the 1959–60 school year to a student body …

Lacey, Nathan (Lynching of)

On October 16, 1911, an African American man named Nathan Lacey was lynched in Forrest City (St. Francis County) for allegedly attacking the wife of his employer, Tom Cox. Mrs. Cox is probably Elizabeth Cox, who in 1910 was living in Franks Township with her husband Tom and their one-year-old son, Thomas. There were three African American men by the name of Nathan Lacey or Lacy listed in St. Francis County in 1910. The first was Nathan Lacy Jr., born in Mississippi around 1881, who was a widower working as a farm laborer in Madison Township. He had three children the age of eight and under. Nathaniel Lacy, born in Mississippi around 1885, was single and living with his mother, …

Lacy, Thomas J.

Thomas J. Lacy was a leader of the Arkansas legal community in the early days of statehood. One of the original members of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, he served for nine years before ill health forced him to step down in 1845. Thomas J. Lacy was born around 1806 in Rockingham County in North Carolina. The son of Batie Cocke Lacy and Elizabeth Overton Lacy, he was educated at what became the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reportedly graduating at the top of his class in 1825. Following graduation, he read law in the Springfield, Kentucky, office of John Pope, an ally of Andrew Jackson who would later serve as territorial governor in Arkansas. From Kentucky, Lacy …

Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee

The court case Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee examined the structure for the funding of Arkansas schools in a grueling, fifteen-year process. This case led to the subsequent overhaul of public school funding with the aim to be more fair and exact and to benefit all Arkansas students equally. In 1992, the school district of Lake View (Phillips County) first brought its case against the State of Arkansas, claiming that the funding system for the public schools violated both the state’s constitution and the U.S. Constitution because it was inequitable and inadequate. At that time, schools received funding from three levels of government: local, state, and federal. Because some local governments had more tax money available for …

Laman v. McCord

aka: W. F. Laman, et al. v. Robert S. McCord, et al.
W. F. Laman, et al. v. Robert S. McCord, et al. was a 1968 decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court that established the framework for interpreting the state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in ways that favored public access to meetings and government papers. The lawsuit leading to the decision of the Supreme Court was filed only weeks after the Arkansas General Assembly enacted the FOIA. The law gave the public and the media the right to examine and copy public records and to be present whenever governmental bodies met. The unanimous opinion used unusually strong language in condemning a violation of the new act at a closed meeting of the city council of North Little Rock (Pulaski County) and …

Lamb, Theodore Lafayette

Theodore Lafayette Lamb was a key participant in the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis in 1958–59. He was also a prominent civil rights and labor attorney from 1967 until his death. Ted Lamb was born on April 11, 1927 in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Foster Lamb and Theodosia Braswell Lamb. His father was a butcher by trade and moved his family to Arkansas in the early 1930s; the family settled on a farm near Bryant (Saline County). Lamb was educated in the Little Rock (Pulaski County) schools. He was president of the student council at Little Rock High School, now Central High School in 1944. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was posted to …

Lambert, Joseph Calvin (Joe)

Joseph Calvin Lambert was a career U.S. Army soldier who fought in World War II before achieving the rank of major general and serving as the army’s adjutant general in the 1960s. Joseph Calvin (Joe) Lambert was born in Washington (Hempstead County) on August 3, 1908, one of six children of timber industry worker Walter Samuel Lambert and Maude Johnson Lambert. He lived in the area, much of the time in Texarkana (Miller County), until 1925, when he joined the army as a buck private. He rose through the non-commissioned officer ranks, reportedly gaining his master sergeant’s stripes after rescuing a general’s daughter from shark-infested waters in Panama, and was promoted to second lieutenant in the Army Reserve Corps in …

Lancaster, Robert (Execution of)

Robert Lancaster was hanged on September 12, 1879, in Batesville (Independence County) for the Christmas Eve 1877 shooting death of a man at a dance in Sylamore (Stone County). Robert Lancaster was born in 1851 in Richwoods (Stone County), which was then part of Izard County, the second of five children in the farming family of William and Rosy Lancaster. The September 13, 1879, Arkansas Gazette article on his execution describes his background thusly: “After receiving a good common-school education he learned the trade of a stone-mason, working at his trade when opportunity offered. He soon acquired dissipated habits, and being a man of immense physical strength, was considered a dangerous man when under the influence of liquor.” On December …

Landlord-Tenant Laws

Landlord-tenant law is divided into two types: residential and commercial. Because commercial landlord-tenant law is governed mostly by the law of contracts, this discussion is restricted in scope to residential landlord-tenant law. Landlord-tenant relations are regulated generally by state law as opposed to federal, although a few relevant federal laws, most notably the Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968), preempt any conflicting state law. Public and Section 8 housing is also regulated mostly by federal law. About half of the states have enacted the Uniform Residential Landlord Tenant Act, which was adopted by the Uniform Law Commission in 1972. Since then, the uniform law was repeatedly introduced in Arkansas to no avail, but in …

Lane, Frank (Lynching of)

Frank Lane was a career criminal likely lynched on August 25, 1882, after killing two men over an argument during a card game at Mountainburg (Crawford County). Frank Lane was an ex-convict from Illinois who moved to Missouri after being freed from prison. It was there that he learned of the 1877 murder of the five members of the Spencer family of Clark County, Missouri, and, acting as a detective, accused local man Bill Young of being the killer. Young, a convicted murderer who went “from the penitentiary into the Union army, returned home and became rich,” was tried for the crime and acquitted, with a newspaper stating that “there was nothing at all proven against him except his bad …

Larkin, Hill (Lynching of)

On February 14, 1890, an African-American man named Hill Larkin (sometimes referred to as Hill Larker) was hanged in Camden (Ouachita County) for allegedly murdering a deputy sheriff named Ross and wounding or killing a deputy sheriff named Snead from Calhoun County. In 1880, forty-two-year-old Hill Larkin, a native of Mississippi, was living in Carroll Township, Ouachita County, with his wife, Parille. He was a farmer and could neither read nor write. Ross, sometimes identified as Tom Ross, was probably John Thomas Ross. In 1870, he was eleven years old and living with his parents, John J. and M. E. Ross, in Lafayette Township. John Thomas Ross died in Ouachita County on February 4, 1890, and is buried in Oakland …

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 …