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Entry Category: Law - Starting with L

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 …