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Entry Category: Law - Starting with H

Haley, Loy (Lynching of)

Loy Haley, an African-American man, was lynched on June 15, 1915, likely near Lewisville (Lafayette County), for allegedly murdering Roy Lester, owner of a plantation in Lafayette County located in the Red River bottoms. Probably the earliest report on the violent chain of events was a June 13, 1915, article in the Arkansas Gazette. Though titled, “Lynching Near Lafayette County,” the article does not, in fact, describe a lynching but rather reports on the intended lynching of Loy Haley. According to the report, Roy Lester had remained on his plantation despite flooding on the Red River that had left his farm entirely surrounded by water, and made him “the only white man on the place.” No details of Lester’s murder …

Hall, Frank (Execution of)

Frank Hall was an African American man hanged in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on December 9, 1881, for murder, although he proclaimed his innocence up to his death. Frank Hall, also known as Lewis Hall, was born enslaved in Rowan County, North Carolina. Described as five feet ten inches tall and “when walking swaggers and is loose-jointed,” Hall was recruited to come to Arkansas as a laborer, finding work in Monroe County. The Arkansas Democrat reported that he soon became known as a “desperado,” suspected of murdering a man after moving to Lonoke County. He spent three years in prison for stealing money from a child and left Lonoke County after his release. He moved to a community about eight …

Hallum, John

John Hallum was a prominent nineteenth-century Arkansas lawyer and historian. His efforts to record and illuminate the territory and state’s early history provided a highly readable introduction to the state’s heritage, while laying a solid foundation for future historians. John Hallum was born on January 16, 1833, in Sumner County, Tennessee, the oldest of eleven children of Bluford Hallum and Minerva Davis Hallum. Shortly after he was born, the family moved, and Hallum spent his early years on a farm near Memphis, Tennessee. He reportedly learned how to read from the local newspaper, the Memphis Appeal, and was a voracious reader from an early age. When the family moved back to Sumner County, he received sporadic schooling in a log …

Hamilton and Ludberry (Lynching of)

A lynching in Warren (Bradley County) was the subject of two different reports published in the January 23, 1887, edition of the Arkansas Gazette. The earliest report received was placed on page four in the “Local Items” column and reads as follows: “It was rumored last evening that Medbury and Hamilton, charged with the murder of the Harris brothers, near Warren, had been taken from jail and lynched. The report, however, could not be verified, there being no night telegraph operator at that place.” However, by the time that page was set, another report arrived at the Gazette (datelined St. Louis, Missouri, January 22) and was placed on the first page of the issue. According to this report, the two …

Hamilton, Henry (Reported Lynching of)

Henry Hamilton, described as a wealthy landowner from Bradley County, was reportedly lynched by a mob on June 30, 1887, for his role in murdering a pair of brothers. However, the national reports in question mirror state reports, published in January of that year, regarding the lynching of two men variously named Hamilton and Ludberry. Newspapers around the United States reported in early July 1887 that Hamilton, “a wealthy planter and stock man,” had been lynched on June 30, 1887, with most accounts saying that he and a man named DeBerry committed the crime for which Hamilton was lynched, while others reported that Hamilton and his brother committed the murders. Accounts also differ on the names of the murder victims, …

Hammond Packing Company v. Arkansas

The U.S. Supreme Court heard only one case from Arkansas among several important antitrust lawsuits during the Progressive Era, a time when many states were waging crusades against big-business monopolies: Hammond Packing Company v. Arkansas, 212 U.S. 322 (1909). The state won, and the Court’s decision provided a remedy for corporate obstruction in the discovery phase of litigation and established an important precedent that became a cornerstone of Rule 37 in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Using a 1905 Arkansas antitrust law, Robert L. Rogers, who was the state’s attorney general, and Lewis Rhoton, prosecuting attorney in Pulaski County, waged numerous antitrust lawsuits. Several were aimed at the so-called “Beef Trust,” seeking penalties ranging from $30,000 to $7 million, as …

Hampton Race War of 1892

aka: Calhoun County Race War of 1892
The Hampton Race War (also referred to as the Calhoun County Race War in many sources) occurred in September 1892 and entailed incidents of racial violence all across the southern part of the county. While many sources have attributed the events in Calhoun County to Arkansas’s passage of the Election Law of 1891, with provisions that vastly complicated the voting process for illiterate citizens of all races and effectively kept them from voting, it seems that the trouble in the county started prior to the early September election. Racial unrest was widespread in Arkansas in the 1890s, especially across the southern counties. Incidents increased after the state began passing Jim Crow legislation that limited the rights of its black citizens. (According …

Hannah, James Robert (Jim)

James Robert (Jim) Hannah was a popular jurist who, as chief justice, led the Arkansas Supreme Court through a tumultuous period early in the twenty-first century. Hannah, who was known for his dignity and soft-spoken leadership, spent more than thirty-six years as a trial court judge and Supreme Court justice. When deeply divisive political issues reached the court after his election as chief justice in 2004, however, he could not prevent a fracture among the justices. Jim Hannah was born on December 26, 1944, at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Long Beach, California, to Frank Alvin Hannah, who was an officer in the U.S. Navy, and Virginia Marie Stine Hannah. His father was stationed in California and Miami, Florida, in …

Hardin, Will H. (Lynching of)

Will H. Hardin was murdered in his jail cell in Clinton (Van Buren County) on April 17, 1899, after his death sentence for killing a local man was commuted. An accomplice, Lee Mills, had already been hanged for his role in the incident. Hardin—a former deputy sheriff—and Mills, both of whom lived near Scotland (Van Buren County), rode to the home of Hugh Patterson on Culpepper Mountain about six miles southwest of Clinton on the evening of December 13, 1897, intending to rob him of between $1,000 and $1,800 believed to be in his house. Also at the house when the robbers arrived were Patterson’s son Jim, along with Jim’s wife Rebecca and their five children. Patterson’s brother William James …

Harper, Charles Augustus (C. A.)

Charles A. Harper, originally from New England, spent a nomadic career soldiering, practicing law, and in business, farming, the ministry, and the judiciary, including a brief and undistinguished period as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court around the end of the Civil War. He was elected to the court when Republicans formed a state government under the new constitution of 1864, but he resigned two years later after apparently sitting on only five minor appellant cases and writing three opinions. The inactivity was not his fault, as the government and entire judicial system were in turmoil and functioned erratically. Charles Augustus (C. A.) Harper was born on December 2, 1818, in Canterbury, New Hampshire, the second son of Joseph …

Harper, John (Execution of)

John Harper was a Black man hanged at Magnolia (Columbia County) on October 12, 1904, for the murder of his wife. On the night of February 26 or 27, 1904, John Harper hit his wife on the head with a fireplace poker or other heavy instrument, and after she fell to the ground, “thinking she was not dead…[he] poured coal oil on her and built a fire around her.” After he “burned the body to a crisp,” he dragged her corpse to their garden and buried her. Harper told neighbors that she had left him, but they were suspicious and contacted local law enforcement officers, who found her corpse in the garden. Harper “confessed his crime after being put in …

Harris, Carleton

Carleton Harris was a lawyer and politician who was chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court during a tumultuous period in Arkansas political and judicial history. When he was elected to the court in 1956, Harris was the youngest chief justice in the nation; he served in the position for twenty-three years, longer than any other Arkansan except Griffin Smith, whose seat he filled upon the judge’s death and after the brief interim appointment of Lee Seamster. He was elected three times to the Arkansas House of Representatives, first when he was twenty-two years old, and he was elected to one term as prosecuting attorney, to eight years on the chancery bench, and to all or parts of four terms …

Harris, Gilbert (Lynching of)

On August 1, 1922, a mob of as many as 500 people broke into the Hot Springs (Garland County) jail and, brandishing guns, forcibly took a man and lynched him at the triangle in front of the Como Hotel located at the intersection of Central and Ouachita avenues. In his memoirs, Roswell Rigsby (1910–2001), an eyewitness to the lynching, stated, “I believe this was the last lynching in Hot Springs, at least in public.” There are some conflicting reports as to the first name of the man lynched. There are references to his first name being Punk, Bunk, and Gilbert; however, all accounts list his last name as Harris. Accounts of the hanging appeared in newspapers as far away as …

Harris, Jack (Lynching of)

On June 25, 1903, an African American man named Jack Harris was lynched in Clarendon (Monroe County) for allegedly attacking his employer, planter John A. Coburn. In 1900, Harris, a twenty-six-year-old bachelor, was living with his mother Ann in Monroe County and working as a farmer. The 1880 census indicates that Coburn, born in Searcy County in 1866, was living with his parents Arthur J. and Mary Elizabeth Hixon Coburn in White County. By 1894, he was in Monroe County, where he married Sallie D. Knight. Apparently on June 21, 1903, Harris rode one of Coburn’s mules without his permission. When Coburn asked him for an explanation, Harris allegedly struck him with a piece of timber, breaking one of his …

Harris, Oren

Oren Harris served as prosecuting attorney of Arkansas’s Thirteenth Judicial Circuit (1937–1940) and in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing the Fourth Congressional District from 1941 to 1953 and, following redistricting, the Seventh Congressional District from 1953 to 1966. Harris resigned his congressional seat in February 1966 after President Lyndon Johnson appointed him U.S. district judge for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas. Although Harris took senior status with the court in 1976, he fulfilled his promise to work until “he couldn’t put his socks on” and carried a full docket of cases for two additional decades. Oren Harris was born on a farm in Belton (Hempstead County) on December 20, 1903, to Homer Harris and Bettie Bullock Harris, …

Harrison Race Riots of 1905 and 1909

aka: Charles Stinnett (Execution of)
Though nowhere near as murderous as other race riots across the state, the Harrison Race Riots of 1905 and 1909 drove all but one African American from Harrison (Boone County), creating by violence an all-white community similar to other such “sundown towns” in northern and western Arkansas. With the headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) located nearby, Harrison has retained the legacy of its ethnic cleansing, in terms of demographics and reputation, through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The U.S. Census of 1900 revealed a Black community in Harrison of 115 people out of 1,501 residents. This constituted a vibrant community that, despite its poverty, had a cohesive culture and deep roots. By all accounts, …

Harrison, John Henry (Lawsuits Relating to the Lynching of)

On February 3, 1922, an African American man named John Henry Harrison was lynched in Malvern (Hot Spring County) for allegedly harassing white women and girls. He had been arrested, taken to his victims for identification, and then jailed. Sheriff D. S. Bray, fearing mob violence, decided to take Harrison to the jail in Arkadelphia (Clark County) for safekeeping. Finding the roads out of town intentionally blocked by cars, he decided to travel by train instead. Bray, Harrison, and two deputies (S. J. Leiper and W. T. Gammel) boarded the train around 10:30 p.m., and Harrison was hidden under the seat in the “negro car.” According to the Malvern Daily Record, just as the train was beginning to leave, a …

Harrison, John Henry (Lynching of)

On February 3, 1922, an African-American man was lynched in Malvern (Hot Spring County) for allegedly harassing white women and girls. While a number of newspaper accounts, as well as a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) annual report, identify him by the name of Harry Harrison, and the Arkansas Gazette identified him as John Harris, research conducted in large part by the Hot Spring County Historical Society indicated that his name was John Henry Harrison. Harrison was living in Malvern at the time of the 1920 census; he was thirty-eight years old, married, and worked as a laborer in a lumber mill. He was a native of North Carolina and could both read and write. According …

Harrison, William M.

William M. Harrison was a Maryland-born lawyer who spent twelve years as an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in its most tempestuous days—helping to settle the state of the law and the social order during and after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Arkansans during that period lived under governments created by four state constitutions, the charters of 1836, 1864, 1868, and 1874, which created a jungle of legal issues. Harrison entered that era as a Republican politician opposing secession but mutated into a Democrat when the minority Republicans lost power. He was sometimes a lonely voice on the court advocating for not punishing people who had to live and transact business in a state that had seceded from …

Hart, Jesse Cleveland

Jesse Cleveland Hart was appointed associate justice to the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1907 after the death of Justice James E. Riddick, who died of typhoid fever on October 9, 1907, while in office. Hart served as an associate justice until 1927, when he was appointed chief justice following the resignation of Chief Justice Edgar A. McCulloch. Hart served as chief justice until his death in 1933. Jesse C. Hart was born in a two-story log home near Dardanelle (Yell County) on July 25, 1864. Hart was the second of seven children of James E. Hart, who was a physician, and Sarah Stone, both pioneers of Yell County. His mother, a talented and educated woman whose own father was a …

Hart, Josephine Linker (Jo)

Josephine Linker (Jo) Hart, whose Cherokee parents were driven from their farm in Pope County when she was a child to make way for Lake Dardanelle, was inspired by that experience to study law, serving as a civil and criminal defense lawyer. She later became one of the first women to be elected to both Arkansas appellate courts and the first Native American to serve on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Jo Linker was born on November 20, 1943, at her grandmother’s home in Perryville (Perry County) but soon went to live with her parents on the farm near Russellville (Pope County). Gylem P. Linker and Leola Caldwell Linker raised cattle and grew vegetables that they sold to Atkins Pickle Company …

Hate Groups

Both the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) use the term “hate group” to describe any organization that espouses hostile attitudes toward members of racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) includes people with disabilities and people with alternative lifestyles in the minority group category. Individuals who are affiliated with hate groups sometimes commit physical acts of violence or destroy property such as churches, synagogues, mosques, and other symbols associated with targeted minority groups. The historic base of white supremacist groups in the United States began with the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which was actively involved in terrorist activities against African Americans and their supporters in the years following the …

Hawkins, Marlin Conover

Marlin Conover Hawkins served Conway County as an elected official for thirty-eight years. His ability to deliver votes to statewide and national candidates gave Hawkins a profile in state politics that was rare for a county official. His political machine is an important part of Arkansas’s political lore, and the effects of his political contacts are still evident in Conway County. Marlin Hawkins was born on April 22, 1913, near Center Ridge (Conway County) to John Carl Hawkins and Nettie Mae Hawkins. John Carl Hawkins, a sharecropper and part-time barber, died in 1929. As the second of seven children, part of the burden of supporting the family fell on Hawkins. He worked as a sharecropper and part-time janitor until Olen …

Hayden, Bud (Lynching of)

On June 3, 1898, Bud Hayden was lynched in Texarkana (Miller County) for allegedly assaulting twelve-year-old Jessie Scott, the daughter of the late James V. Scott, former circuit clerk. Although Hayden claimed to be twelve years old at the time, the authorities estimated his age to be at least eighteen. The Arkansas Gazette’s reports of the lynching were carried in newspapers across the country, including the Atlanta Constitution, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Herald. At the time of the 1880 census, J. V. Scott was living in Cut Off Township in Miller County. He was a twenty-four-year-old farmer living with his wife, Talitha, who was twenty. There was only one African-American family named Hayden in the county. …