Entries - Gender: Male - Starting with W

William Wordlaw (sometimes spelled Wardlow or Wordlow) was one of twelve men arrested and charged with murder following the events of the Elaine Massacre of 1919. After brief trials, the so-called Elaine Twelve—six who became known as the Moore defendants and six (including Wordlaw) who became known as the Ware defendants—were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Ultimately, the Ware defendants were freed by the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1923; after numerous legal efforts, the Moore defendants were freed in 1925. William Wordlaw was born to sharecroppers Edd and Georgia Wordlaw on August 19, 1897, in Pontotoc, Mississippi. William and his six siblings grew up helping their parents farm the land. According to his draft registration documents, he …

Ted Raymond Worley was a historian, teacher, editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and executive secretary of the Arkansas History Commission, as well as a prolific writer. Ted R. Worley was born on June 1, 1906, in Pope County to Ernest C. Worley and Dollie Koone Worley. After graduating from Russellville High School, he attended Arkansas State Teachers College (which later became the University of Central Arkansas) in Conway (Faulkner County), earning his degree in 1934. He received his master’s degree at the University of Texas in 1939. Worley taught at a rural Pope County school and schools at Pottsville (Pope County) and at Bald Knob (White County) while working on those degrees. He also worked toward a doctorate at …

William Booker Worthen was a banker in Arkansas from 1874 until his death in 1911, and he also wrote a history of Arkansas banking. The bank he founded survived recessions and the Great Depression, becoming the largest bank holding company in the state, until being acquired by Boatmen’s Bank in 1994. It is now part of Bank of America. Born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on September 17, 1852, one of four children of George Alfonso Worthen and Louisa Booker Worthen, W. B. Worthen grew up in the turbulent times surrounding the Civil War. His father, a merchant with a variety of business interests, died as a civilian in 1864. After the Civil War, Worthen studied as a cadet at …

Charles Wright, an African American man, was hanged on murder charges on April 25, 1884, at Center Point (Howard County), the only person to be executed for participating in the Howard County Race Riot of 1883. Thomas Wyatt, a white sharecropper, spurred the riot by beating two Black farmers in late July 1883 over a dispute about surveys of a property line. He also hit a Black woman over the head when she rejected his solicitations as she plowed a field. After failing to receive legal satisfaction, a group of Black men planned a citizens’ arrest of Wyatt. The next day, they gathered to march to Wyatt’s home to apprehend him. In the ensuing altercation, Joe Booker, the group’s alleged …

Richard Nathaniel Wright was a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His many works, influenced by the injustices he faced as an African American, protested racial divides in America. His most famous work, the autobiographical Black Boy, was a controversial bestseller that opened the eyes of the nation to the evils of racism. Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a farm in Roxie, Mississippi, the son of Nathan Wright, a sharecropper, and Ella Wright, a teacher. He had one younger brother, Leon. The family’s poverty forced them to move around the South during Wright’s childhood. In Memphis, Tennessee, his father left the family, and in 1915, his mother put Wright and his brother in a Memphis orphanage after …

The Twelfth (Wright’s) Arkansas Cavalry Regiment was a Confederate cavalry unit that served in the Trans-Mississippi Theater during the American Civil War. Participating in military engagements in Arkansas at Mount Elba, Easling’s Farm, Poison Spring, and Marks’ Mills, along with Price’s Missouri Raid, it was stationed in Texas when Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi Theater surrendered on May 26, 1865. The unit was organized at Camden (Ouachita County) on December 17, 1863, composed of seven companies and designated the Second Battalion Arkansas State Troops under command of Lieutenant Colonel John C. Wright. In January 1864, three more companies were assigned, bringing the battalion to full regimental strength; it was re-designated the Twelfth Arkansas Cavalry, with Wright promoted to colonel. It …

On June 29, 1892, an unidentified African-American man was apparently lynched in Wynne (Cross County) for allegedly assaulting a young girl. Although the New York Sun reported that the girl was black and that the mob was made up of African Americans, the Forrest City Times told a slightly different story. According to the Times, passengers traveling south on the Iron Mountain Railroad reported the “loss” of an African-American man in Wynne on the night of the June 29. The unidentified black man had allegedly tried to assault a six-year-old white girl that morning. The two were found in a closet, and the girl reported what had happened to her. The man was jailed, but the next morning the doors …

Robin F. Wynne was a lawyer and politician who spent forty-five years practicing in every branch of the law—as a litigator, prosecutor, law professor, and trial judge, and also as an elected member of both appellate branches of the judiciary: the Arkansas Court of Appeals and the Arkansas Supreme Court. He served two terms in the 1980s as a member of the Arkansas House of Representatives from his rural southern Arkansas district around Fordyce (Dallas County). Wynne joined the Supreme Court in 2015, just as the Arkansas appellate courts were entering a phase of partisanship that had begun to afflict the judiciary nationally and in many states. Although he had sought political offices as a Democrat, he was determined that …