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. The death of Willie Kees drew national attention because, by happenstance, it occurred during the same week that John Rushin and Lint Shaw were lynched in Georgia. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in a letter written to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, noted that the two incidents were the seventy-first and seventy-second “authenticated” lynchings that had occurred since Roosevelt had been inaugurated on March 4, 1933.