April 30, 1927

The dead body of a twelve-year-old white girl named Floella McDonald was discovered by a janitor in the belfry of the First Presbyterian Church in Little Rock (Pulaski County). The next afternoon, the janitor and his seventeen-year-old mulatto son were arrested for the murder. The backlash from the murder caused a wave of mob violence that culminated in the lynching of an African-American man named John Carter. The lynching and the rioting that followed became one of the most notorious incidents of racial violence in the state’s history.