Eli Ladd was a Black victim of a racial terror lynching that took place on February 7, 1890, in Blountsville, Indiana. Ladd was living on his family farm in Mooreland at the time of his death and was employed as a Barber. A small group of white men chased Ladd while firing over fifty rounds of gunshots at him. Five men were arrested and three were convicted and served brief two-year sentences in the Indiana State Prison.
Reuben Eli Ladd, born in 1869, grew up near Mooreland, Henry County, Indiana. Ladd's parents were Isaac and Sarah Ladd (née Means). Ladd lived with his parents and younger sister, Julia on his maternal grandparent's farm in Blue River Township. Eli Ladd’s maternal grandparents, Reuben and Leah Means, were born in North Carolina and had lived on their Blue River Township farm since at least 1850 and the Stony Creek area since at least 1840. As was customary in farming families, Eli was “working on the farm” at least by the time he was 11. [1] Some newspapers that report the lynching refer to Ladd as the Mooreland barber. [2] [3]
On February 8, 1890, the Muncie Morning News reported Ladd had been shot 6 times on February 7, 1890 in Blountsville, Indiana. Eli Ladd was lynched for confronting a vigilante group of white men who accused Ladd of assaulting a white woman. [4] [5] [6] Violent lynchings, such as Ladd's, were used by whites to implement and enforce Jim Crow laws during Reconstruction in Indiana. [5] William and Henry Rozell (Razell), Cassius (sometimes Charles) Lake, Charles Smelzer, John Davis, and J.P. Smith are frequently cited as being among the lynch mob’s leaders. There may have been an ongoing "private feud" between Ladd and one of the men. [7]
On February 10th, warrants of arrest were issued for the Rozell brothers, Cassius Lake, Charles Smelzer, and J.P. Smith who were taken to the Henry County jail to await the trial. [8] On February 15, 1890, the Muncie Morning News reported that Rollin Warner was engaged to defend the men charged with Ladd's murder. On May 22, 1890, the jury acquitted Cassius Lake. [9] On June 23, 1890, the Smeltzer-Ladd murder trial commenced under Judge Lotz in the Delaware County Court. [10] The Muncie Morning News reported on July 7, 1890 that Smeltzer had received two years in the Indiana State Prison for murdering Ladd. On December 29, 1890, a trial began at the New Castle Circuit Court for William Rozell. [11] On January 11, 1891, John P. Smith testified that William Rozell had conspired to murder Ladd the night before the lynching. [12] William Rozell was sentenced to two years at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. John P. Smith plead quilty and was sentenced to two years of hard labor.
A West Virginia newspaper, the Wheeling Register, "chuckled over what they called Hoosier hypocrisy" because the lynching occurred in a Republican county. [5] [13]
David C. Hennessy was an American policeman and detective who served as a police chief of New Orleans from 1888 until his death in 1890. As a young detective, he made headlines in 1881 when he captured a notorious Italian criminal, Giuseppe Esposito. In 1888, he was promoted to superintendent and chief of police. While in office he made a number of improvements to the force, and was well known and respected in the New Orleans community.
The lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981, was one of the last reported lynchings in the United States. Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, a 19-year-old African-American, and hung his body from a tree. One perpetrator, Henry Hays, was executed by electric chair in 1997, while another, James Knowles, was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty and testifying against Hays. A third man was convicted as an accomplice and also sentenced to life in prison, and a fourth was indicted, but died before his trial could be completed.
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states. In 1891, the largest single mass lynching in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants.
J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith were African-American boys who were murdered in a spectacle lynching by a group of thousands on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. They were taken from jail cells, beaten, and hanged from a tree in the county courthouse square. They had been arrested that night as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case. A third African-American suspect, 16-year-old James Cameron, had also been arrested and narrowly escaped being killed by the mob; an unknown woman and a local sports hero intervened, and he was returned to jail. Cameron later stated that Shipp and Smith had committed the murder but that he had run away before that event.
James Cameron was an American civil rights activist. In the 1940s, he founded three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Indiana. He also served as Indiana's State Director of the Office of Civil Liberties from 1942 to 1950.
James Ford Seale was a Ku Klux Klan member charged by the U.S. Justice Department on January 24, 2007, and subsequently convicted on June 14, 2007, for the May 1964 kidnapping and murder of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two African-American young men in Meadville, Mississippi. At the time of his arrest, Seale worked at a lumber plant in Roxie, Mississippi. He also worked as a crop duster and was a police officer in Louisiana briefly in the 1970s. He was a member of the militant Klan organization known as the Silver Dollar Group, whose members were identified with a silver dollar; occasionally minted the year of the member's birth.
The Banditti of the Prairie, also known as The Banditti, Prairie Pirates, Prairie Bandits, and Pirates of the Prairie, in the U.S. states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio and the Territory of Iowa, were a group of loose-knit outlaw gangs, during the early to mid-19th century. Though bands of roving criminals were common in many parts of Illinois, the counties of Lee, DeKalb, Ogle, and Winnebago were especially plagued by them. The new crime wave in the region of the frontier Midwest may have occurred following the crackdown on Southern outlaws by the rising vigilante-regulator movement and the breakup of the criminal syndicate of John A. Murrell and his gang, the "Mystic Clan", in the Southern United States. In 1841, the escalating pattern of house burglary, horse and cattle theft, stagecoach and highway robbery, counterfeiting and murder associated with the Banditti had come to a head in Ogle County. As the crimes continued, local citizens formed bands of vigilantes known as Regulators. A clash between the Banditti and the Regulators in Ogle County near Oregon, Illinois resulted in the outlaws' demise and decreased Banditti activity and violent crime within the county.
Whitecapping was a violent vigilante movement of farmers in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was originally a ritualized form of extralegal actions to enforce community standards, appropriate behavior, and traditional rights. However, as it spread throughout the poorest areas of the rural South after the Civil War, white members operated from economically driven and anti-black biases. States passed laws against it, but whitecapping continued into the early 20th century.
The 1891 New Orleans lynchings were the murders of 11 Italian Americans, immigrants in New Orleans, by a mob for their alleged role in the murder of police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. It was the largest single mass lynching in American history. Most of the lynching victims accused in the murder had been rounded up and charged due to their Italian ethnicity.
The lynching of the Walker family took place near Hickman, Fulton County, Kentucky, on October 3, 1908, at the hands of about fifty masked Night Riders. David Walker was a landowner, with a 21.5-acre (8.7 ha) farm. The entire family of seven African Americans including parents, infant in arms, and four children were killed, with the event reported by national newspapers. Governor Augustus E. Willson of Kentucky strongly condemned the murders and promised a reward for information leading to prosecution. No one was ever prosecuted.
The lynching of the Frenches of Warsaw took place in Warsaw, Gallatin County, Kentucky on May 3, 1876, between 1 am and 2 am on a Wednesday morning. Benjamin and Mollie French, African Americans, were lynched by a white mob for the murder of another African American, which was unusual for this period. Lake Jones was an elderly black man who had faithfully served a white family named Howard, both before and after his emancipation from slavery. The Frenches were accused of poisoning Lake Jones with arsenic and intending to steal his money.
John Lynch (c. 1812 – 22 April 1842) was an Irish-born Australian serial killer who confessed to the killing of ten people between 1836 and 1842. He is possibly the most prolific individual serial killer in Australian history. Lynch arrived in Australia as a convict, assigned to a farm in the Berrima district. He murdered a fellow assigned convict in 1836 but was acquitted of the charge. After a period in a convict gang he absconded, and by July 1841 he had made his way back to the Berrima district. On two occasions Lynch murdered carriers along the road between Berrima and Camden, stealing their drays and teams. In the latter half of 1841 Lynch murdered the farmer John Mulligan and his family, and took possession of their farm in the Berrima district using the name John Dunleavy. He was convicted in March 1842 of the murder of Kearns Landregan, sentenced to death and executed by hanging in April 1842.
The lynching of Paul Reed and Will Cato occurred in Statesboro, Georgia on August 16, 1904. Five members of a white farm family, the Hodges, had been murdered and their house burned to hide the crime. Paul Reed and Will Cato, who were African-American, were tried and convicted for the murders. Despite militia having been brought in from Savannah to protect them, the two men were taken by a mob from the courthouse immediately after their trials, chained to a tree stump, and burned. In the immediate aftermath, four more African-Americans were shot, three of them dying, and others were flogged.
The lynching of Jay Lynch, age 28, took place in Lamar, Missouri, on May 28, 1919. That year had 83 lynchings in the United States. This was one of four against white men.
In the early hours of December 12, 1880, a white mob in Clay County, Indiana lynched George Scott, an African American man. Scott had fled after being accused of a crime in nearby Eaglesfield, Indiana, and was captured near Indianapolis and brought to the Clay County jail in Brazil, Indiana. Rumors swirled that a mob might form, but the local Sheriff, James Lankford, paid them no heed. However, the man left in charge of the jail, ex-Sheriff Jacob Baumunk, took the precaution of giving the keys to Sheriff Lankford, who would not be on-site at the jail, after locking up. Sometime between one and three in the morning on Sunday, December 12, a mob of over 100 men, masked, descended on the jail and demanded that Baumunk give them the keys. After informing the mob that he did not have the keys, he was told to “retire to his room.”
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William Keemer was the victim of a racial terror spectacle lynching in 1875 in Greenfield, Indiana. Keemer, a Black man, was dragged from his jail cell in Hancock County, Indiana on June 25, 1875 by a white mob from Hancock, Shelby, and Rush counties. Keemer was hung at the Hancock County fairgrounds and over 1,000 people traveled to view the body. Keemer was arrested on June 24 for an alleged sexual assault against a white women in Carthage, Indiana. No trial was held for the alleged crime and William Keemer remains innocent. In 2021 a historical marker commemorating the anti-Black violence committed against Keemer was approved by the Indiana Historical Bureau.
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Bud Rowland and Jim Henderson, two Black men, were lynched in Rockport, Indiana on December 16, 1900. The following day, Joe Holly was lynched in Boonville, Indiana for the same alleged crime.
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