Lynching of Henry Lowry

Last updated

The lynching of Henry Lowry, on January 26, 1921, was the murder of an African-American man, Henry Lowry, by a mob of white vigilantes in Arkansas. Lowry (also spelled "Lowery"), a tenant farmer, had been on the run after a deadly shootout at the house of planter O. T. Craig on Christmas Day of 1920. Lowry went into hiding in El Paso, Texas; when he was discovered and extradited by train, a group of armed white men boarded the train in Sardis, Mississippi, and took Lowry to Nodena, near Wilson, Arkansas. He was doused in gasoline and burned alive before a mob of 500. A reporter from the Memphis Press witnessed the event, and word of the lynching soon spread around the country, aided by an article William Pickens wrote for The Nation , in which he described eastern Arkansas as "the American Congo". [1]

Contents

Description

Prelude, and shooting at Craig's plantation

A detailed account comes from William Pickens, then a journalist and an assistant field secretary for the executive secretary of the NAACP. [2] Pickens is the only source for some details on Lowry; his age, for example, being otherwise unknown except for Pickens's estimate of "forty years or more". [2] He and his wife Callie are not listed in the 14th United States census, despite having moved to Arkansas in 1918 from Mississippi. [2] O. T. Craig was a planter in Mississippi County, Arkansas, first name not given in most contemporary accounts but revealed by the same census records to be Osben T. Craig, aged 68 at the time; with 62-year-old wife Mary, children Elizabeth (28), Richard (24), Margret (21), and two further sons. [2] Craig had a reputation for being ornery: he mistreated his Black tenants and exploited them. [3] Lowry was a proud, tall man; he was over six feet tall and, according to later testimony from another one of Craig's tenants, Mrs. Lucy Oliver, "he didn't take nothing off of nobody". He had attained the highest possible level within his Masonic order, a rank given to those of "outstanding character and leadership qualities". [3]

The shooting and the lynching were consequences of Lowry's indenture with Craig. Weeks before the events, Lowry had come to ask for his settlement, meaning a complete account of all debts and credits, and of how much money, if any, was due to him. Lowry, who had a wife and child and was a hardworking man who did not drink, had come to work for Craig some two years before. Craig was a powerful man and did not want his workers to leave or have freedom of movement; his son Richard was the local postmaster and clerk of the local court. Lowry needed the settlement if he ever wanted to leave, since without it he could not prove that he was not indebted to Craig, but Craig refused to provide the documents. Richard hit Lowry, who left but made a promise he would be back. He did so a few weeks later, while the Craigs were having their Christmas dinner, and was told to leave; Craig hit him with a piece of wood, and then Richard shot Lowry, who pulled his own gun and returned fire, killing O. T. Craig and his wife, and wounding Richard and his brother. Then, he ran. [4]

The story as told locally gave various accounts of the events that led up to the shooting, and it centered on the planter's cook, a young woman named Bessie. It alleges that Lowry attacked her, and that the planter and his son came and defended her from Lowry. [5] Another newspaper said Lowry (inexplicably called "Giles" in part of the report) attacked Craig's wife with a club, and then shot Craig with a .38 when the latter attempted to protect his wife. [6] Pickens calls these stories fictional (with their references to "Negro murderer" and "bad whiskey", and the incongruous account of the cook being outside during the family's dinner, being chased by Lowry) and ridiculed them. [4] Sascha W. Krause argues that giving the "backstory" of a crime committed by the future victim, in all its salacious details and usually dependent on racist tropes, was part and parcel of the lynching rhetoric in which newspapers were complicit. [7]

Lowry's escape and capture

J. T. Williams, an African-American man who lived near Nodena, hid Lowry on his farm for two days. [8] Lowry was a member of a local Odd Fellows lodge, and was helped by fellow lodge members in his escape to El Paso, Texas. [9] When he left the Williams house, with some six hundred men looking for him, he drenched his shoes with turpentine to throw the hounds off his trail, "a common practice among southern Blacks running for their lives". Fellow members of the Turrell Odd Fellows Lodge helped logistically and financially, including a man named Morris Jenkins and his wife. [3]

Lowry went into hiding in El Paso, Texas, in a Black neighborhood, where he was trying to make enough money to send for his wife, Callie Lowry, and his daughter [3] --they were kept in Craig's backyard (for "protection"). When Lowry wrote to one of his friends in order to relay some news to his wife, the letter was intercepted--the Craigs controlled the local mail--and the recipient and others (and their wives) were thrown in jail. [fn 1] Lowry's landlady promptly notified the local NAACP chapter, who hired an attorney, Frederick Knollenberg. He, together with a local minister, the local NAACP chapter president, and Lawrence A. Nixon (of Nixon v. Herndon) visited Lowry in prison. Lowry agreed to be extradited, if Arkansas governor Thomas Chipman McRae could guarantee his safety; that promise was made. [10]

McRae's two lawmen went to El Paso and arrested Lowry; they were under orders to take Lowry to Little Rock, to prevent a lynching, but the deputy sheriffs took Lowry back by way of New Orleans, "so as to bring him to the waiting mob in Mississippi County", according to Pickens, and the mob received a telegram to meet the train in Sardis, Mississippi. An armed group "overwhelmed" the deputies in Sardis on January 26, [4] and took Lowry back by car [1] (through three states) to Nodena, near Wilson, Arkansas. Some of them stopped in Memphis to tell the local newspapers that the lynching was to happen at 6 that evening. [4]

The lynching

The Law Is Too Slow (1923) by George Bellows The Law is Too Slow MET 2835-180.jpg
The Law Is Too Slow (1923) by George Bellows

Ralph Roddy, a reporter for the Memphis Press , gave a detailed account of events. While the plan had been to kill Lowry at the Craig farm, the growing size of the mob prevented that, and after the victim had been moved a little way from a place called Harrison's Landing, it was decided to kill him where they were, in a "natural amphitheater between two bluffs, with the Mississippi on one side and a huge lake, caused by backwater, on the other". The place was in sight of the Craig farm and in front of the house of J. T. Williams, who had hidden Lowry on his farm for two days after the Christmas Day shooting. [8]

Lowry was slowly burned alive, with leaves and gasoline. He asked to be buried in Magnolia, Mississippi, and at the end called out to appeal to a lodge of which he was a member. [8] Throughout the ordeal, he never begged for mercy, [8] and attempted to shield his family. [10] Reportedly, O. T. Craig's sons attended the lynching. [1] The mob also wished to murder Jenkins (who was held in Marion, Alabama) and Williams (in Blytheville, Arkansas), but apparently bad weather, impassable roads, and the day's exertions were too much for them. [8]

Legacy and significance

Pickens's article on the lynching describes the Mississippi valley (Arkansas, Louisiana, western Tennessee, Mississippi, eastern Texas) as an American version of the Congo, but unlike King Leopold of Belgium's Congo Free State, it was an economy of cotton and sugar, not ivory and rubber. Besides that, there are great similarities: "Here labor is forced, and the laborer is a slave". He analyzes the system of sharecropping, in which even the smallest of debts means that a debtor can be held in bondage; moreover, Pickens argues, this is a part of America in which the law, particularly the Thirteenth Amendment, holds no currency, and where violent mobs and terrible lynchings are a normal part of the economic system. The case of Henry Lowry combines all these elements though, as Pickens concluded, it did not sink as low as other lynchings: "The mob did not fumble in the ashes for the charred bones and other 'souvenirs' as is usual in such Southern Roman holidays". [4]

Harry Haywood and Milton Howard opened their pamphlet Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression (1932) with a description of Lowry's death, taken from a January 27, 1921, article from the Memphis Press . [11] James Weldon Johnson, poet and Civil Rights activist, was also outraged, and used the same description of Lowry's death for "American Barbarism"; such content was frequently featured in pamphlets and articles used for member recruitment and fundraising for organizations like the NAACP. Johnson commented, "In the whole history of lynching in the United States, there is not a more revolting chapter than the one written last week in the State of Arkansas." [12]

Lodges with Black membership also came under increased scrutiny. These fraternal orders and secret societies formed a danger to the establishment; they were "a locus for political activity" and their national organizations were able to provide assistance to local groups, including with migration north on a large scale. Such societies were also suspect for fear of an uprising, and in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, "negro lodges...were very strong and their leaders were known to advocate equal wages, political offices, and social equality for the colored people". That Lowry had been assisted by lodge members caused at least one local newspaper to call for the authorities to destroy these organizations, because they were "inciting the Southern negro". [9]

The NAACP put an account of the lynching in a pamphlet entitled An American Lynching: Being the Burning at Stake of Henry Lowry at Nodena, Arkansas, January 26, 1921, as Told in American Newspapers, and delivered a copy to every member of the U.S. Congress as it was deliberating the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. [13] The NAACP also sent copies to newspaper editors in South America, Asia, and Europe. [14] It received many positive responses, in particular from the Asian Review which in no uncertain terms denounced the hypocrisy of the people of United States championing justice and humanity whilst at the same time perpetrating "the foulest deed ever conceived" and allowing the offenders to go unpunished. [15]

Modern scholars have placed the lynching in a socioeconomic context. For historian Will Guzman, in his 2015 study Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands, the lynching of Henry Lowry exemplified the economic oppression suffered by sharecroppers, and Black sharecroppers specifically, and the killing was the result of the financial and physical entrapment that was part and parcel of the system. [16] Jeannie M. Whayne, historian at the University of Arkansas, also places the lynching in the socioeconomic context of the planter system, and calls it a "carefully orchestrated event" meant to vilify Blacks and unite whites of all social classes, and she cites Sheriff Dwight H. Blackwood, [17] who was also quoted in Roddy's article in the Memphis Press, saying that "every man, woman, and child in the county was determined to have Lowry burned". [8] Whayne also notes how the events leading to the shooting were misrepresented by the newspapers, as an example of the complicity of the press in the white supremacist sharecropping system in which the local police cooperated with the planters. [17]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Guzman says the letter was sent to Morris Jenkins; Schneider says he wrote to his wife.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DeSoto County, Mississippi</span> County in Mississippi, United States

DeSoto County is a county located on the northwestern border of the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2020 census, the population was 185,314, making it the third-most populous county in Mississippi. Its county seat is Hernando.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilson, Arkansas</span> City in Arkansas known for its cotton production

Wilson is a city in Mississippi County, Arkansas, United States. The community is located in the Arkansas Delta and is surrounded by fertile cropland historically used to produce cotton. Wilson started as a company town in 1886 by Robert E. Lee Wilson, who would build a cotton empire and run it from the city. The Wilson Company would become so successful that all of the town's buildings were rebuilt in the Tudor Revival architectural style following Wilson's son's honeymoon to England in 1925. Wilson incorporated in 1959, becoming a town with public roads and municipal government. The extensive property holdings of the Lee Wilson and Company remained in the Wilson family until 2010. The community has seen a rapid decline in economic activity and population since the advent of mechanization on the farm, reducing the need for manual labor to produce cotton. The population was 766 at the 2020 census, down from 903 at the 2010 census.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elaine massacre</span> Anti-black violence in Elaine Arkansas in 1919

The Elaine massacre occurred on September 30 – October 2, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas where African Americans were organizing against peonage and abuses in tenant farming. As many as several hundred African Americans and five white men were killed. Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred". Walter Francis White, an NAACP attorney who visited Elaine shortly after the incident, stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred". More recent estimates in the 21st century of the number of black people killed during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, and have ranged into the hundreds. The white mobs were aided by federal troops and local terrorist organizations. Gov. Brough led a contingent of 583 US soldiers from Camp Pike, with a 12-gun machine gun battalion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scipio Africanus Jones</span> American lawyer and politician

Scipio Africanus Jones was an American educator, lawyer, judge, philanthropist, and Republican politician from the state of Arkansas. He was most known for having guided the appeals of the twelve African-American men condemned to death after the Elaine Massacre of October 1919. More than one hundred African Americans were indicted in the aftermath of the riot, although an estimated one hundred to two hundred Black Americans were killed in the county, along with five whites. No whites were prosecuted by the state. The case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which in Moore v. Dempsey (1923) set a precedent of reviewing the conduct of state criminal trials against the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter White (NAACP)</span> American civil rights activist (1893–1955)

Walter Francis White was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Red Summer</span> 1919 period of white supremacist terrorism and racial riots in many U.S. cities

Red Summer was a period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas. The term "Red Summer" was coined by civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson, who had been employed as a field secretary by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1916. In 1919, he organized peaceful protests against the racial violence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynching in the United States</span> Extrajudicial killings in the United States by mobs or vigilante groups

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arkansas Delta</span> Natural region of Arkansas

The Arkansas Delta is one of the six natural regions of the state of Arkansas. Willard B. Gatewood Jr., author of The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox, says that rich cotton lands of the Arkansas Delta make that area "The Deepest of the Deep South."

On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among those killed were Hazel "Hayes" Turner and his wife, Mary Turner. Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day, his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil then set on fire. Mary's unborn child was cut from her abdomen and stomped to death. Her body was then repeatedly shot. No one was ever convicted of her lynching.

Ell Persons was a black man who was lynched on 22 May 1917, after he was accused of having raped and decapitated a 15-year-old white girl, Antoinette Rappel, in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. He was arrested and was awaiting trial when he was captured by a lynch party, who burned him alive and scattered his remains around town, throwing his head at a group of African Americans. A large crowd attended his lynching, which had the atmosphere of a carnival. No one was charged as a result of the lynching, which was described as one of the most vicious in American history, but it did play a part in the foundation of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Pullen</span> African-American lynching victim (c. 1883–1923)

Joe Pullen or Joe Pullum was an African-American sharecropper who was lynched by a posse of local white citizens near Drew, Mississippi on December 15, 1923.

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 Arkansas State Press was an African-American newspaper published from 1941 to 1959. Dubbed "Little Rock's leading African-American newspaper," its owners and editors were Daisy Bates and L. C. Bates. According to historians, the newspaper was "believed by many to be instrumental in bringing about the desegregation of the Little Rock public schools."

Jim McIlherron was an African-American man who was tortured and executed by a lynch mob on February 12, 1918, in Estill Springs, Tennessee. McIlherron was lynched in retaliation for shooting and killing two white men after a fight broke out.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynching of Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels</span> 1937 lynching in the United States

On April 13, 1937, Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels, two black men, were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi by a white mob after being labeled as the murderers of a white storekeeper. They had only been legally accused of the crime a few minutes before they were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees, and tortured with a blow torch. Following the torture, McDaniels was shot to death and Townes was burned alive.

John Carter was an African-American man who was murdered in Little Rock, Arkansas, on May 4, 1927. Grabbed by a mob after another Black man had been apprehended for the alleged murder of a white girl, Carter was hanged from a telephone pole, shot, dragged through the streets, and then burned in the center of the city's Black part of town with materials that a white crowd of perhaps 5,000 people had looted from nearby stores and businesses.

Owen Flemming or Flemings was an African-American man who was lynched by a mob near Mellwood, Arkansas, on June 8, 1927, after an altercation with a white man who attempted to force him to work on a levee during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

Winston Pounds was an African-American man who was lynched by a mob in Wilmot, Arkansas, on August 25 or 26, 1927.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African Americans in Arkansas</span> Racial group in the US state

African Americans have played an essential role in the history of Arkansas, but their role has often been marginalized as they confronted a society and polity controlled by white supremacists. During the slavery era to 1865, they were considered property and were subjected to the harsh conditions of forced labor. After the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Reconstuction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, African Americans gained their freedom and the right to vote. However, the rise of Jim Crow laws in the 1890s and early 1900s led to a period of segregation and discrimination that lasted into the 1960s. Most were farmers, working their own property or poor sharecroppers on white-owned land, or very poor day laborers. By World War I, there was steady emigration from farms to nearby cities such as Little Rock and Memphis, as well as to St. Louis and Chicago.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Lewis, Todd E. (1993). "Mob Justice in the 'American Congo': 'Judge Lynch' in Arkansas during the Decade after World War I". The Arkansas Historical Quarterly . 52 (2): 156–84. doi:10.2307/40019247. JSTOR   40019247.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Guzman 2015, p. 148.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Guzman 2015, p. 56.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Pickens, William (March 23, 1921). "The American Congo - Burning of Lowry". The Nation . Vol. 112. pp. 426–28.
  5. ↑ "Posses Searching for Negro Slayer of White Man". Pine Bluff Daily Graphic . December 26, 1920. p. 1. Retrieved April 30, 2021.
  6. ↑ "Slayer of Planter and Daughter is Encircled by Posse". Arkansas Democrat . December 27, 1920. p. 1. Retrieved April 30, 2021.
  7. ↑ Krause, Sascha W. (2005). The Anatomy of Resistance: The Rhetoric of Anti-Lynching in American Literature and Culture, 1892-1936 (PhD). University of Regensburg.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Roddy, Raph (January 27, 1921). "Kill Negro By Inches". Memphis Press . pp. 1, back. Retrieved May 1, 2021.
  9. 1 2 Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth (1993). "African-American Struggles for Citizenship in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas in the Age of Jim Crow". Radical History Review . 1993 (55): 33–51. doi:10.1215/01636545-1993-55-33. ISBN   9780521448451.
  10. 1 2 Schneider, Mark Robert (2002). We Return Fighting: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age. Northeastern University Press. pp. 145–48. ISBN   9781555534905.
  11. ↑ Haywood, Harry; Howard, Milton. Gray, Erin (ed.). "Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression (1932)". Viewpoint.
  12. ↑ Waldrep, Christopher (2009). African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 164–66. ISBN   9780742552739.
  13. ↑ Schneider, Mark Robert (2002). We Return Fighting: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age. UPNE. p. 174. ISBN   9781555534905.
  14. ↑ Hill 2016, p. 64.
  15. ↑ Hill 2016, p. 65.
  16. ↑ Guzman 2015, pp. 56–59.
  17. 1 2 Whayne, Jeannie M. (1996). A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-century Arkansas. University of Virginia Press. pp. 58–59. ISBN   9780813916552.

Reference bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.