| Lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson | |
|---|---|
Hundreds gathered on the bridge to look at the bodies. |
|
| Date and place | May 25, 1911 near Okemah, Oklahoma, United States |
| Photographed by | George H. Farnum |
Laura and Lawrence Nelson were African Americans who were lynched in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911.[1]
Laura, her husband, their 15-year-old son Lawrence, and (by some accounts) their baby, were taken into custody after Lawrence shot and killed George Loney, Okemah's deputy sheriff. Loney and a posse had arrived at the Nelsons' home to investigate the theft of a cow. Laura's husband pleaded guilty to the theft and was sent to the state prison. In an effort to save her son, Laura said she had fired the fatal shot. Both she and Lawrence were arrested; the son was taken to the local jail and Laura to a cell in the county courthouse.[1]
Three weeks later a mob of 40 armed men arrived to kidnap the mother and son. They tied up the guard and dragged off the mother and son. Laura was raped, according to some reports, and both were hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River.[2] Hundreds of sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning, and photographs of the hanging bodies were sold as postcards. The killers were never identified.[1] The folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose father as a young man attended the lynching and later belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, wrote about the event in three songs.
The Nelsons were among at least 4,743 people lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 of them black, 154 of them women,[3] 73 percent of them in the South.[4]
Contents |
Accounts vary regarding what happened to the Nelsons, and details are hard to pin down. Some stories say the family had stolen a cow; others say a sheep. Some say Lawrence fired the gun only because he thought the officer was about to fire his. Others say the family left the officer to die and begging for water. Some say Laura had a baby with her who died, while others say the baby was saved; and several primary sources make no mention of a baby. Folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose father Charley attended the lynching, wrote several songs about it. His lyrics said three bodies hung from the bridge, not two (see below). Some say Laura was raped before being hanged; other accounts make no reference to whether that happened.
Several secondary sources agree that, on May 2, 1911, Deputy Sheriff George Loney and three other police officers carried out a search to find who had stolen a cow or sheep belonging to one of the officers. They found butchered remains in a barn behind the Nelsons' cabin, seven miles northeast of Paden, Oklahoma. When they entered the cabin to question the Nelsons, Laura picked up a Winchester rifle. Her son Lawrence took the rifle from her and fired a single shot at the officers. It went through the pantlegs of one officer, then struck Loney in the leg. The officers left the cabin with Loney and shot at Laura's husband. The gunfire ended when he ran out of ammunition, by which time Loney had bled to death in the Nelson's yard.[5]
The family was arrested and taken to the county jail in Okemah. The elder Nelson pleaded guilty to cattle rustling, and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. He was sent to the state prison at McAlester, Oklahoma, which probably saved his life. Lawrence remained in Okemah jail, and Laura was placed in a cell in the courthouse, possibly with her nursing baby.[5]
During the night of May 25, a mob of 40 armed men arrived at the jail and managed to enter easily through the door, though it was usually locked. They forced the guard, W.D. Payne, to hand over the boy, "about fourteen years old, slender and tall, yellow [mixed race] and ignorant," according to the Okemah Ledger. They also seized Laura—described by the Ledger as "very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years old, and vicious."[1] According to a black woman who saw the incident, Laura's baby was left behind: "[T]hose men just walked off and left that baby lying there. One of my neighbors was there, and she picked the baby up and brought it to town, and we took care of it."[6]
The guard was tied to one of the doors, and when he was able to untie himself and call for help—over an hour later because he had to gnaw through the rope—Sheriff J. A. Dunnegan sent out a search party after the prisoners. It was too late for the Nelsons.[7] Laura and Lawrence were taken six miles to Yarbrough's Crossing on the North Canadian River to the west of Okemah, where they were gagged with tow sacks and hanged from a bridge on the road to Schoolton.[8]
On its front page The Okemah Ledger called the lynching a masterpiece of planning "executed with silent precision." It described the mother and son by the following: "The woman's arms were swinging by her side, untied, while about 20 feet away swung the boy with his clothes partly torn off and his hands tided with a saddle string ... Gently swaying in the wind, the ghastly spectacle was discovered by a Negro cowboy taking his cow to water. Hundreds of people from Okemah and the western part of the country went to view the scene." It ended the article with: "While the general sentiment is adverse to the method, it is generally thought that the Negroes got what would have been due them under process of law."[9]
According to the Okemah jail guard, W.D. Payne, relatives of the Nelsons refused to claim the bodies. They were buried by the Okfuskee County authorities in a cemetery in Greenleaf, near Okemah.[7]
George H. Farnum, the owner of Okemah's only photography studio, took numerous photos of the scene after the lynching. He took several pictures from a boat on the river, showing 58 onlookers on the bridge—including six women and 17 children—with the two corpses hanging below. He also took close-ups of the bodies. As was common practice with lynching photographs, he reproduced the images as postcards, and they were sold in local stores as souvenirs.[9] J.R. Moehringer writes that lynching postcards were as common as those of Niagara Falls. Although the U.S. Postal Service banned the sending of lynching postcards in 1908, the cards continued to sell well door-to-door.[10]
The Atlanta antique collector James Allen, who spent years looking for such postcards to publish in his Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), was offered one of Laura for $75 in a flea market, "caught so pitiful and tattered and beyond retrieving—like a paper kite sagged on a utility wire." As a gay man and the victim of prejudice from other men, Allen identified with the victims. He writes that the photographs engendered in him a "caution of whites, of the majority, of the young, of religion, of the accepted."[10]
Allen writes that the photographers were more than passive spectators; they positioned and lit the corpses as if they were game birds. The photographs and postcards became an important part of the lynching ritual, emphasizing the political nature of the act, one of extrajudicial punishment. Seth Archer writes in the Southwest Review that such photographs and postcards were distributed partly as a warning, in this case to the neighboring all-black Boley—'look what we did here, Negroes beware.' The practice of sending the cards to family and friends outside the area underlined the ritual aspect of the lynchings, death as a community exhibit and warning. Archer compares them to the 2004 images from Abu Ghraib prison, in which U.S. service personnel were photographed humiliating and dominant over their Iraqi prisoners. That most of the public in the United States now view lynchings with horror, is a measure of changing attitudes. Archer writes that if the lynchers saw their victims as less human than they, "[W]hat could members of a lynch mob possibly picture black people to be, if they were less human than the mob that lynched them?"[9]
Blacks in Oklahoma and elsewhere expressed outrage, a black journal lamenting:
"Oh! where is that christian spirit we hear so much about
—What will the good citizens do to apprehend these mobs
—Wait, we shall see—Comment is unnecessary. Such a crime is simply
Hell on Earth. No excuse can be set forth to justify the act.[11]
Residents in the black town of Boley were so angry that they talked about organizing a posse to march on Okemah. The rumors sparked a panic among local whites, who sent their women and children away for fear of a retaliatory attack.[12] The lynching was widely reported outside Oklahoma. Oswald Garrison Villard, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote in protest to the governor of Oklahoma, Lee Cruce, about "the horror of the action," and called on the state to bring the killers to justice. In a reply to the NAACP, Cruce assured them he would do everything he could, but added:
There is a race prejudice that exists between the white and Negro races wherever the Negroes are found in large numbers. ... Just this week the announcement comes as a shock to the people of Oklahoma that the Secretary of the Interior ... has appointed a Negro from Kansas to come to Oklahoma and take charge of the supervision of the Indian schools of this State. There is no race of people on earth that has more antipathy for the Negro race than the Indian race, and yet these people, numbering many of the best citizens of this State and nation, are to be humbled and their prejudices and passions are to be increased by having this outrage imposed upon them ... If your organization would interest itself to the extent of seeing that such outrages as this are not perpetrated against our people, there would be fewer lynchings in the South than at this time ...[13]
District Judge John Caruthers convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate, although no witnesses identified the 40 men who had taken part. He told the jury:
The people of the state have said by recently adopted constitutional provision that the race to which the unfortunate victims belonged should in large measure be divorced from participation in our political contests, because of their known racial inferiority and their dependent credulity, which very characteristic made them the mere tool of the designing and cunning. It is well known that I heartily concur in this constitutional provision of the people's will. The more then does the duty devolve upon us of a superior race and of greater intelligence to protect this weaker race from unjustifiable and lawless attacks.[1]
{Note: He was referring to constitutional and legal changes in Oklahoma that essentially disfranchised most blacks by the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and increased residency requirements; without the vote, they could not serve on juries or in office, but they were still expected to pay taxes and support the state. They were disfranchised and suffered Jim Crow laws until passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.}
In the event, no one was charged. Among those involved in the lynching was Charley Guthrie, father of the folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was born a year later. Charley's role is uncertain but he appears to have attended as an observer or active participant. A real estate broker and local politician,[9] Charley Guthrie, according to his son, became an enthusiastic member of the Ku Klux Klan. It was revived in 1915 and became powerful in Oklahoma and the Midwest into the early 1920s. Woody Guthrie wrote three songs about the lynching: "High Balladree", "Bloody Poll Tax Chain", and "Don't Kill My Baby and My Son" (also called "Old Dark Town" and "Old Rock Jail").[14]
|
||||||||||||||||