The Lynching of Bunk Richardson: Am Innocent Man Murdered To Quench A Mob's Blood Lust

 

Feb. 11, 1906, Bunkie Richardson was a 28-year-old Black man who was in jail when a mob wanted blood, some thought he had participated in the murder of a White woman Sarah Jane Smith in July of 1905 but there was no evidence of this. The man who confessed to the murder did not mention Bunk Richardson when he indicated two other men helped him in the crime, also the confessed murderer had already been executed.

On the night of the original arrests, Etowah County Sheriff William Chandler had requested the state militia and received them to help stop a mass lynching and move the prisoners to the Jefferson County Jail. The mob that was unable to quench their blood lust that night roamed the town and burned down Black homes and killed another innocent Black man on the city trolly.

The two men convicted Jack Hunter and Vance Gardner never mentioned anyone Richardson and Hunter said he alone killed Smith. A third man was convicted but Sheriff Chandler and three local lawyers wrote letters to Gov. William Jelks, asking him to re-examine Johnson's case. Two lawyers went so far as to travel to Montgomery to lobby for the man's innocence.

Jelks commuted the third man, Will Johnson, to life in prison. This again enraged the people of Gadsden who had assembled to view Johnson’s execution on Dec. 9^th, 1905.

At the trial for the men convicted of the murder Richardson was mentioned as having known one of the killers and was seen on the railroad tracks in Gadsden where the murder happened.

Thus, Bunk was in jail waiting to appear before a grand jury for his participation but there was nothing to connect him to the crime. Not even the papers of the time produced any, they tentatively endorsed the lynching or at least did not condone it.

On the night Feb 11 30 men stormed the unprepared jail and demanded Richardson. They overpowered the sheriff and jailer and took Richardson. They drug him through town beating and kicking him. They took him to the railroad trestle over the Coosa River and looped a rope around his neck and threw him off.

When word got out of the lynching Richardson’s cousin Earl Williams who was a well-known stone mason and business owner gathered his family and left town, they never returned leaving behind a thriving store and laundry.

No one was ever charged with the murder of Bunk Richardson or with the intimidation of his relatives.

 

Sources:

https://www.al.com/news/anniston-gadsden/2016/12/1906_gadsden_lynching_memorial.html

https://www.gadsdentimes.com/story/news/local/2016/08/21/gadsdens-dark-past-speakers-give-detailed-account-of-negro-clearance/25610873007/

https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=116817

 

Breaking The Barrier: Ruth Carol Taylor Becomes First African American Flight Attendent

 

Feb. 11, 1958, Ruth Carol Taylor broke the color barrier as a flight attendant. when she joined Mohawk Airlines. Her previous attempt to do so a TWA failed but, her position at Mohawk created public pressure on TWA forcing them to hire Margaret Grant later in 1958, shattering the color barrier. While she is best known for her achievement in the airline industry, she spent much of her nursing and journalism career as an activist for minority and women’s rights She continued breaking barriers, and in 1963, she covered the March on Washington as a journalist for a British magazine, Flamingo. She co-founded the Institute for Inter-Racial Harmony Inc. in 1982, for which she developed testing designed to measure racial bias in educational, commercial, and social settings.

The Martinsville Seven: Justice Deferred, Justice Denied

Feb. 5, 1951, Outside the prison in Richmond Virginia it was bitterly cold on the second night of executions of the seven Martinsville Negros convicted of the rape of Ruby Stroud Floyd in January of 1949. These final three executions were the largest mass execution by the state for rape in United States history.

Ruby Stroud Floyd was a 32-year-old White woman who was in the Negro section of Martinsville collecting for some clothes she had sold. Around 7:30 in the evening she was assaulted by at least four men that she may or may not have passed earlier in the evening. In her account, 13 men had repeatedly raped her and from the descriptions, she provided the police quickly arrested Frank Hairston Jr. and Booker Millner. Another four were arrested in the early morning hours based on the confessions of the first two men.

However independent investigation and civil rights activists found that the police had used violence and further threats to coerce the confessions. They made arrests of all seven suspects within two days of the report. Only one of the men had a prior criminal conviction and all were employed.

While the police did take precautions and jailed the men separately and in other counties to avoid mob violence it is also known the men were not permitted at the time of the arrest to call for an attorney or contact their families.

A preliminary hearing was one month after the arrests and a grand jury convened a month after that. Within two hours the grand jury came back with indictments on all seven men.

The court assigned seven different public defenders but denied all motions to move the trial as the defense felt there was no opportunity for a fair trial in Martinsville given the publicity of the case.

In a very systematic, almost manufactory manner each of the cases was tried and the all-White juries found the men guilty and recommended the death penalty. No jury took longer than two hours to convict the men. The defense attorneys warned the men and their families not to mention how the confessions were obtained.

At this point both the NCAAP and Civil Rights Congress was involved in the case and trying various legal measures to stop or at least delay the executions; they were trying to get new trials for the men.

Martin A. Martin, the first African American lawyer to serve in the Department of Justice and other NAACP attorneys defended the men on appeals, attempting to ensure fair trials, set due process precedents, and gain clemency or sentence reductions. 

Much of the defense was built around the fact the men recanted their confessions, and how they were not allowed to consult with lawyers or their families. Martin and the defense secured a limited stay of the execution date from Governor William M. Tuck and a writ of error from the Virginia Supreme Court. This stay did not last long however as a new governor John S. Battle refused to commute the men's sentences, saying he was horrified by the rapes. Additional litigation in the U.S. District Court and Court of Appeals proved futile. The defendants were all executed on February 2 and 5, 1951.

In December of 2020, the Martinsville 7 Project petitioned then-Virginia Governor Ralph Northam to pardon the Martinsville Seven posthumously and issue an apology. He did so. “They did not receive due process,” the Democratic governor said. “Their punishment did not fit the crime.”

 

The Martinsville 7

Francis DeSales Grayson

Frank Hairston Jr.

Howard Hairston

James Luther Hairston

Joe Henry Hampton

Booker T. Millner

John Clabon Taylor

 

 

Sources:

https://martinsville7.org/

https://aaregistry.org/story/the-martinsville-seven-a-story/

 https://www.virginiamercury.com/2021/09/07/a-virginia-the-martinsville-seven-could-not-have-imagined/

 

200 Black Men Reenslaved In Pittsburgh For Spring Planting

 

Feb. 2, 1909, Immigration from the southern states of Blacks was an ongoing issue in many northern cities as they attempted to adapt to the increased population. Pittsburgh was one of the cities on the forefront of this migration, the city was one of the major stops on the underground railroad and the steel industry offered the possibility of good paying jobs.

The Herron Hills neighborhood in the North Oakland area of Pittsburgh became the Black community with this migration. While there was economic opportunity in the city, and a number of people had gone into business owning groceries, butcher shops and barber shops. Regardless there was still a problem when men who came from a agricultural background entered into an industrial workforce so the unemployment rate for Blacks was higher than for Whites and prejudicial attitudes in the mills and unions made it harder for Blacks to find jobs.

In the winter of 1909 White women began making reports they were being accosted and assaulted in Herron Hills and surrounding neighborhoods. There was little to substantiate this accusation, no witnesses and little evidence except the accusations. There also was no formal investigation into any of the reported incidents.

What did happen was the police using these accusations as a cover entered into the Herron Hills neighborhood and began arresting Black men if they couldn’t prove they had employment. Men were arrested for vagrancy and disorderly conduct. On the night of Feb. 2^nd, they arrested over 200 men. The newspapers of the time reported that this all was done to reassure White women they were safe, but again there was not investigation into assaults. What conclusively happened was that 200 men were arrested and sent to the workhouse where they had to earn their freedom. The Allegheny County workhouse held roughly a 1,000 men at any one time and it was a working farm and workers made furniture, brooms and did laundry. The workhouse forced men to work for nothing while it earned $200,000 a year (6 million in 2023). This type of re-enslavement was a cash fountain for the county and the Feb. 2^nd arrests would give the county a huge work force for spring planting. The men would on average serve 30-45 days for vagrancy and drunkenness. A handful of the men were charged with assault and served 2 to 10 years at the workhouse.

The arrest of the 200 was a bit of an outlier based on the number of arrests, however the police did double their patrols of the Herron Hills community. The mass arrest was a clear example of how even in Northern cities Blacks after the Civil War faced challenges toward their freedom and could be arrested and convicted just based on an accusation.

 

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/image/889962034/?terms=%22200%20Negroes%22&match=1

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1909/02/04/101865714.html?pageNumber=1

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1909/02/06/101025900.html?pageNumber=6

https://www.workhouses.org.uk/US-PA-Allegheny/

http://www.info-ren.org/projects/btul/exhibit/afamsur.html

Forgotten History: Pecan Shellers Strike Changes San Antonio Forever

Jan. 31, 1938, San Antonio, Texas is the capital of pecans, 50% of the national pecan process, shelling, and packaging was done on the west side of the city. More than fifty percent of the commercial pecan crop was grown within 250 miles of the city. There were 400 shelling factories in the city.

The center of the Hispanic community was also in the westside American with Mexican ancestry and Mexican nationals made up 40% of the city’s population and lived on the west side of town, so it made sense for the companies to use this labor pool almost exclusively. Until this day when 12,000 pecan shellers walked out protesting a cut in pay and poor working conditions.

While it might not seem to be a dangerous job shelling by hand was hazardous and hard. Shellers usually worked more than 10 hours a day, seven days a week for $2 to $3 weekly. Lighting was poor, inside toilets and washbowls were nonexistent, and ventilation was inadequate. The fine brown dust released by pecans exposed shellers to tuberculosis. This was a major disease concern, San Antonio averaged 148 TB deaths for every 100,000 persons, compared to the national average of fifty-four.

The strike began because of a pay cut. The Southern Pecan Shelling Company reduced the pay of shellers who had earned six or seven cents a pound (six cents for pieces, seven cents for halves) to five and six cents a pound. Wages for crackers were cut from fifty cents to forty cents for every 100 pounds.

The walkout brought an immediate halt to the processing of the pecans. Most of the workforce were women and it took courage to do the walkout, but there was little to lose. The west side of town, where most Mexican Americans lived, featured one of the worst slums in the United States with unpaved roads crowded with tiny tar paper homes. Many of the houses rented for as little as fifty cents a week, had dirt floors, and were without electricity, running water, or plumbing. Infant mortality was high as were dysentery and other diseases.

San Antonio’s city government’s reaction to the strike was immediate. The police chief, Owen Kilday, claimed publicly that only a few of the 12,000 workers employed in the pecan industry were participating. Propaganda by the city was quickly introduced to the local newspapers and radio. City officials tried to both downplay the severity of the strike and accuse the strikers of communism.

These accusations took on an unfortunate appearance of reality because the original strike leader, Emma Tenayuca, was a well-known figure in San Antonio politics who had connections to the Worker's Alliance, a national organization formed by the Communist party. Tenayuca’s husband was also an unapologetic Communist who had run for governor of Texas and often was in court fighting for immigrant rights. Donald Henderson, president of the United Cannery union, arrived to direct the strike. He soon passed this responsibility to CIO organizer J. Austin Beasley, however, Tenayuca stayed involved in the day-to-day activities of the strike and their lives, organizing to make sure there was food and other needs were met.

The picketing of the 400 factories was met with police actions as well. Kilday claimed that there was no strike and dispersed demonstrators and arrested picketers. In one week in February, 90 male pecan shellers were arrested and imprisoned with 200 other prisoners in a county jail designed to hold 60. Other organizations backed the city and the pecan industry.  The Mexican Chamber of Commerce, the American Chamber of Commerce, LULAC, and Archbishop Drossaerts of the Catholic Church in San Antonio also spoke out against the strike. They spoke out against radical activism and urged the strikers to return to work.

thirty-seven days after the strike’s inception, the striking shellers agreed to submit their case to arbitration. Governor Allred also convinced the Southern Pecan Shelling Co. to abide by the decisions of a three-man arbitration board. 

There was an unintended consequence of agreeing to arbitration, the strikers and the companies agreed to a new wage but the national labor board ordered a 25 cents an-hour wage. The appeals by both the union and the companies were denied. By November of the year, the Southern Pecan Shelling Company had turned to mechanized shelling, as did most of the companies. Over the next few years, the labor force dropped from 12,000 to 800.

While in the long term, the Pecan Shellers strike changed the industry and eliminated this huge source of jobs it also changed the political nature of San Antonio. This included Maury Maverick who became mayor and began working hard to include Mexican Americans in the city’s decision-making and the larger community. While improvement occurred slowly and fitfully, the end of the 1930s saw changing attitudes in San Antonio towards the poorest citizens of the city.

 

 

Picture, Pecan shellers striking in front of Southern Pecan Shelling Company in 1938. Courtesy San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections--Institute of Texan Cultures

Sources:

https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/pecan-shellers-strike

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/pecan-shellers-strike

https://www.uiw.edu/sanantonio/gower.html

 

Four Bodies Hung From Same Tree Two Other Men Also Lynched

Jan. 31, 1893, Economic changes and industrialization often brought people into conflict, in the Jim Crow south the conflict was usually blamed on Blacks even when there was no evidence but a confession drawn out by torture.

This seems to be the case of a late-night lynch party in Tazewell County where four men were lynched in one location and a fifth hung for the same crime in a different part of the county. The men Jerry Brown, Sam McDonald, Spencer Branch, and John Johnson were lynched in Richfields Virginia where the crime they were said to have committed occurred. The fifth man named Sam Blow was lynched in Cedar Bluff.

The men allegedly murdered two prominent Buchanan County merchants Alex Ratcliffe and Bob Shortridge and robbed them. As the Black men were all railroad workers and the assault happened at the tracks the Tazewell County sheriff made an instant connection. Apparently, Jerry Brown did have a reputation as a “rough man,” and this was an additional reason to arrest him.

After several hours in custody, Brown was reported to have confessed. He said he and his friends saw the two men flashing money so they attacked them with a hatchet and club. Shortly after this, a mob of about 500 broke into the jail led by local magistrate James Hurt, and businessman   James Crabtree. The mob marched Brown to an oak tree across the train yard from where the two white men were killed and hung him.

By this time Sheriff's deputies had found Branch and Johnson and arrested them but knowing that a mob had taken Brown took them through the woods to Cedar Bluff to meet the train. When the deputies boarded the train they found it was under the control of the mob and it was being taken back to Richfields. Also on board was the fourth suspect Sam McDonald and who had confessed to being involved with the robbery and he had also confessed to the murder of Jo Hunt the year before. The three men were then hung from the same tree as Brown.

Another mob had found Sam Blow in Cedar Bluffs and had lynched him for his part in the murders, he was implicated in Johnson’s final statement as were two White men known only by the names Lambert and Harman. Although a posse was formed to find Lambert in West Virginia there was no mention of him being found. Deputy Tazewell County Sheriff Joe Peery also stated that a sixth Black man, Sam Barns, had been hung for his participation in the robbery/murder.

 

 

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/image/84741278/?terms=%22Jerry%20Brown%22&match=1&clipping_id=7852857

https://www.thehomesickappalachian.com/lynchings-in-southwest-virginia/

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/richlands-lynching-clinch-valley-news-february-3-1893/

https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/valynchings/gallery/jerry-brown-john-johnson-sam-ellerson-and-spencer-branch/

 

Texas Rangers Massacre 15 Innocent People Near The Border In 1918

 

Jan. 28, 1918, in the early morning hours armed men entered the homes of the farmers in small border town of Porvenir and took 15 men aged 14 to 72 out to the edge of town and shot them to death, riddling their bodies with bullets and then rode away.

These were Texas Rangers, and they had a taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury and execution of these men because there were rumors they had been part of bandit raid on the Brite Ranch a few miles to the south. Both Porvenir and the ranch were on the Texas side of the Rio Grande River which acts as the border between the two countries. While the killings and raid were in Texas, the victims of the massacre had family and friends on the Mexico side and that is where the other residents of Porvenir ran when leaving the town behind.

Over the next few days, they came back and collected their dead, buried them and gathered anything they owned that was left behind on the night of the raid. They also began talking and spreading the story of what happened.

The Rangers tried to cover up the massacre with reports that the men killed ere bandits hiding in the brush and they had been fired on from the dark. They also described the residents of Porvenir as “thieves, informers, spies, and murderers.” They tried to connect the dead to the former border raider Poncho Villa, who had moved to a hacienda in the southern part of the Chihuahua state and who was trying to negotiate a peace settlement and amnesty with Mexican interim President Adolfo de la Huerta. There was no evidence of Villa’s involvement in the Brite Ranch raid or any other recent border incursions.

The Mexican government initiated an investigation of their own into the incident in early February. The Mexican government made an official protest of the incident to the United States Department. The Eighth U.S. Cavalry Regiment also started an investigation as they rode with the rangers that night but had not been involved in the search of the town or the shooting. However they retuned to the town a few days later and burned it to the ground.

The school master of the tiny village Harry Warren wrote an account of the massacre, summarized the events in great detail, one of his students had went to him in the early morning for assistance. It was Warren who recorded the names of the victims.

Congressional Representative José T. Canales of Brownsville demanded a legislative investigation into the conduct of the Ranger forces and called for a reorganization of the force. All of these investigations also showed there was no evidence implicating the Porvenir villagers in the cattle raids.

Face with mounting pressure and conclusive evidence. The villagers were innocent Texas Governor William Pettus Hobby disbanded Company B of the Texas Rangers, firing 5 rangers and transferring another 5. The commander of the company Captain Monroe Fox reacted badly to this writing letters justifying what his men had done and restating that only bandits had been killed in Porvenir. Fox accused the governor of giving in to pressure from the Mexican government and accused Hobby of playing politics to secure the Mexican vote in future elections.

Relations between Mexico and the United States were in a period of flux and Secretary of State Robert Lansing was working hard to open relations and trade to a larger degree so he was in full support Hobby’s actions.

Fox resigned his commission with the Rangers in June after the Governor attempted to transfer him to a desk job in Austin. The legislature followed Hobby’s lead and more reforms, including a reduction of the Ranger force to four companies, and higher wages to attract and retain good men. Fox’s career with the Rangers was not over, but he never again saw Ranger duty along the border again either.

No criminal charges were ever filed against the Rangers involved in the Porvenir massacre but there were civil lawsuits in the following years. In June 1926, eight years after the event, Mexican attorneys filed twelve separate claims against the United States regarding the Porvenir massacre. Which resulted in treaty where victims of state violence filed claims through the U.S.–Mexico General Claims Commission. The Mexican and U.S. governments bilaterally created the commission to settle many claims of both Mexican and U.S. nationals arising between July 4, 1868, and the start of the commission.

Survivors and their descendants kept the story alive in their families until 2009 when they started working towards getting a memorial, which was placed by the state on the 100th anniversary in 2018.

 

Sources:

https://www.texasranger.org/texas-ranger-museum/history/biographies-20th-century-texas-rangers/captain-fox-porvenir-massacre/

https://www.porvenirmassacre.org/

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/porvenir-massacre