1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back by David F. Krugler

Author:David F. Krugler [Krugler, David F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-12-31T08:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.2. Posse searching for blacks. Deputized by Phillips County Sheriff Frank Kitchens, this posse scoured the roads and fields around Hoop Spur in a campaign to disarm, detain, and even kill black sharecroppers and their families. Source: AHC 1595.2, from the Collections of the Arkansas History Commission. Courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission.

Herbert Thompson commanded a group of white veterans searching a bayou east of Hoop Spur. Around noon, he and his men fired on a band of sharecroppers and a uniformed black veteran hiding in a thicket. The black men returned the fire. The exchange killed James Tappan, a white veteran, and two sharecroppers; the surviving blacks escaped.25 The men commanded by sharecropper Frank Moore were close enough to hear the gunfire. “Let’s go help them people out,” Moore exclaimed. He led his band to the Hoop Spur road, where they saw several cars of deputies to the north. The union men dispersed, some moving alongside the railroad tracks, others staying on the road shoulder. One man allegedly fired his rifle at the deputies, fatally wounding a white man named Clinton Lee.26

As word of the deaths of Lee and Tappan spread, the posse embarked on a murderous rampage against African Americans. The four Johnston Brothers numbered among the victims. Dr. David A. E. Johnston was a prosperous Helena dentist and businessman. His brother Louis was a physician in Oklahoma, home for a reunion. The other two brothers, who owned an automobile dealership, were both veterans. Early on the morning of October 1, the brothers went squirrel hunting in the woods south of Elaine. After the merchant who had sold them shotgun shells told a deputy sheriff that the Johnstons were armed, the posse set out to find them.27

When the brothers learned of the disturbances, they left their guns and game inside their car and boarded a train to return home. Deputies arrested them before the train reached Helena. The men were shackled and put into the back seat of O. R. Lilly’s Oldsmobile. A realtor and Helena alderman, Lilly apparently had a grudge against David Johnston. A friend of Lilly’s had attempted to whip the dentist in an altercation a week earlier, but Johnston had instead beaten up his attacker. In the front seat with Lilly were two white men – one, Amos Jarmon, was the Phillips County treasurer – and Lilly’s black driver Jim Carruthers. According to Jarmon, the car had stopped to help a disabled vehicle and its white occupants when David Johnston lunged over the seat, seized Lilly’s gun, and killed him. Jarmon claimed that he and his partner then fatally shot Johnston while the white men from the other car killed Johnston’s three brothers.28

Jarmon’s story raises several questions. Who were the armed white men Lilly had allegedly stopped to aid? Where were the deputies who had arrested the Johnstons? If, in fact, David Johnston shot Lilly, would his brothers sit helplessly in the back seat or would they try to escape? The murders may

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