Lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson

Lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson
There are two known images of this scene, this one, numbered 2899, and another, numbered 2897. Seth Archer writes of number 2897 that there are 58 spectators in the photograph: 35 men, 6 women and 17 children.
Date	May 25, 1911 (1911-05-25)
Location	Around six miles west of Okemah, Oklahoma, on a bridge across the North Canadian River; a different bridge in what is probably the same location now carries State Highway 56.
Photographer	George Henry Farnum
Charges	None

Laura and Lawrence Nelson (born 1878 and 1897) were an African-American mother and son who were lynched near Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911.

Laura, her husband, their teenage son Lawrence, and their baby had been taken into custody after George Loney, Okemah's deputy sheriff, arrived at the Nelson's home to investigate the theft of a cow. Sources conflict as to what happened next, but one of the Nelsons, either Lawrence or Laura, shot and killed Lomey. Laura's husband pleaded guilty to larceny, and on or around May 12 was sent to the relative safety of the state prison in McAlester, while the son was held in the county jail and Laura in a cell in the courthouse to await trial for the killing.

During the night of May 24–25 mother, son and baby were kidnapped from their cells by a group of men that included Charley Guthrie (1879–1956), the father of folk singer Woody Guthrie (1912–1967), according to a statement given in 1977 by the former's brother. A contemporaneous report in The Crisis said that Laura was raped, then she and Lawrence were hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River. The baby reportedly survived. A group of sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning, and photographs of the hanging bodies were sold as postcards. The district judge convened a grand jury to investigate, but no-one stepped forward to identify the killers. Although Woody Guthrie was not born until 14 months after the lynching, the photographs and his father's reported involvement had a lasting effect on him, and he wrote several songs about the killings.

The Nelsons were among at least 4,743 people lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 of them black, 73 percent of them in the South.

Shooting and arrests

West Broadway Street, Okemah, in 2010. The Nelsons were taken to the county jail, then located at 510 West Broadway.

The Nelsons – Austin, Laura, their son Lawrence and a baby – lived on a farm near Paden, Oklahoma. According to the charge sheet, Austin stole a cow from Claude Littrell (1886–1953) on May 1, 1911; witnesses for the state were Littrell, Lawrence Payne, Cliff Martin and Oscar Lane. On an unknown date, possibly May 2, Deputy Sheriff George H. Loney and several others – most likely the four witnesses named on the charge sheet – went to search the Nelsons' property, and found the butchered remains of the animal.

When the men entered the family's home, someone shot Loney, who died of his wounds. Joe Klein wrote in 1980 that it was the son, Lawrence, who fired the shot. There were stories that Loney died in the yard begging for water, something that Klein wrote particularly upset the white community. Other sources reported the shooter as Laura, and others again surmised that she took responsibility to save her son. The family was arrested and taken to the Okfuskee county jail in Okemah, a predominantly white town; Harry Menig writes that in 1911 the local school had 555 white students and one black. Austin pleaded guilty to larceny and on May 12 was sentenced to three years' imprisonment, then sent to the state prison in McAlester, which a local newspaper wrote probably saved his life. Lawrence remained in the Okemah jail, and Laura was placed in a cell in the courthouse.

Lynching

Kidnap and killing

Lawrence's partially clothed body; someone appears to have painted out his genitals.

A group of men arrived at the jail during the night of May 24–25; some sources report that there were 40 of them. They forced the guard, W. L. (Lawrence) Payne, to hand over the boy, "about fourteen years old, slender and tall, yellow and ignorant," according to a newspaper. They then went to the cell in the courthouse and seized Laura, described by a newspaper as "very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years old, and vicious." According to The Crisis and a woman who said she witnessed the lynching, they also took the baby.

The guard said that the men tied him to one of the doors but he was able to escape and raise the alarm, after which Sheriff J. A. Dunnegan sent out a search party, to no avail. Laura and Lawrence were taken to what newspapers at the time called a "negro settlement," six miles west of Okemah, to a bridge over the North Canadian River. According to a July 1911 report in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, members of the mob raped Laura. Then they gagged her and Lawrence with tow sacks and hanged them from the bridge with a rope made of half-inch hemp. A woman who said she watched the lynching reported that Laura placed the baby on the ground when she was forced onto the bridge, and that the mob left the baby lying there: "After they had hung them up, those 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. It's all grown up now and lives here."

Seth Archer writes that the front page of The Okemah Ledger later that day said the lynching was "executed with silent precision that makes it appear as a masterpiece of planning." One newspaper reported: "The woman's arms were swinging by her side, untied, while about twenty 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 boy taking his cow to water. Hundreds of people from Okemah and the western part of the country went to view the scene."

According to the Okemah jail guard, none of the Nelsons' relatives claimed the bodies. He wrote that they were buried by the Okfuskee County authorities in the Greenleaf cemetery near Okemah.

Photographs and postcards

Photographs of lynchings were sold as postcards. James Allen bought this one of Laura in a fleamarket for $75 in the 1990s.

The scene after the lynching was recorded in a series of photographs by George Henry Farnum (1884–1931), the owner of Okemah's only photography studio. He took several pictures from a boat; one of them shows 58 onlookers on the bridge – including six women and 17 children – with the two bodies hanging below. He also took close-ups of the bodies, and as was common practice with lynching photographs, the images were turned into postcards and sold in local stores as souvenirs. Journalist J.R. Moehringer writes that lynching photographs were as common as postcards of Niagara Falls, and when the U.S. Postal Service banned them from being sent through the mail in 1908, the cards still sold well door to door.

Atlanta antique collector James Allen spent years looking for these cards to publish in his Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), a book accompanied by an exhibition of 130 lynching postcards from 1880 to 1960, which opened at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York in January 2000. He writes that he 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."

Allen argues that the photographers were more than passive spectators; they positioned and lit the corpses as if they were game birds, and the postcards became an important part of the ritual, emphasizing the political nature of the act. Seth Archer writes in the Southwest Review that they were partly intended as a warning, in this case to the neighboring all-black Boley – "look what we did here, Negroes beware" – but the practice of sending the cards to family and friends outside the area underlined the ritualistic nature of the lynchings, death as a community exhibit.

Archer compares them to the images from Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, where U.S. service personnel were photographed humiliating their Iraqi prisoners. That lynchings are now viewed with horror in the United States is in part, Archer writes, because white Americans came to see black Americans as human, though he adds that if the lynchers saw their victims as less human than themselves, "what could members of a lynch mob possibly picture black people to be, if they were less human than the mob that lynched them?"

Reaction

Legal and political

Further information: Lynching in the United States

The Omekah Independent wrote that "there is not a shadow of an excuse for the crime," and called it a "terrible blot on Okfuskee County, a reproach that it will take years to remove." Another local newspaper wrote: "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." According to The Crisis, The Muskogee Phoenix tried to lay the blame on the black community, writing that the Nelsons had been "mobbed by Negroes." Blacks in Oklahoma and elsewhere expressed outrage at the killings. One black journal lamented:

"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.

Lee Cruce, governor of Oklahoma, wrote that there was racial prejudice "wherever the Negroes are found in large numbers."

Residents of the nearby 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. Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–1949) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote in protest to Lee Cruce (1863–1933), governor of Oklahoma. Cruce assured Villard he would do everything he could to bring the killers to justice. He defended the laws of Oklahoma as "adequate" and its "juries competent," and said that the administration of justice in the state proceeded with little cause for criticism, "except in cases of extreme passion, which no law and no civilization can control." He 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 ...

District Judge John Caruthers convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate, but no-one would identify the lynchers. The NAACP argued that nothing would change while governors like Cruce sought to excuse lynching as the product of the "uncontrollable passion" of white people to exact what they perceived as justice.

Charley and Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie, whose father took part in the lynching, wrote three songs about it.

Among those associated with the lynching was Charley Guthrie, a real estate broker, district court clerk and local Democratic politician; he was also the father of folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was born 14 months after the lynching. Woody Guthrie said that his father – whether before or after the lynching is unclear – was briefly an under-sheriff in Okemah. He also said his father joined the Ku Klux Klan, which was revived in 1915 after a period of abeyance and became powerful in Oklahoma and the Midwest into the early 1920s.

The journalist Joe Klein interviewed Charley Guthrie's brother, Claude, in 1977 for his Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980). In a taped interview, Claude said that Charley had been involved in both the arrest and the lynching of the Nelsons:

It was pretty bad back there in them days ... The niggers was pretty bad over there in Boley, you know ... Charley and them, they throwed this nigger and his mother in jail, both of them, the boy and the woman. And that night, why they stuck out and hung [laughter], they hung them niggers that killed that sheriff ... I just kind of laughed [laughter]. I knew darn well that rascal [Charley] was – I knew he was in on it.

Klein included in his book that Charley had been part of the posse and the lynching mob, but did not refer to the interview. Seth Archer found the tape in 2005 in the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, and reported Claude's statement in the Southwest Review in 2006.

Template:Quote box4 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"). The image of the hanging bodies had a lasting effect on Guthrie, who later recalled seeing as a child "the postcard picture they sold in my home town for several years, a-showing you a negro mother, and her two young sons [sic], a-hanging by the neck from a river bridge, and the wild wind a-whistling down the river bottom, and the ropes stretched tight by the weight of their bodies ... stretched tight like a big fiddle string."

Mark Allan Jackson writes that in 1946 Guthrie alluded to the killings in a sketch, now held by the Ralph Rinzler archives, depicting a stylized bridge from which dozens of lynched bodies hang, with the crumbling buildings of a decayed city in the background.

See also

• Grandfather clause
• History of Oklahoma
• Jim Crow laws
• Oklahoma Territory
• "Strange Fruit" by Abel Meeropol
• Tulsa race riot (1921)
• Ida B. Wells

References

• Allen, James. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Twin Palms Publishers, 2000; see extract about the Nelsons.
• Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. Rutgers University Press, 2004.
• Archer, Seth. "Reading the Riot Acts", Southwest Review, September 22, 2006.
• Bittle, William Elmer and Geis, Gilbert. The Longest Way Home. Wayne State University Press, 1964.
• Clinton Mirror. "Mother and son lynched", May 27, 1911.
• Collins, Rob. "Picture of horror", Oklahoma Gazette, May 24, 2011.
• Cray, Ed. The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. W. W. Norton, 2006
• Davidson, James West. 'They say': Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race. Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Feimster, Crystal. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. Harvard University Press, 2009.
• Gonzales, Rita. "'With none but the omnipresent stars to witness'": Ken Gonzales-Day's Hang Trees", Pomona College Museum of Art, 2006.
• Great Plains Quarterly, Volume 3, Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1983.
• Guthrie, Woody. "Don't Kill My Baby and My Son", 1966; also see "Don’t Kill My Baby and My Son", YouTube.
• Jackson, Mark Allan. Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie. University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
• Kennedy, Randall. Race, Crime, and the Law. Vintage Books, 1998.
• Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1999, first published 1980.
• Kaufman, Will. Woody Guthrie, American Radical. University of Illinois Press, 2011.
• Lynch, Kara. Meet me in Okemah. University of California, 2004; originally a video film, episode three of Invisible.
• Menig, Harry. "Woody Guthrie," Chronicles of Oklahoma. Volume 53, Oklahoma Historical Society, 1975.
• Menig, Harry. "Woody Guthrie: The Oklahoma Years, 1912–1929," in David D. Joyce (ed.). "An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before". University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
• Moehringer, J.R. "An Obsessive Quest to Make People See", The Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2000.
• Owens, Ron. Oklahoma heroes: the Oklahoma Peace Officers Memorial. Turner Publishing Company, 2000.
• Payne, W.L. "Okemah's Night of Terror", June 23, 1911, in Hazel Ruby McMahan, Stories of Early Oklahoma. Daughters of the American Revolution, 1945; also available here.
• Reese, Linda Williams. Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920. University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
• Segrave, Kerry. Lynchings of Women in the United States: The Recorded Cases, 1851–1946. McFarland, 2010.
• Shepard, R. Bruce. "Diplomatic Racism: Canadian Government and Black Migration from Oklahoma, 1905-1912," in Glasrud, Bruce A. and Braithwaite, Charles A. (eds.). African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology. University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
• The Crisis. Report of the lynching, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Vol 2, Number 3, July 1911, p. 99; another report here, p. 18.
• The Crisis. "The Oklahoma Lynching", The Crisis, Vol. 2, Number 4, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, August 1911.
• The Dispatch. "News from everywhere", May 31, 1911.
• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States: 1889–1918, 1919.
• The New York Times. "Hang Negro Woman and Son", May 26, 1911.
• Williams, Kidada. They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New York University Press, 2012.
• Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Further reading

• Allen, James. Musarium: Without Sanctuary; James Allen, "Without Sanctuary", a brief film about the collection
• Apel, Dora, and Smith, Shawn Michelle. Lynching Photographs. University of California Press, 2007.
• Dickinson, Stephanie. "A Lynching in Stereoscope", African American Review, 38(1), Spring 2004, pp. 35–43.
• Gehman, Geoff. "Strong sense of injustice spurs lynchings collector", The Morning Call, November 11, 2001.
• Lacayo, Richard. "Blood at the Root", Time magazine, April 2, 2000.
• Leightweis-Gof, Jennie. "The Lynched Woman: Kara Walker, Laura Nelson, and the Question of Agency", Blood at the Root: Lynching As American Cultural Nucleus. SUNY Press, 2011.