Jan. 12, 1931,
Maryville, Missouri: Nodaway County Sheriff Harve England was supposed to
request the National Guard’s aide to stop the lynching of Raymond Gunn. Missouri
Governor Henry Caulfield had already sent them to the town to be prepared for
riots and to assist the sheriff, but apparently the sheriff couldn’t be
bothered to send the request and said, “I went home and came to bed,” after the
mob had taken Gunn. The 63-year-old sheriff’s other excuse was that he felt
called in the guard would have endangered those young men’s lives, “most of
the members of the guard are young men 19 or 20 and I was afraid if I called
them in with their automatic pistols there would be bloodshed.”
So, the mob of some 2,500 individuals took Raymond Gunn from
the sheriff and his deputies and started marching him from town. Gunn had been
arrested for the murder of a young schoolteacher by the name of Velma Coulter
the previous December. Originally he was one of several suspects but his past with
a conviction for sexual assault and a bloody footprint set him apart, and
although he had tried to place suspicion on his friend Paul ‘Shire’ Smith, Smith was cleared and confirmed to be working in Omaha, Nebraska. Smith was
held for his safety while being investigated but was released without incident.
Gunn reportedly did at one point confessed to the murder and the
county prosecutor was going to try and gain a conviction and death sentence for
him, but mob justice decided to guarantee it. While he was likely to in fact be
convicted the pure, public brutality of his lynching outraged much of America.
The mob of 2,500 led Gunn to the one-room schoolhouse where
Coulter had taught. There they doused him with gasoline and the school house
and chained him to a pole on the roof, then both he and the school were set
afire while the crowd watched. It took less than 16 minutes for Gunn and the
school to both be reduced to ash.
As happened so often law enforcement did nothing to find the
members or leaders of the mob. Both the county prosecutor, Virgil Rathbun, and
the circuit court judge D. D. Reeves called the lynching a regrettable and deplorable action but were not inclined to impanel a grand jury. On the other hand,
Governor Caulfield ordered the state attorney general Stratton Shartel to
pursue an investigation, however, this was partly performative as Missouri law
required the county prosecutor to request aid. Also in the immediate aftermath, the state legislature debated and then tabled a resolution condemning the lynching,
supposedly because the ‘Wording’ made the Nodaway and Maryville authorities look
like they were collaborating with the mob.
The national NAACP called on Governor Caulfield to remove
Sheriff England from office, and while Caulfield did read the telegram, he did
not remove England from office, however, the sheriff did retire the next year.
In the end, the only consequences were to the other Black
citizens of Nodaway County. Between the lynching itself and the way the town of
Maryville armed itself two weeks later when they heard Negros were marching on
the city, fears of safety and certainty that the law could not protect them led
to an exodus away from the area. Families lost their homes and in some cases
property due to the unstable situation. The Sedalia Democrat newspaper reported
that an estimated 65 Blacks moved away within three weeks of the lynching. A
1930 census had 90 Negros in the county, a 1932 survey found six.
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