Jan. 24, 1879, Arkadelphia the county seat of Clark
County, Arkansas was the center of a small crime wave in January of 1879, the
crimes seemed unrelated based on local reports but still had the community on
edge. One farmer, William Bullock had been attacked in his home with an ax,
another White farmer was shot with a shotgun and lastly a farmer named R.M.
Duff had his barn set afire and his house robbed.
Law enforcement had very little to go on but innuendo and rumors
and when a Black laborer and his sons stopped at a store in Arkadelphia. The
Black man and his sons went to pay for the things they were buying and
presented the storekeeper a $50 bill. Well in the time of reconstruction/Jim
Crow the idea of a Negro having such a sum of money automatically caused White
people to be suspicious.
So, the sheriff was summoned and he didn’t accept that the Daniels
men had been paid for any labor and arrested them. While Ben Daniels and his
three sons were very vehement in saying they did not burn Duff’s barn and rob
his home the Sheriff sent word to the circuit judge he had confessed. This rumor
got spread around and although the four men were supposedly under protection at
the jail hooded men came and took them.
Newspaper reports are inconclusive about what happened next,
but it does appear they left Daniels oldest son Charles at the jail for some
reason and took Ben Daniels and his two other sons Joseph and Louis to a nearby
orchard and hung them for the crime.
Much of this is subject to conjecture with research by
historians and civil rights investigators based on census records and the small
sample of published news stories.
The Arkansas Gazette reported that the elder Daniels
implicated all three of his sons and pled his own innocence. Other than the
sheriff’s statement on the confession there was no other evidence any of the
men committed a crime. There was no investigation into the lynching of the
three men.
Sources:
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/arkadelphia-lynching-of-1879-9242/
https://www.newspapers.com/image/571055721/?terms=Arkadelphia&match=1
https://www.newspapers.com/image/171732506/?terms=Arkadelphia&match=1
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