A mob intent on death

by Richard C. Cortner

"In a landmark Fourteenth Amendment case, and one of the NAACP's first campaigns of national litigation, sixty-seven blacks were sentenced to prison and twelve others to the electric chair. It took five years of bitter failure, rescheduled execution deadlines, numerous trials and hearings, and three appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in the end all went free. It was a great victory for the right to fair trial, the right not to be deprived of life and liberty without due process. The October 1, 1919, 'Race War' (Arkansas Gazette) began in a small black church in the village of Hoop Spur in Phillips County, near the Mississippi River in eastern Arkansas. Five white men and probably more than 200 black men, women, and children were killed. Whites called it a planned insurrection to murder white planters, instigated by union agitators. Blacks said they had gathered in their church to seek legal help to get a fairer price for their cotton. There was later evidence that testimony and con