African-American mother and son who were lynched in the U.S.
Laura and L. D. Nelson were an African-American mother and son who were lynched on May 25, 1911, near Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. They had been seized from their cells in the Okemah county jail the night before by a group of up to 40 white men, reportedly including Charley Guthrie, father of the folk singer Woody Guthrie. The Associated Press reported that Laura was raped. She and L. D. were then hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River. According to one source, Laura had a baby with her who survived the attack.
Laura and L. D. were in jail because L. D. had been accused of having shot and killed Deputy Sheriff George H. Loney of the Okfuskee County Sheriff's Office, during a search of the Nelsons' farm for a stolen cow. L. D. and Laura were both charged with murder; Laura was charged because she allegedly grabbed the gun first. Her husband, Austin, pleaded guilty to larceny and was sent to the relative safety of the state prison in McAlester, while his wife and son were held in the county jail until their trial.
Sightseers gathered on the bridge on the morning of the lynching. George Henry Farnum, the owner of Okemah's only photography studio, took photographs, which were distributed as postcards, a common practice at the time. Although the district judge convened a grand jury, the killers were never identified. Four of Farnum's photographs are known to have survived—two spectator scenes and one close-up view each of L. D. and Laura. Three of the images were published in 2000 and exhibited at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York by James Allen, an antique collector. The images of Laura Nelson are the only known surviving photographs of a black female lynching victim.
Background.
Lynching in the United States.
Historian Amy Louise Wood writes about lynchings:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;Compared to other forms of terror and intimidation that African-Americans were subject to under Jim Crow, lynching was an infrequent and extraordinary occurrence. Black men and women were much more likely to become victims of personal assault, murder, or rape than lynching [...] Despite, or even because of, its relative rarity, lynching held a singular psychological force, generating a level of fear and horror that overwhelmed all other forms of violence.
Lynching could involve victims being hanged furtively at night by a small group or during the day in front of hundreds or even thousands of witnesses; the latter is known as "spectacle lynchings". The whole community might attend; newspapers sometimes publicized them in advance, and special trains brought in more distant community members. An audience of 10,000, including the mayor and chief of police, was said to have attended the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in 1916. As well as being hanged, victims were sometimes tortured first and burned alive; body parts were removed and kept or sold as souvenirs. Almost all perpetrators were white and the victims were black. The political message—the promotion of white supremacy and black powerlessness—was an important element of the ritual, so that even the quieter lynchings might be photographed and the images published as postcards.
According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,745 people are recorded as having been lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1964; 3,446 (72.7 percent) of them were black. Lynching came to be associated with the Deep South; 73 percent of lynchings took place in the Southern United States. Between 1882 and 1903, 125 black-on-black lynchings were recorded in 10 southern states, as were four cases of whites being lynched by black people. There were 115 recorded cases of women lynched between 1851 and 1946; 90 were black, 19 white, and six Hispanic or uncertain. Women were usually lynched as associates of men who were being lynched; of 97 incidents examined by historian Kerry Segrave, 36 were of women lynched alone.
In Oklahoma.
Oklahoma Territory was said in 1892 by the governor of Oklahoma to be "about 85 percent white, 10 percent colored and 5 percent Indians". It was awarded statehood in 1907, with laws that enshrined racial segregation (Jim Crow laws). In 1911 Okemah's school had 555 white students and one black student. There were 147 recorded lynchings in Oklahoma between 1885 and 1930. Until statehood in 1907, most victims were white cattle rustlers or highwaymen. In all, 77 victims were white, 50 black, 14 American Indians, five unknown, and one Chinese. Five women—two black, two white, and one other—were lynched in Oklahoma in four incidents between 1851 and 1946.
People.
Nelson family.
The Nelsons lived on a farm six miles north of Paden, Oklahoma, a largely White town. Austin Nelson was born in Waco, Texas, in 1873. According to historian Frances Jones-Sneed, his parents, Dave and Rhoda Nelson, had been born into slavery in Georgia; Dave Nelson worked as a molder in Waco.
Austin and Laura married in 1896; L. D. was born around the next year. (L. D. was regularly referred to after the lynching as L. W. or Lawrence.) In 1900 the extended family moved to Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma. According to Jones-Sneed, Laura and Austin were listed in the 1910 census as having two children, L. D., aged 13, and Carrie, aged two. It is not known what became of Carrie. She was probably the baby one witness said survived the lynching; several sources said she was found floating in the river.
George Loney.
Around 35 years old when he died, Deputy Sheriff George H. Loney had lived in Paden for several years and was held in the highest regard, according to "The Okemah Ledger". Described by the newspaper as a fearless man, he was known for having helped to stop the practice of bootlegging in Paden, on behalf of supporters of the local temperance movement. Later he became a state enforcement officer, then deputy sheriff. He was buried in Lincoln County near Paden on May 4, 1911. The "Ledger" wrote that every office in the courthouse closed for an hour during his funeral.
Death of Loney.
Shooting.
George Loney formed a posse consisting of himself, Constable Cliff Martin, Claude Littrell, and Oscar Lane, after a steer was stolen from Littrell's property in Paden on May 1. Littrell obtained a search warrant from A. W. Jenkins, a Justice of the Peace, which allowed the men to search the Nelson's farm. They arrived there on May 2 at around 9 pm, and read the warrant to Austin Nelson before entering the house. The steer's remains were found in either the barn or house.
When the men entered the Nelsons' home, Loney asked Constable Martin to take the cap off a muzzle-loading shotgun that was hanging on the wall. The "Independent" reported that, as Martin reached for the gun, Laura Nelson said: "Look here, boss, that gun belongs to me!" Martin said he told her that he wanted only to unload the gun.
The "Independent" and "Ledger" offered different versions of events. According to the "Independent", which was more sympathetic to the Nelsons, Laura grabbed another gun, a Winchester rifle hidden behind a trunk. L. D. took hold of the Winchester at the same time, and during the struggle for the gun, it went off. A bullet passed through Constable Martin's pant legs, grazing him in the thigh, then hit Loney in the hip and entered his abdomen. He walked outside and died a few minutes later.
According to the "Ledger", L. D. had grabbed the Winchester, pumped a shell into it, and fired. Austin had then taken hold of the rifle and tried to shoot Littrell, the newspaper said. During the ensuing gunfight, Loney had taken shelter behind a wagon. No one realized he had been hit until he asked for water; according to the newspaper, Laura responded: "Let the white ____ [sic] die." Loney reportedly bled to death within minutes. The "Ledger" described his death as "one of the most cold-blooded murders that has occurred in Okfuskee county".
Arrests and charges.
Austin was arrested by Constable Martin on the evening of the shooting; he arrived with Martin in Okemah at 4 am on Wednesday, May 3. The Okfuskee county jail was in Okemah, a predominantly white town. Laura and L. D., described by the "Ledger" as "about sixteen years old, rather yellow, ignorant and ragged", were arrested later that day. Sheriff Dunnegan found them at the home of the boy's uncle. According to "The Independent", they made no effort to escape and were brought to the county jail on the night train.
Austin admitted the theft of the cow, saying he had had no food for his children. According to his undated charge sheet, witnesses for the state were Littrell, Martin, Lane, and Lawrence Payne. (Lawrence Payne was also the name of the jailer on duty the night the Nelsons were kidnapped from the jail.) Austin's account of what happened tallied with that of the posse, except that he said he was the one, not Laura, who had objected to the shotgun being removed from the wall. He said Laura had been trying to take the rifle away from her son when it was fired.
During a hearing on May 6 before Justice Lawrence, Austin was held on a bond of $1,500, which he was unable to pay. After pleading guilty to larceny, he was sentenced on May 12 to three years in Oklahoma State Penitentiary. On May 16 he was sent to the state prison in McAlester 59 miles (95 km) away, which according to the "Ledger" probably saved his life. On May 10, before the same judge, Laura and L. D. (named by the "Ledger" as Mary and L. W. Nelson) were charged with murder and held without bail in the Okemah county jail. The Nelsons hired Blakeley, Maxey &amp; Miley, a law firm in Shawnee, to represent them. The "Ledger" reported on May 18, under the headline "Negro Female Prisoner Gets Unruly", that on May 13 Laura had been "bad" when the jailer, Lawrence Payne, brought her dinner. She had reportedly tried to grab his gun when he opened the cell door, and when that failed she tried to throw herself out of a window. Payne "choked the woman loose", according to the newspaper, and after a struggle returned her to her cell. The "Ledger" wrote on May 25 that during the incident she had "begged to be killed".
May 25, 1911.
Kidnap.
Laura and L. D. were due to be arraigned on May 25. Between 11:30 and midnight on May 24, a group of between a dozen and 40 men arrived at the jail. They entered it through the front door of the sheriff's office. Payne, the jailer, said he had left it unlocked to let in a detective from McAlester, who was looking for an escaped prisoner. He said the men had bound, gagged and blindfolded him at gunpoint, taken his keys, and cut the telephone line. He was unable to identify them.
The boy was "stifled and gagged", according to the "Ledger", and went quietly; prisoners in adjoining cells reportedly heard nothing. The men went to the women's cells and removed Laura, described by the newspaper as "very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years old, and vicious". According to a July 1911 report in "The Crisis" (the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and a female witness who said she had seen the lynching or its aftermath, the men also took the baby.
The jailer said that, after struggling for two hours, he escaped and raised the alarm at Moon's restaurant across the road from the jail. Sheriff Dunnegan sent out a search party to no avail. According to the "Ledger", a fence post suspended on two chairs across a window was found in the jury room just after the lynching, near the cell where Laura had been held. It was thought that the men had intended to hang her out the window but had been deterred by an electric light burning nearby.
Lynching.
Laura and L. D. were taken to a bridge over the North Canadian River, six miles west and one mile south of Okemah; it was described as on the old Schoolton road and at Yarbrough's crossing. According to the Associated Press and "The Crisis", Laura was raped. The "Ledger" reported that the men gagged her and L. D. with tow sacks and, using rope