This summer, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) launched Version 2 of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) one of the most complete digital databases of racially motivated killings of Black people in the Jim Crow South.
This expansion introduces 290 new victims and more than 5,000 new documents to the Archive, collected through CRRJ’s investigative processes and student clinic. Version 2 also extends the Archive’s geographic scope beyond the 11 former Confederate states, now featuring cases from 14 additional cities and states, including Maryland, Washington D.C., Kentucky and West Virginia.
What follows are six cases, uncovered by our staff historian Dr. Jay Driskell, investigated by CRRJ students and staff, now publicly available on the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. This the first time that some of these accounts have been made public and these victims’ stories told.
On January 12, 1931, Raymond Gunn was lynched in Maryville, Missouri, after he was arrested for allegedly killing 19-year-old schoolteacher Velma Colter in her school room.
Gunn, aged 37, was taken to a jail in a nearby county, an attempt by law enforcement to prevent his lynching, although a mob formed and attempted to take Gunn from his cell. They successfully fought back city police, sheriff’s officers, and a National Guard tank company.
Gunn was then moved to a jail in Kansas City, before being sent back to Maryville for arraignment. Governor Henry Stewart Caulfield mobilized sixty National Guardsmen upon Gunn’s return and awaited orders from the sheriff to protect Gunn. However, the sheriff, Harvey England, never gave the order and as the lynching occurred the troops remained in the armory. The mob, estimated to have been anywhere between 2,500 and 10,000 strong, suspended Gunn to the rafters of a schoolhouse, doused it with gasoline and burned the entire building to the ground. After the destruction and Gunn’s death, the mob combed the area for “souvenirs.”
It was alleged that England knew the leaders of the mob personally, and that Gunn was restrained using his handcuffs. When asked later why he failed to call in the National Guard to protect Gunn, the sheriff said he feared that their presence would inflame the mob and that the soldiers “would get out on the streets with those guns and hurt somebody.”
No grand jury was convened. Governor Caulfield and Attorney General Straton Shartel investigated Gunn’s killing and found that the sheriff may have violated a Missouri law by not calling for help when Gunn was seized.
The NAACP and religious leaders called for the sheriff’s removal. No legal action was taken to hold individuals in the lynch mob accountable, and no one was ever prosecuted for Gunn’s lynching.
In the early morning hours of June 26, 1938, Wallace McKnight, a 33-year-old night watchman at a local restaurant in Washington D.C. was returning home from work when he encountered the patrol officer John E. Sobolewski. Tucked under McKnight’s arm was bag of groceries taken from his workplace containing a chicken, a pound of butter, a pound of bacon, two-dozen eggs, 10 oranges and seven bananas.
Sobolewski asked McKnight about the package, suspecting that it had been stolen, at which point McKnight – fled. The officer drew his revolver, shouted a warning and shot McKnight in the back. McKnight continued to run and Sobolewski commandeered a passing car, finally catching up with McKnight and shooting him a second time. Sobolewski hailed a passing taxicab and sent McKnight to the hospital where he died several hours later.
McKnight’s killing was one of a string of police killings of Black men in the D.C. area, and so, under increased political pressure, the police department suspended Sobolewski and a coroner’s inquest ordered he be held for grand jury action. He was indicted on manslaughter charges, news that was greeted by considerable local protests in which the NAACP, the National Negro Congress, and the local communist party all participated. But an all-white jury quickly acquitted Sobolewski, who swiftly returned to duty.
The victim’s widow, Mollie McKnight, sued Sobolewski for $10,000. The outcome of this suit remains unknown.
On July 4, 1941, Gladys Green Dixon, 34, was killed in a vacant lot near her home in Washington D.C. According to press accounts, Dixon’s nude body was found slashed and stabbed in a vacant lot behind her home.
While police officers determined that she died of natural causes, witnesses and the condition of her body pointed to a very different story.
Dixon’s family contacted the DC branch of the NAACP, who hired counsel to prosecute the case. Dixon had allegedly been seen with a group of white soldiers just prior to her death, having recently separated from her husband and living with her father at the time she died. and the Black press speculated the local police failed to investigate her death to protect the soldiers from prosecution. Instead, law enforcement concluded that the wounds on her body were caused by rats feeding on the corpse, and Dixon’s official cause of death is listed as “natural causes,” most likely heart disease.
The NAACP pressured Ira E. Keck, Detective Chief of the police department, to reopen the case. Lieutenant Jermiah Flaherty, head of homicide, took over the investigation, the outcome of which remains unknown.
Grant Bullard, 17, and William Mayfield, 14, were carnival workers from Miami, passing through Neon, Kentucky in 1945 with the Playlands Carnival, when they were shot and killed by four white men.
The men — Irvine Collier, John Bently, Zack “Junior” Bently, and John Marcum — asked Bullard and Mayfield to dance for them, and when the teenagers refused, they were killed. Sheriff Gilbert Polly said that the killings were without provocation.
Both the NAACP and the Kentucky chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare were involved in the subsequent investigation and petitioned for a trial. A grand jury indicted the four men for murder.
After two postponements, a trial became impossible since witnesses had moved on with the carnival and were scattered across the country.
Some evidence suggested that the Police Judge for Neon, Zack Bentley Sr., was the father of one of the perpetrators and potentially related to the rest of the gang. Further legal status unknown.
On November 2, 1946, Junior Johnson, 12, and Leroy Wynn, 16, were fatally shot on Main Street in Rison, Arkansas, by Paul Clements, a white farmer.
Saturday was market day in Rison and that night, the town was filled with Black and white farmers as well as merchants.
Following an altercation with two Black men, Clements left the market to retrieve his gun. When he returned, he found those men had already been arrested on charges of assault with intent to kill.
Clements, presumably disappointed and enraged by being denied the opportunity exact vengeful violence on those men, proceeded to fire indiscriminately into the predominantly Black crowd, killing Johnson and Wynn, and seriously wounding two others. Clements was arrested by Sheriff Glover and Marshal Hunter, and brought before a grand jury, which declined to indict him, claiming they could find no witnesses to the shooting.
A circuit court judge ordered Clements held under a $7,500 bond for investigation by a new grand jury. Available records do not reveal whether Clements was ever tried for the shootings.
NAACP Records contain a letter dated November 6, 1946, from the Interdenominational Ministers Alliance of Greater Little Rock reporting that “[a]ccording to newspaper reports, one, Paul Clements, a white farmer of Rison, Arkansas, residing north of Kingsland, shot four Negroes on Saturday, November 2 at 11:00 p.m., of whom two died. The two dead are Junior Johnson, age 12, killed immediately, and Leroy Wynn, 16, died in a hospital the Sunday following. The two others in a serious condition at information, are Grant Hester, 60, and Jeff Thomas, 40. Clements shot the above persons after having trouble with other Negroes on the street.”
High school student, Edgar Duncan was flying kites with two friends on Nickel Plate Railroad land, when he was shot and killed on April 1, 1933, in Indianapolis, Indiana, by Railroad Detective Paul Seiss.
Seiss claimed that he saw the boys atop a coal car throwing coal down and he fired his gun in the air to frighten them off. Duncan’s two friends fled, but Duncan, who was 15 years old, was hit by the bullet. The wounded teenager climbed down a ladder to Seiss and told him he had been shot. Duncan collapsed before medical help arrived.
According to NAACP documents, Duncan still had his kite string in his hand when he died.
Seiss was arrested pending further investigation and released on $1000 bond. A week later a coroner’s inquest exonerated Seiss. The detective had been attacked and disarmed by two Black men attempting to steal coal just six weeks prior to Duncan’s fatal shooting. This experience may have meant that on this occasion Seiss was prepared to shoot to kill, rather than simply scare.
The Indianapolis Branch of the NAACP investigated the shooting. A protest meeting was organized by the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and the International Labor Defense.
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