Location: Montgomery County, Texas
Age: 28
Year: 1941
Bob White, 28, was a laborer in a scrap metal yard who was killed in Conroe, Montgomery County, Texas, in 1941.
A white woman identified White as her rapist in a police line-up.
White’s conviction and death sentence by a state criminal court was reversed on appeal.
White was retried and again convicted and sentenced to death. The decision was reversed by the United States Supreme Court.
As White sat in the defendant’s chair for his third trial, the woman’s husband, W.S. Cochran, shot and killed him.
Trial jury acquitted Cochran.
For more information, search CRRJ’s archive.
Read more about White’s death on the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive
About the Archive
The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive houses case files and documents for more than 1,000 cases of racial homicides in the Jim Crow South. Co-founded by Melissa Nobles, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Margaret Burnham, CRRJ director and professor of law at Northeastern, these uncovered stories highlight how violence affected lives, defined legal rights and shaped politics between 1930 and 1954.