Location: Lafayette, Alabama
Age: 18
Year: 1950
Willie B. Carlisle, 18, was a service station employee who was killed in 1950 by two police officers, Doyle Mitcham and James R. Clark, in Lafayette, Alabama.
Mitcham and Clark beat Carlisle to death with a rubber hose after they accused him of letting air out of a police car tire.
A grand jury indicted the officers.
For more information, search CRRJ’s archive.
Read more about Carlisle’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.