Another Lynching in Pemiscot County

   Last week I wrote about the May 1927 lynching of Will Sherrod at Braggadocio in Pemiscot County, Missouri. Several reports at the time, including one in the Democrat-Argus of Caruthersville, the county seat, claimed Sherrod's hanging was the first lynching in the county's history. However, this apparently was not true, because another extralegal killing of a black man had occurred in the county less than sixteen years earlier.
   During the first week of October 1911, a black man was arrested in Caruthersville for allegedly attacking two white men with a knife. For safekeeping, the prisoner was taken to the Kennett jail in neighboring Dunklin County. A mob formed at Caruthersville and took a train to Kennett but found, upon arrival, that the prisoner had been spirited out of the jail and hidden at an undisclosed location, thus thwarting the vigilante action.
   This incident and a rash of other petty crimes allegedly committed by "troublesome" blacks from the cities who'd arrived in Pemiscot County in recent weeks for the fall cotton picking season had aroused the white citizens of the county. One report claimed that many of the migrant blacks who came to the county were there ostensibly to work in the cotton fields but in reality were there only to prey on those who did work.
   In this atmosphere of racial animosity, a black man named Ben "High Pockets" Woods followed two young white women home from work in Caruthersville on the evening of October 10. Frightened by the man's behavior, the women gave an alarm, and High Pockets was found hiding in some shrubbery not far from where the young women lived. At least one exaggerated report claimed High Pockets had assaulted the women. At any rate, he was arrested and taken to the Pemiscot County Jail in Caruthersville.
   Later the same night, another black man, A. B. Rich, was arrested for possession of stolen merchandise and lodged in the jail alongside Woods. It was thought Rich had stolen the merchandise himself, and he was also suspected of other petty crimes. He was considered "a worthless character" who was "insulting to white people."
   As word of High Pockets's alleged stalking of the young women spread, a mob quickly formed. Shortly after midnight, the vigilantes broke into the county jail and took both prisoners from their cells. The black men were taken to the local baseball field, from where sounds of the two men being whipped could be heard.
   A short time later, an abandoned "negro boarding house" in Caruthersville, with a reputation as a place where gambling and other vices flourished, was set ablaze, and it quickly went up in flames.
   The next morning, Rich's body was found lodged on the near bank of the Mississippi River about a half mile north of Caruthersville. The body bore numerous cuts, bruises, and abrasions. Reports in the immediate wake of the incident also said Rich had been shot. High Pockets's body was not found, but it was concluded that he very likely suffered the same fate as Rich but that his body floated away down the river. Therefore, initial headlines mentioned the lynching of two black men.
   The next day, however, High Pockets turned up at the farm where he worked a few miles outside Caruthersville. According to his employer, he gathered up his things and took off for Tennessee. He said he'd been whipped, but he had not been shot or thrown in the river. Whether Rich was shot was also called into question when a coroner's jury convened after his body was pulled from the river. The body had several holes or cuts, at least one or two that looked like bullet holes. On closer inspection, however, the coroner concluded that the wounds had probably been made by the spike on the end of a pole that had been used to help drag the body from the river. The jury, therefore, ruled that Rich had come to his death by unknown means. It wasn't even definite that he had died as a direct result of the mob action.
   Whether the findings of the coroner's jury were part of an orchestrated cover-up is speculation, but little was done to try to bring to justice the mob who broke the two black men out of jail. Local authorities declined to pursue the matter, and even the Missouri governor, who initially offered a reward for the arrest of the vigilantes, withdrew his call for the mob to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law after he learned of the coroner's verdict.
   Many blacks fled Pemiscot County in the wake of the mob action, and as far as many white citizens were concerned, it was good riddance, although local observers took pains to distinguish between honest, law-abiding black citizens and the "worthless characters of their race." And apparently the whole incident was soon forgotten, so much so that editors of the Caruthersville Democrat-Argus, a local newspaper that gave the lynching of A. B. Rich extensive coverage, could not recall just sixteen years later, at the time of Will Sherrod's lynching, that a previous lynching had ever occurred in the county. Perhaps it was just a matter of nomenclature, because it's true that Rich was not lynched in the sense of being hanged, but the true definition of lynching involves any extralegal killing, regardless of the means. Or maybe the editor who asserted in 1927 that no previous lynching had ever occurred in Pemiscot County was falling back on the coroner's dubious 1911 verdict that Rich might not have died as a result of the mob action.