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| 1900 Census, Union Township (Yellville), Arkansas |
When I first started researching my Stinnett cousins I found two families of them in living near my grandfather's family in Yellville, Arkansas. Charley was recorded in the 1900 Federal Census as the oldest son of Thomas and Lettie [Coker] Stinnett.
Though I'd had pretty good luck tracking other individuals in this family through the years I wasn't able to find anything on Charley until I happened across this article about race riots in Harrison, Arkansas during an internet search. I found Charley, though not in the way I had hoped. I think I also may have found the reason that five families I was researching left the area between 1900 and 1910.
I have since found numerous articles in newspaper archives about Charley's arrest, conviction and execution. Jacqueline Froelich and David Zimmerman co-authored Total Eclipse: The Destruction of the African American Community of Harrison, Arkansas, in 1905 and 1909 for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly that gave me more background on my Arkansas folks. A PDF version of the article can be read here. (The first page is upside down but the rest is okay.) A PBS presentation of Marco Williams' Banished tells a bit of Charley's story as well as Kimberly Harper's White Man's Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909.
My family is not the only one that lived through this terror. I am horrified and heartbroken more than one hundred years after the fact ... in spite of the fact that Charley Stinnett was legally executed after his conviction by a so-called jury of his peers. Newspapers reported that his body was shipped to the family's new home in Muskogee, Oklahoma. A freight wagon carried the pine box with Charley's body to his mother's door. It was reported that not only was the box so small that his arms and legs hung out over the sides, but also that so much blood seeped through the box that it left a trail in the wagon's route. How did that happen with a hanging execution?
India Arie singing Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit
2 comments:
Thank you for putting this all together... heartbreaking yet the history is so good to know. I live about 35 miles from Harrison, and I've been warned many times about the "Sundowner" rules down there to this day.
Have you found any documents about land rights? Did they lose their property? And if so, is it possible to find out where it is?
I haven't found any land records as yet. The earliest census records I can find for the Stinnett siblings are for 1900 and all of them - John and Tom Stinnett, and Annie Stinnett Coker (Yellville) as well as William Stinnett (Harrison) are all shown to be renters.
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