Randolph Coker was known as "Beau" to friends and family. My Aunt Ginny and my father both recalled him as a rascal and a ladies man. They remembered Uncle Beau being in trouble with police and [seemingly] always with a different woman. My research has backed up their stories.
Randolph was born 6 October 1900 in Yellville, Marion County, Arkansas to George W. and Anna {Stinnett} Coker. He was the sixth of seven children and their youngest son.
The family left Yellville in 1909 after a race riot in a neighboring county and moved to Joplin, Missouri. They lived at 315 Cox St. initially but later moved to 922 North St. which was the family home for more than three decades. Beau attended Lincoln School in Joplin. He and his siblings Lonnie and Bertha are noted in the listing of students at Lincoln School in the book Black Families of the Ozarks, Volume 3-B, available at the Greene County Library in Springfield, Missouri. He was an 11-year-old second grader in the Spring of 1912 and doesn't appear to have gone beyond the third grade (1913) though Lonnie and Bertha completed their elementary education.
Many details of Beau's adult life can be found in newspaper archives in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. He had a nose for trouble; and that trouble often included women and alcohol. He had numerous arrests while being under the influence including drunk driving, lewd behavior, assault, and chicken stealing. He seemed to move between Joplin and Parsons, KS. I can imagine the moves being inspired by how much trouble he was in at one place or the other.
There are two marriage records for Beau, one in Parsons and one in Joplin, but no evidence of divorce. He was also arrested with women who were not his wives. No records of any children have been found but I do have a very close DNA match who also matches my father with enough centiMorgans to be a close cousin. My match and I are wondering if Uncle Beau had an affair with her grandmother whose husband was often away from home on his railroad job.
Randolph spent time in city jails, county jails, and finally, in the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1940 according to census records. I know he received a 5-year maximum sentence in a Labette County, KS District Court for the chicken-stealing incident but I don't know how he ended up in the Missouri Pen. That penitentiary has been closed for several years and I haven't found out what was done with prisoner records. The Pen was the first one built west of the Mississippi and was once likened to Russian prisons for the tortures that prisoners endured.
By 1941 Uncle Beau is back in Joplin. According to his WW II draft registration record he is working at his cousin Roy Watkins' shoe shop on E. 4th St. and living at the family home on North St. Beau didn't make the papers between 1940 and 1950 - at least not in digitized format yet. The next records I found for him are related to his death in 1950.
Aunt Ginny once told me that Beau was killed by some white men with whom he had been gambling near Cave Springs, MO. Newspapers reported that his body was found on the Frisco tracks in Springfield, MO with severed limbs and a crushed skull. They implied that he was drunk and fell on the tracks and then hit by a passenger train. A few people who had seen him earlier in the evening said he had been drinking but was not drunk. There was no inquest and the coroner ruled his death as accidental. I thought it was interesting that a son of the man Beau was staying with in Springfield at the time was also found dead on the Frisco tracks a few years earlier. The conspiracist in me has my head spinning with tales of a Frisco killing field; the pragmatist is not surprised by Uncle Beau's untimely end.