Laura and L. D. Nelson were an African-American mother and son who were lynched on May 25, 1911, near Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. They had been seized from their cells in the Okemah county jail the night before by a group of up to 40 white men, reportedly including Charley Guthrie, father of the folk singer Woody Guthrie. The Associated Press reported that Laura was raped. She and L. D. were then hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River. According to one source, Laura had a baby with her who survived the attack.
Laura and L. D. were in jail because L. D. had been accused of having shot and killed Deputy Sheriff George H. Loney of the Okfuskee County Sheriff's Office, during a search of the Nelsons' farm for a stolen cow. L. D. and Laura were both charged with murder; Laura was charged because she allegedly grabbed the gun first. Her husband, Austin, pleaded guilty to larceny and was sent to the relative safety of the state prison in McAlester, while his wife and son were held in the county jail until their trial.
Sightseers gathered on the bridge on the morning of the lynching. George Henry Farnum, the owner of Okemah's only photography studio, took photographs, which were distributed as postcards, a common practice at the time. Although the district judge convened a grand jury, the killers were never identified. Four of Farnum's photographs are known to have survived—two spectator scenes and one close-up view each of L. D. and Laura. Three of the images were published in 2000 and exhibited at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York by James Allen, an antique collector. The images of Laura Nelson are the only known surviving photographs of a black female lynching victim.
Background
In Oklahoma
Oklahoma Territory was said in 1892 by the governor of Oklahoma to be "about 85 percent white, 10 percent colored and 5 percent Indians". It was awarded statehood in 1907, with laws that enshrined racial segregation (Jim Crow laws). In 1911 Okemah's school had 555 white students and one black student. There were 147 recorded lynchings in Oklahoma between 1885 and 1930. Until statehood in 1907, most victims were white cattle rustlers or highwaymen. In all, 77 victims were white, 50 Black, 14 American Indians, five unknown, and one Chinese. Five women—two black, two white, and one other—were lynched in Oklahoma in four incidents between 1851 and 1946.
People
Nelson family
The Nelsons lived on a farm six miles north of Paden, Oklahoma, a largely White town. Austin Nelson was born in Waco, Texas, in 1873. According to historian Frances Jones-Sneed, his parents, Dave and Rhoda Nelson, had been born into slavery in Georgia; Dave Nelson worked as a molder in Waco.
Austin and Laura married in 1896; L. D. was born the next year. (L. D. was regularly referred to after the lynching as L. W. or Lawrence.) In 1900 the extended family moved to Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma. According to Jones-Sneed, Laura and Austin were listed in the 1910 census as having two children, L. D., aged 13, and Carrie, aged two. It is not known what became of Carrie. She was probably the baby whom one witness said survived the lynching; several sources said she was found floating in the river.
George Loney
Around 35 years old when he died, Deputy Sheriff George H. Loney had lived in Paden for several years and was held in the highest regard, according to The Okemah Ledger. Described by the newspaper as a fearless man, he was known for having helped to stop the practice of bootlegging in Paden, on behalf of supporters of the local temperance movement. Later he became a state enforcement officer, then deputy sheriff. He was buried in Lincoln County near Paden on May 4, 1911. The Ledger wrote that every office in the courthouse closed for an hour during his funeral.
Death of Loney
Shooting
George Loney formed a posse consisting of himself, Constable Cliff Martin, Claude Littrell, and Oscar Lane, after a steer was stolen from Littrell's property in Paden on May 1. Littrell obtained a search warrant from A. W. Jenkins, a Justice of the Peace, which allowed the men to search the Nelsons' farm. They arrived there on May 2 at around 9 pm, and read the warrant to Austin Nelson before entering the house. The steer's remains were found in either the barn or house.
When the men entered the Nelsons' home, Loney asked Constable Martin to take the cap off a muzzle-loading shotgun that was hanging on the wall. The Independent reported that, as Martin reached for the gun, Laura Nelson said: "Look here, boss, that gun belongs to me!" Martin said he told her that he wanted only to unload the gun.
The Independent and Ledger offered different versions of events. According to the Independent, which was more sympathetic to the Nelsons, Laura grabbed another gun, a Winchester rifle hidden behind a trunk. L. D. took hold of the Winchester at the same time, and during the struggle for the gun, it went off. A bullet passed through Constable Martin's pant legs, grazing him in the thigh, then hit Loney in the hip and entered his abdomen. He walked outside and died a few minutes later.
According to the Ledger, L. D. had grabbed the Winchester, pumped a shell into it, and fired. Austin had then taken hold of the rifle and tried to shoot Littrell, the newspaper said. During the ensuing gunfight, Loney had taken shelter behind a wagon. No one realized he had been hit until he asked for water; according to the newspaper, Laura responded: "Let the white ____ [sic] die." Loney reportedly bled to death within minutes. The Ledger described his death as "one of the most cold-blooded murders that has occurred in Okfuskee county".
Arrests and charges
Austin was arrested by Constable Martin on the evening of the shooting; he arrived with Martin in Okemah at 4 am on Wednesday, May 3. The Okfuskee county jail was in Okemah, a predominantly white town. Laura and L. D., described by the Ledger as "about sixteen years old, rather yellow, ignorant and ragged", were arrested later that day. Sheriff Dunnegan found them at the home of the boy's uncle. According to The Independent, they made no effort to escape and were brought to the county jail on the night train.
Austin admitted the theft of the cow, saying he had had no food for his children. According to his undated charge sheet, witnesses for the state were Littrell, Martin, Lane, and Lawrence Payne. (Lawrence Payne was also the name of the jailer on duty the night the Nelsons were kidnapped from the jail.) Austin's account of what happened tallied with that of the posse, except that he said he was the one, not Laura, who had objected to the shotgun being removed from the wall. He said Laura had been trying to take the rifle away from her son when it was fired.
During a hearing on May 6 before Justice Lawrence, Austin was held on a bond of $1,500, which he was unable to pay. After pleading guilty to larceny, he was sentenced on May 12 to three years in Oklahoma State Penitentiary. On May 16 he was sent to the state prison in McAlester 59 miles (95 km) away, which according to the Ledger probably saved his life. On May 10, before the same judge, Laura and L. D. (named by the Ledger as Mary and L. W. Nelson) were charged with murder and held without bail in the Okemah county jail. The Nelsons hired Blakeley, Maxey & Miley, a law firm in Shawnee, to represent them. The Ledger reported on May 18, under the headline "Negro Female Prisoner Gets Unruly", that on May 13 Laura had been "bad" when the jailer, Lawrence Payne, brought her dinner. She had reportedly tried to grab his gun when he opened the cell door, and when that failed she tried to throw herself out of a window. Payne "choked the woman loose", according to the newspaper, and after a struggle returned her to her cell. The Ledger wrote on May 25 that during the incident she had "begged to be killed".
May 25, 1911
Kidnap
Laura and L. D. were due to be arraigned on May 25. Between 11:30 and midnight on May 24, a group of between a dozen and 40 men arrived at the jail. They entered it through the front door of the sheriff's office. Payne, the jailer, said he had left it unlocked to let in a detective from McAlester, who was looking for an escaped prisoner. He said the men had bound, gagged and blindfolded him at gunpoint, taken his keys, and cut the telephone line. He was unable to identify them.
The boy was "stifled and gagged", according to the Ledger, and went quietly; prisoners in adjoining cells reportedly heard nothing. The men went to the women's cells and removed Laura, described by the newspaper as "very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years old, and vicious". According to a July 1911 report in The Crisis (the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and a female witness who said she had seen the lynching or its aftermath, the men also took the baby.
The jailer said that, after struggling for two hours, he escaped and raised the alarm at Moon's restaurant across the road from the jail. Sheriff Dunnegan sent out a search party to no avail. According to the Ledger, a fence post suspended on two chairs across a window was found in the jury room just after the lynching, near the cell where Laura had been held. It was thought that the men had intended to hang her out the window but had been deterred by an electric light burning nearby.
Lynching
Laura and L. D. were taken to a bridge over the North Canadian River, six miles west and one mile south of Okemah; it was described as on the old Schoolton road and at Yarbrough's crossing. According to the Associated Press and The Crisis, Laura was raped. The Ledger reported that the men gagged her and L. D. with tow sacks and, using rope made of half-inch hemp tied in a hangman's knot and hanged them from the bridge. They were found in the morning hanging 20 ft below the middle span. A local resident, John Earnest, reported the discovery to the sheriff's office. The front page of The Okemah Ledger on May 25, 1911, said the lynching had been "executed with silent precision that makes it appear as a masterpiece of planning":
The woman's arms were swinging by her side, untied, while about twenty feet away swung the boy with his clothes partly torn off and his hands tided with a saddle string. The only marks on either body were that made by the ropes upon the necks. Gently swaying in the wind, the ghastly spectacle was discovered this morning by a negro boy taking his cow to water. Hundreds of people from Okemah and the western part of the county went to view the scene.
The bodies were cut down from the bridge at 11:00 on May 25 by order of the county commissioner, then taken to Okemah. The Nelsons' relatives did not claim the bodies, and they were buried by the county in the Greenleaf cemetery near Okemah. Quoting the Muskogee Scimitar, The Crisis wrote that Laura had had a baby with her: "Just think of it. A woman taken from her suckling babe, and a boy—a child only fourteen years old—dragged through the streets by a howling mob of fiendish devils, the most unnameable crime committed on the helpless woman and then she and her son executed by hanging." According to William Bittle and Gilbert Geis, writing in 1964, Laura had been caring for a baby in jail and had the child with her when she was taken from her cell. They quoted a local woman: "After they had hung them up, those men just walked off and left that baby lying there. One of my neighbors was there, and she picked the baby up and brought it to town, and we took care of it. It's all grown up now and lives here."
Photographs
The scene after the lynching was recorded in a series of photographs by George Henry Farnum, the owner of Okemah's only photography studio. There are four known extant images taken from a boat. Photographs nos. 2894 and 2898 are close-up shots of L. D. and Laura; nos. 2897 and 2899 show the bridge and spectators. In no. 2899, 35 men and six women are on the bridge, along with 17 children, from toddlers to mid-teens. The photographs are marked with the photographer's name: "COPYRIGHT—1911—G. H. FARNUM, OKEMAH, OKLA."
It was common practice to turn lynching photographs into postcards. In May 1908, in an effort to stop the practice, the federal government amended the United States Postal Laws and Regulations to prevent "matter of a character tending to incite arson, murder or assassination" from being sent through the mail. The cards continued to sell, although not openly, and were sent instead in envelopes. Woody Guthrie said he recalled seeing the cards of the Nelsons for sale in Okemah. James Allen bought the photo postcard of Laura Nelson, a 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 inch gelatin silver print, for $75 in a flea market. The back of the card says "unmailable".
Seth Archer wrote in the Southwest Review that lynching photographs were partly intended as a warning, in the Nelson's case to the neighboring all-black Boley—"look what we did here, Negroes beware"— but the practice of sending cards to family and friends outside the area underlined the ritualistic nature of the lynchings. Spectators appearing in lynching photographs showed no obvious shame at being connected to the events, even when they were clearly identifiable. Someone wrote on the back of one card, of the 1915 Will Stanley lynching in Temple, Texas: "This is the Barbecue we had last night My picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe."