By: Rene Childress

This next episode is from a family story passed down through generations in my family. Part of my family tree has roots that stretch back to a small “Cotton Town '' in Arkansas called of all things Cotton Plant, Arkansas.

This is one of the many stories that our elders would speak about in hushed tones.  Our story does not begin or end in the town of Cotton Plant which has its own terrible stories. It begins about two hundred miles west of my family ancestral seat.

It takes place along a sediment filled bottomland outcropping that the Arkansas river left behind as it changed course. This became good fertile farmland. It also had another distinction that would eventually cause its residents to become fodder for the never ending racial violence that has plagued African-Americans even to this day. 

Starting from before the end of slavery it is an area that is almost exclusively African-American. After Emancipation the former slaves began their new lives in this area as property owners and farmers. They became shopkeepers and tradesmen. They cared for and raised their families. They wed their lovers. They baptized their children.They buried their loved ones.  They lived their lives. This all would meet a cataclysmic destiny with the evil proclivities of white American racism.

It is December 1923. Three days after Christmas. A tornado of racial animus descends upon this little community of forty or so black  families that disrupts their lives for generations. 

A twenty five year old white woman named Effie Latimer is found shot in the back with a shotgun. She has reportedly also been outraged by several men (Outraged is the euphemism used in polite southern Christian terms to describe the act of rape). She was discovered by one of her fellow neighbors fighting against the grip of death's embrace. 

Shortly before her slipping into this embrace it is reported that she awoke long enough to name one of her attackers. She names a local black man from the black settlement around Catcher. This gentleman’s  name was William Betts (aka “Son”). 

He is apprehended forthwith by the local authorities. As the case progresses two more arrests occur.  These arrests include a man named Charles Spurgeon Rucks and a thirteen year old named John Henry Clay. 

While these persons are in custody Mr Rucks was taken into the woods to be interrogated  by a deputy sheriff named W.A. Bushmaier. They return from this little foray in the woods with the Deputy Sheriff claiming that Rucks had confessed in his presence to the crime. We don’t know what transpired in the woods. 

What truth could be found in the isolation of the woods. God only knows.  But you can bet there were some torture or other nefarious  goings on that occurred.

The fever of the lynch rope is always just under the surface awaiting a chance to rear its ugly illegal head. All it needed was the germ of the suspicion of a black man violating a white woman. The conditions were perfect for a pogrom. 

Mobs began to swell looking for vengeance. They rampaged through the streets of Catcher demanding that the “Niggers” be turned over. To the lynch mob’s dismay the men had been transferred to a more secure location. 

One had been transferred to the lock-up in Fort Smith which had a more secure facility. The other two were shipped to Little Rock for safekeeping. This riled the mob to no end. Their thirst for vengeance could not be quenched at either jail lockup. So they turned their ire on the rest of the black populace of Catcher.

The date of December 30th 1923 marks the beginning crescendo of unspeakable attacks on any black person that white mobs came upon. They burned homes. They destroyed the markers in a black graveyard. They ransacked black businesses. 

We may never know the number of victims that were murdered. Rumors abound that many people were slaughtered and thrown into the rapid flowing Arkansas River. The 65 year old father of Mr. Rucker was executed by” Special Deputy Sheriff” Frederick Creekmore (deputized to control the mob violence) . Circumstances of the killing were never investigated. 

The African-American community of Catcher ran for their lives. The legal officials were in league with the terrorists. No one was coming to help. 

Leaving was the only option to save their families. One group of eleven men decided to gather at one homestead armed against the mobs. Being confronted with this armed resistance, the mob let the Governor, Thomas  McRae and the Arkansas National Guard displace and arrest the defendants. 

The people that were trying to protect themselves were eventually charged and convicted of “Night Riding” a 1909 law meant to curtail lynching and the Ku Klux Klan. (How Rich)

The way this story ends is no one is ever convicted for the murders, property destruction,beatings and terrorizing that forces these people from their homes. The Van Buren Press-Argus reported that the pogrom induced march out of Catcher “continued until that settlement was strictly a white settlement”. 

The eleven so-called Night Riders were eventually freed by the Arkansas State Supreme Court after a year in prison. Upon their release,they were greeted by a decimated community. While they were incarcerated the entire community had been forced off their land by white hooligans backed up by both the state and local law enforcement. 

To this day the state of Arkansas has not seen fit to forthrightly  address the theft of these people’s property and livelihoods. Again as in similar stories we have been visiting white property owners seemed to increase their holdings as black people were forced to flee.  There never has been a single attempt to make these families whole. 

African-Americans playing by the rules were once again victimized by the ugly proclivities of some of our white citizens. It is up to us who believe in the American Dream to keep these stories ever present so that we can truly say “Never Again”