NOTABLE ARKANSANS
He was born in Rome, Ga. While his WWI Draft Registration records his birth date as July 16, 1895, other sources claim different dates. The same document lists his 1917 residence as Marion (Crittenden County), Ark. After surviving the war in Europe, he returned to Arkansas and got a job with a utility company, erecting support poles and installing lines bringing electricity to communities around Marion.
It was the height of the Jim Crow era, and Arkansas, like the rest of the South, had a seemingly, insurmountable structure of racial stratification. Inflation and unemployment disproportionately burdened the Black community. In the Delta, lynching was one of the main methods used to intimidate Black citizens. It also served to enforce in white people the belief that Black people were inferior and could be treated with contempt or, at best, indifference.
Despite this background of social and racial injustice, he rose to prominence as a respected leader and relatively wealthy landowner. He was reported to have owned more than a thousand acres of land, which he farmed himself or leased to tenants.
Several theories exist as to the exact motive for the events that transpired on that early June day in 1954. Perhaps a group of white men was angered by his refusal to sell his land, or maybe some people were envious of a piece of land he had rented from a white woman. Or, as so often was the spark of riotous behavior in the South, he was perceived to have shown interest in a white woman. Whatever the reason, after his body was found in a remote wooded area — strapped to a tree, mutilated and burned unrecognizably from the knees up, a can of gasoline nearby — no investigation was carried out by local law enforcement. The coroner found no evidence of struggle at the scene, suggesting his 300-pound body had been transported from another location.
Who was this Black Arkansan, whose murder became one of the most notorious cold cases of the civil rights era, unsolved to this day?
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Who was this Black Arkansan, whose murder became one of the most notorious cold cases of the civil rights era, unsolved to this day?
Isadore Banks