Lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson

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 held in the county jail after L. D. was accused of shooting and killing Deputy Sheriff George H. Loney during a search of the Nelson family's farm for a stolen cow on May 2, 1911. Laura was also charged with murder, reportedly because she allegedly grabbed the gun first. Her husband, Austin Nelson, pleaded guilty to larceny in connection with the stolen steer and was sent to the state penitentiary in McAlester, which likely saved his life.

Contemporary newspaper accounts, principally The Independent and The Okemah Ledger, gave differing versions of the shooting. Both agreed that a struggle occurred over a Winchester rifle during the posse's search of the Nelson home, during which Loney was fatally shot. Laura and L. D. were arrested and held without bail in the Okemah jail pending trial.

On the night of May 24, 1911, between roughly a dozen and 40 armed men entered the jail through an unlocked door, bound and blindfolded the jailer, cut the telephone line, and took Laura and L. D. from their cells. According to the Associated Press and a 1911 report in The Crisis, Laura was raped. The two were taken to a bridge over the North Canadian River and hanged. Their bodies were discovered the following morning by a boy taking a cow to water, and crowds of spectators gathered at the scene. According to some accounts, including a report in The Crisis and later interviews cited by historians William Bittle and Gilbert Geis, Laura had an infant with her in jail who was found alive near the scene afterward.

Okemah photographer George Henry Farnum photographed the bodies and the crowd of spectators on the bridge; his images were later reproduced as postcards, a common practice associated with lynchings at the time. Four of Farnum's photographs are known to survive. Three were published and exhibited in 2000 by collector James Allen as part of the exhibition "Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the Collection of James Allen" at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York. The photographs of Laura Nelson are described as the only known surviving photographs of a Black female lynching victim.

A district judge, John Caruthers, convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate the killings, but no participants in the mob were ever identified or charged. Oswald Garrison Villard of the NAACP wrote to Oklahoma Governor Lee Cruce in protest; Cruce called the lynching an "outrage" in his reply but defended the state's laws and juries as adequate.

One of the men reported to have been involved in the mob was Charley Guthrie, an Okemah real-estate agent and father of folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was born in Okemah 14 months after the lynching. The claim originates from Charley's brother, Claude Guthrie, in a 1977 taped interview with biographer Joe Klein; no documentary evidence corroborates it. Woody Guthrie later wrote several songs referencing the lynching of the Nelsons and lynching in Okemah more broadly.