Lynching of Owen Flemming

Background

In the aftermath of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, white officials in Arkansas forcibly conscripted Black citizens — including businessmen, doctors, and preachers — to perform rescue work and strengthen levees, often at gunpoint. According to the Pittsburgh Courier, a national African-American weekly newspaper, Black laborers were coerced to work without food and were frequently not allowed to change into appropriate workwear, while white citizens were excluded from this labor. The Courier reported that some white men "volunteered to go down and help force the Negroes to work with the aid of a shot gun." In Helena, Arkansas, white police officers reportedly entered a Black church during a service and forced the male congregants to work on the levees.

Owen Flemming, about whom little else is documented, was among those forced to labor. Researcher Nancy Snell Griffith, writing in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, noted that contemporary articles variously described Flemming as "a prominent black man." The Courier called him a "well-to-do race man" of Helena, while the Arkansas Gazette quoted officials at the Barton refugee camp describing him as "a bad negro, continually shirking work." Flemming was made to work near Mellwood, Arkansas, an unincorporated community about 35 miles from Helena.

The killing of Roy Waters and the lynching

Accounts of the precipitating events differ. The Courier reported that Flemming, already forced to work on the levee, was ordered by plantation overseer Roy Waters to retrieve mules from a flooded area. Flemming refused and killed Waters. He was then captured but not arrested; the Courier reported that Helena Sheriff J. D. Mays, when called by the plantation owner, responded, "I'm busy. Just go ahead and lynch him." Flemming was reportedly handed over to a mob of about 500 people.

The Arkansas Gazette offered a different account, stating that Waters sent someone to summon Flemming from a boxcar to the work site; when Flemming refused, Waters went to him personally. The Gazette reported that Flemming shot Waters with a shotgun and then twice more with Waters's own pistol, though an alternate version in the same account suggests Flemming wrestled the pistol from Waters and shot him in self-defense. Flemming then fled and hid in a tent before being surrounded by a posse of approximately 500 people and shot. The Helena newspaper reported that Flemming's wife and baby were brought to the scene before the posse fired into his body.

Flemming was killed on June 8, 1927, near Mellwood, Arkansas.