Pokin Around: In 1996, Hillcrest students decided two lynched men deserved a grave marker

Steve Pokin
News-Leader

 

Correction:  The Hazelwood Cemetery is at Glenstone Avenue and Seminole Street. The original version of this story had the wrong location.

 

Jack Hembree called to say there was more to the story.

We reported on Sunday that the Equal Justice Initiative, in Montgomery, Alabama, will include in its new memorial the names of three black men lynched by a drunken mob on the downtown Springfield square in April 1906.

It is a piece of history that haunts this city. Much of the black population of Springfield, fearing for their lives, fled after the hangings. It is an exodus reflected in the small percentage of blacks who live here today.

Carolyn Hembree of Springfield was teaching at Hillcrest High School in 1996 when her students decided that two of the three black men lynched in 1906 on the square deserved a marker on their grave at Hazelwood Cemetery.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, lynching was a form of racial terrorism used by whites to keep blacks under their thumb once they no longer were property.

 Over 4,000 blacks were lynched from 1877 to 1950.  

I ask Jack what more we should say about the lynchings and the Equal Justice Initiative.

In response, he put his wife on the phone.

Carolyn Hembree, now 86, was an English teacher at Hillcrest High School in 1996.

In a classroom discussion about the civil rights movement, she tells me, the subject focused on the lynchings that took place in the heart of the Queen City.

In fact, Hembree invited English Professor Katherine Lederer to speak to her class.  Lederer, who died in 2005, taught at Missouri State University and wrote often about the history of African Americans in Springfield, including her book "Many Thousand Gone."

What Hembree's students did not know at the time — and what I did not know — is that two of the men lynched and burned were buried in an unmarked grave, on a family plot at the Hazelwood Cemetery at Glenstone Avenue and Seminole Street. 

At the time, blacks were buried in a part of the cemetery fenced off from whites.

As best as Hembree knows, the grave was left unmarked for two possible reasons: the prohibitive cost of a marker or possibly because family members did not want the young men's final resting place to be disturbed or vandalized.

Horace Duncan

Horace B. Duncan, 20, the son of Will and Mary Adams Duncan, lived with his parents. The orphaned Fred Coker, 21, lived with his grandfather King Coker, listed by the local newspaper in 1890 as one of the leaders in the black community.

They share a grave by necessity. Not only were they hanged, but their bodies were doused with coal oil and ignited on the square. They fell from the Gottfried Tower, which had a replica Statue of Liberty at its top, and their ashes mingled.

Lederer in 1981 wrote a three-part series about the lynchings for Springfield! magazine.

She wrote: "A wagon with a pine coffin draped in black muslin came from Ely Paxon's funeral parlor. The driver shoveled the ashes of Coker and Duncan into the coffin."

They were murdered about 11:40 p.m. Saturday, April 14 — hours before Easter Sunday.

Neither man was ever charged with a crime. On the Friday before the lynchings, a white couple told police they were attacked by two masked black men and that the woman was raped. 

But Duncan's and Coker's employer, a white man, told police the two men were at work during — and well beyond — the time of the alleged attack. They could not have committed the crime.

They were released but were again placed in the county jail on Saturday when the white man who said he was attacked reported his watch was stolen. 

A drunken mob of up to 1,000 people broke into the county jail and the adjoining house of Sheriff Everett Horner.

Lederer wrote that Horner's wife told reporters the next day: 

"The front door was battered down and a crowd of noisy, drunken men rushed in ... The men smelled of liquor. I did not know any of them at first ... Then, I recognized two friends in the crowd."

City and county law enforcement turned a blind eye.

Lederer wrote that Pastor Paul Douglas of the First Congregational Church would later say: "We might as well have had a jelly fish for a sheriff and a set of rag dolls for police." 

Ninety years after the lynchings, Carolyn Hembree and her Hillcrest students placed a marker above the spot where cemetery records indicated the two men's ashes were buried. It is within the Duncan family burial plot.

“We had a service and a dedication for an in-ground marker," Carolyn Hembree tells me. “The kids organized it. ... It was so meaningful to those kids and to the city.”

Student Rebekah Bough, 17 at the time, spoke at the 1996 memorial service. 

According to a News-Leader story, she said: "After I heard Dr. Lederer's speech in English, I wanted to know if there was something the Key Club could do.

"For whatever circumstances, these two men had not been eulogized properly,'' she said. "Their families couldn't afford it; their graves probably would have been desecrated anyway. ... No one has ever said, `We're sorry it happened.' ''

At the cemetery, the marker and grave of William Allen is nearby.

Allen, 25, was the third black man lynched and burned that night. He died in the early morning of Easter Sunday.

After lynching Duncan and Coker, the mob returned to the county jail with the intent of hanging a black man accused of killing a white man on the Drury campus.

The black man the mob actually sought had escaped earlier, when Coker and Duncan were seized.

But Allen was still trapped because the lock on his cell had jammed. It took the mob two hours to batter the lock open, according to Lederer's reporting.  

I cannot imagine the horror Allen felt during those two hours.

Allen told them he had nothing to do with the alleged murder. It did not matter.

At first, the mob took him to Drury to lynch him there but, instead, they took him back to the square so more people could witness the hanging and burning.

After Allen's death, Lederer wrote: "As the mob dispersed, leaders and souvenir hunters grabbed bones, bits of charred flesh and fragments of clothing from the embers. All through the early morning hours, men and boys continued to hunt souvenirs in the still smoking ashes.  

Katherine Lederer, an MSU English professor who died in 2005, wrote extensively about the history of African Americans in Springfield, and the April 14, 1906 lynching of three black men on the square. She is buried next to two of the men lynched that day and paid for the perpetual care of both graves. The two men are buried together because their bodies were indistinguishable after being burned.

"Enterprising businessmen took pictures catching the still rising smoke and the Easter sightseers. Examination of the original pictures shows clearly that they then inked in two bodies hanging from the bandstand. 

"Other entrepreneurs sold medals; one read "Easter offering." 

"Sunday afternoon, small groups of men formed on the square, broke up, regrouped. There was much talk of burning out the black sections. It was no idle threat. 

"Only five years before in Pierce City, a lynch mob hanged two young black men, shot an elderly man, set fire to all the black houses, incinerating an elderly crippled man who couldn't get out of his house in time, broke into militia headquarters, stole guns and chased every remaining black out of Pierce City."

After the Springfield murders, a grand jury met for five weeks and 18 men were indicted.

But no one was ever convicted, and only one man was ever tried. Daniel Doss Galbraith was charged with murder in the second degree. The result was a hung jury — 10-2 favoring acquittal. He was not re-tried.

The marker for Duncan and Coker lies flat in the ground. I visit on a sunny and warm afternoon with a deep blue sky.

Nearby is Lederer's headstone. She had asked to be buried here — next to Duncan and Coker — and prior to her death, she had provided the funding for her grave and theirs to be cared for in perpetuity.

This grave marker is part of what it means to live in Springfield. This inconvenient piece of history lurks in the racial DNA of the Ozarks. 

I try to reconcile the beauty of this day and the noble people we can be with the unimaginable things we do to one another.

These are the views of News-Leader columnist Steve Pokin, who has been at the paper 5½ years, and over his career has covered everything from courts and cops to features and fitness. He can be reached at 836-1253, spokin@gannett.com, on Twitter @stevepokinNL or by mail at 651 N. Boonville, Springfield, MO 65806.