Bethea, Rainey

Source:

 African American National Biography

Bethea, Rainey

(16 Oct. 1913?–14 Aug. 1936),

the last person publicly executed in the United States, was born Joseph Rainey Bethea in Roanoke, Virginia, to Rainey Bethea and Ella Louise Huggins. Most press reports of his execution state that Bethea Jr. was twenty‐two at the time of his arrest, though he also claimed at times that he had been born in 1909. Since Bethea Jr.'s father would have been only fifteen years old in 1909, it appears more likely that the 1913 date is correct. The younger Bethea hardly knew his parents. He was still a child when his mother died in 1919 and barely a teenager when his father died seven years later in 1926, leaving Bethea, his sister Ora, and his brother as orphans. Around that time the siblings separated. While his brother remained in Virginia and his sister moved to Nichols, South Carolina, Bethea traveled west to Owensboro, Kentucky.

In 1933 Bethea began doing odd jobs for a white family, in whose basement he lived for a couple of years. Barely literate and with only three years of schooling, he took work where he could find it, but in rural Kentucky at the depth of the Great Depression there were few such opportunities for young black men like Bethea. He turned to a life of petty crime and began drinking heavily. He was fined twenty dollars for breach of the peace in Owensboro in early 1935, and he was indicted on May 31 of that year for stealing two purses at a beauty shop. Upon pleading guilty he was sentenced to one year at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville, but he was released on parole on 1 December 1935 after serving the minimum sentence of six months. Upon his return to Owensboro he found work as a laborer and odd‐job man for his landlady, earning seven dollars a week and free room and board. Within a month of his release from prison, however, he was arrested again for housebreaking and public drunkenness. Unable to pay a one‐hundred‐dollar fine, Bethea remained in the Daviess County jail in Owensboro from January to 18 April 1936, when he was released. Since he had broken the terms of his parole, the county authorities ought to have returned him to the Kentucky State Penitentiary, but they failed to do so.

That administrative error proved costly both for Bethea and for Mrs. Lischia Edwards, a white, seventy‐year‐old widow whose Owensboro home a shoeless and drunken Bethea burgled on 7 June 1936. Having once worked for and boarded near Mrs. Edwards, he knew the basic layout of the home. Although the precise sequence of events is unclear, Bethea was arrested several days later and confessed in custody to having raped and assaulted Mrs. Edwards, who had subsequently died from the assault. Bethea, who frustrated his white, court‐appointed lawyers by giving them conflicting accounts, later retracted that confession, but then entered a guilty plea at his trial. Despite that admission, the judge allowed the prosecution to make its case. An all‐white jury found Bethea guilty after deliberating for only five minutes.

Condemned to hang on 31 July 1936, Bethea once again claimed his innocence and hired new counsel, five black lawyers from Louisville including Charles W. Anderson Jr. Bethea's new attorneys made several procedural appeals concerning their client's lack of access to counsel, and compared his plight to that of the Scottsboro Boys, whose inadequate court‐appointed counsel the U.S. Supreme Court had condemned in Powell v. Alabama (1932). Although Bethea's lawyers won him a temporary stay of execution, the courts swiftly rejected all of his appeals. Kentucky governor Albert B. “Happy” Chandler signed Bethea's death warrant on 6 August 1936, the same day he ordered the execution of John (Pete) Montjoy. Bethea's public hanging was set for the Daviess County courthouse on 14 August 1936.

Several factors resulted in the Bethea case becoming a national cause célèbre. Among these was the issue of interracial sex and the apparent rape of a popular and well‐respected white woman by a black male drifter in a small southern town. Indeed, the mood in the wake of Bethea's arrest was such that many in the town expected him to be lynched. Another was that Owensboro had not seen a public hanging for more than eighty years and that Kentucky was now the last state in the Union to perform public executions. Such executions were reserved solely for crimes involving rape, because state lawmakers deemed the electric chair too humane for rapists. In a pattern common throughout the South at that time, Kentuckians condemned to death for rape were invariably African American and their victims white. The atmosphere at several contemporaneous public hangings had resembled the carnival of the Sam Hose and other public lynchings, during which predominantly white crowds sought a combination of vengeance and souvenir items. To this already combustible mix was added the requirement that the local sheriff perform the execution; Owensboro's sheriff was a white woman, a factor that assured the case newspaper coverage throughout the nation. On the eve of the execution, however, the sheriff deputized a man to perform the task.

By then, accounts of the “hangman in skirts” in respectable newspapers like the New York Times and Louisville Courier‐Journal, as well as in the sensationalist “yellow press,” had swelled the crowd at Bethea's hanging to between ten and twenty thousand people. Some of the spectators arrived at the gallows on horseback; most walked, came by car, truck, or train; a few arrived for pre‐execution hanging parties and barbecues by airplane. They came from Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, but also as far away as Florida and the North. Newspaper accounts of the execution differ. The New York Times and other out‐of‐town newspapers reported that an angry white crowd jeered as a Roman Catholic priest read Bethea his last rites and that following the hanging the mob stormed the gallows, tearing Bethea's clothes and even the hangman's hood for souvenirs. Local newspapers disputed those accounts, claiming the crowd had observed the execution in respectful silence, and that the national press, denied the spectacle of a “hangman in skirts,” decided to condemn a savage redneck mob instead. Whatever the precise sequence of events, the controversy surrounding the hanging of Rainey Bethea persuaded Kentucky to join the rest of the country in abolishing public executions.

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