Ellington, Arthur “Yank”

Source:

 African American National Biography

Ellington, Arthur “Yank”

(1914–?),

lynching survivor and litigant, was born in Noxubee County, Mississippi, to parents whose names are unknown. Nothing is known of his early life, but around 1932 he married a woman named Kate, with whom he had two children. They moved a few miles south of Noxubee, to Scooba in Kemper County, where he began working as a farm laborer for Raymond Stuart, a prominent white planter. Ellington's new home county, known since Reconstruction as “Bloody Kemper” because of its reputation for racial violence, had witnessed fourteen lynchings between 1883 and 1930, all of them of African Americans. Indeed, whites in Kemper lynched blacks at twice the rate of other counties in Mississippi, the state with the nation's worst record for lynching.

On 30 March 1934 Ellington nearly became the fifteenth black man lynched in Bloody Kemper, following the discovery of his employer's dead body. Raymond Stuart had died as a result of wounds inflicted the previous evening by someone wielding an axe or similar implement. Although no material evidence linked Ellington to the murder, Kemper County Deputy Sheriff Cliff Dial and a posse of white men came to his home a few hours later, and forcibly took him to the Stuart farmhouse. There twenty or more armed white men confronted Ellington and demanded that he confess to Stuart's murder. When he proclaimed his innocence, insisting that he had been at home in bed with his wife at the time of the alleged murder, Dial led the mob in twice hanging him by a rope to the limb of a tree. When Ellington continued to protest his innocence, his attackers tied him to a tree and whipped him repeatedly before allowing him to return home. Two days later, Dial and another deputy returned to Ellington's home, arrested him, and drove him to a jail in Meridian in nearby Lauderdale County. Ostensibly, this was to protect Ellington from being mobbed again by angry whites in Kemper County, although Stuart had been equally well known in Meridian. Dial's concern for his prisoner's procedural rights and safety did not, however, preclude him from repeatedly whipping Ellington on the journey from Scooba to Meridian, nor from threatening to continue to whip him until he confessed to Stuart's murder. By the end of the journey, which took a circuitous route through Alabama, perhaps to extend the torture, Ellington had confessed.

Ellington's confession on 1 April 1934 led to the arrest of two other black men, Ed Brown, one of Stuart's tenants, and Henry Shields, one of his neighbors. Both of these men were taken to the Meridian jail, where Dial and several prison guards forced them to strip, laid them over chairs, and whipped them across their backs with a buckled leather strap. Again, Dial warned the prisoners that the beatings would continue until they confessed to Stuart's murder in precisely the manner he demanded. When they finally did so, the deputy warned the defendants that they would receive similar punishments if they later retracted their confessions. Despite this threat, all three men retracted their initial confessions at the trial that followed only four days later, on the grounds that they had been forcibly coerced. Far from denying these beatings, several of the officers admitted in court to having assaulted the prisoners, arguing that (in Dial's view) the whipping of Ellington was “not too much for a negro” (cited in Higginbotham, 162). When the prosecuting attorney (and future U.S. Senator) John Stennis asked Ellington whether he was afraid of his jailers, the prisoner, whose neck was still visibly scarred by rope burns, replied, “Yes, sir. I am afraid of all white people” (cited in Cortner, 25). Although each of the defendants presented strong alibis for their whereabouts on the evening of the murder and despite clear evidence that their initial confessions had been coerced, an all-white jury found the three accused black men guilty of murdering Raymond Stuart. On 6 April 1934, exactly a week after Stuart's body had been found, Judge J. I. Sturdivant sentenced Yank Ellington, Ed Brown, and Henry Shields to death. They were to be hanged five weeks later, on 11 May 1934.

Unlike the similar case of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, which became an international cause célèbre in 1931, the fate of Ellington, Brown, and Shields provoked little response outside northeastern Mississippi. The extreme poverty of the three men also made an appeal of their sentence unlikely, but one of their court-appointed attorneys, State Senator John Clark, became convinced during their trial that their original confessions had been extracted through torture. In a move that ended his career in Mississippi politics, Clark appealed the convictions to the state's supreme court on the grounds that such obviously coerced confessions were unreliable and constitutionally invalid. Clark lost the appeal, but persuaded two Mississippi supreme court judges to issue vigorous dissents, thus making possible a fresh appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision in 1936, the nation's highest court overturned the convictions and death sentences as a violation of the defendants' rights to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice Charles Hughes's opinion in Brown v. Mississippi was scathing about the forced confessions and lack of procedural rights given Ellington and the other defendants. The “rack and torture chamber,” Hughes concluded, “may not be substituted for the witness stand” (cited in Higginbotham, 163).

The Supreme Court's ruling prevented the state of Mississippi from carrying out its planned execution of the three men, but it left open the possibility that they could be retried in Kemper County, again by an all-white jury. Fearing that they would again face a death sentence, Brown and Shields accepted a plea bargain negotiated between Stennis and their attorney, Earl Brewer. Brown agreed to serve a further seven and a half years in jail, and Shields a further five years, in addition to the two years they had already served. Believing that there was no evidence whatsoever that might convict Yank Ellington, Brewer advised the youngest of the defendants to reject the plea bargain. Ellington, who may well have understood Mississippi “justice” better than did former governor Brewer, accepted the plea bargain, fearing that he might never leave the jail alive unless he did so. Ellington was finally released in May 1937, as was Shields two years later, and Brown in late 1941. It is uncertain what happened to them after that point, although earlier, Ellington had made his determination to leave the state that had placed such a low value on his rights as a human being quite clear.

For nearly six decades Brown v. Mississippi remained the guiding principle in criminal cases involving coerced confessions, and was central to the broad liberalization of defendants' rights in the American legal system after World War II.

processed xml | source xml