Criminal Justice in the Age of Segregation: The Arkansas Cases of Robert Bell and Grady Swain, 1927-1935

• Published in: The Arkansas historical quarterly 2022-04, Vol.81 (1), p.19-46
• Main Authors: Kirk, John A., Burrell, Kathleen, Fugate, Brittany, Hendricks, Christy, Thompson, Ellis Eugene, White, Michael, Yancey, Logan H.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; Alexander, Michelle; American history; Capital punishment; Imprisonment; Law enforcement; Murders & murder attempts; Police; Prisons; Robbery; Sheriffs; Syntactic movement
• ISSN: 0004-1823; 2327-1213

The flyers offered a $500 reward for Thomas's capture, dead or alive, with the money put up by Julius's father, William Bunge "Bunn" McCollum.3 This was despite the fact that Sheriff Campbell was visiting Hot Springs at the time of the alleged murder, and he knew about unfolding events mainly through reading reports in the Arkansas Democrat. Michelle Alexander's bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) has examined the links between race and mass incarceration in contemporary America.5 Ava DuVemay's documentary 13TH has unraveled the historical dimensions of the fraught relationship between race, law, and politics.6 Numerous other popular and scholarly works have expanded further upon the many different dimensions of these topics.7 The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to a string of high-profile deaths of people of color at the hands of law enforcement officials has brought an even greater immediacy and urgency to addressing the issues and concerns these works raise.8 The plight of Robert Bell and Grady Swain casts a powerful light on the obstacles that .African Americans have historically faced in obtaining justice in the .American, and especially southern, criminal justice system. The initial hurdle that Bell and Swain had to clear was the extralegal vi- olence of the lynch mob, one that so many others failed to escape.9 Then, while in the hands of law enforcement, the two youths were subjected to whippings to extract confessions from them.10 When Bell and Swain finally had their day in court, they faced a hostile, all-white jury, containing people drawn from the very St. Francis County communities near which their alleged crime had been committed. According to Swain, Sheriff Campbell laid him on a concrete slab outside the jail and whipped him with a leather strap to extract a confession.