Lynching of John Harrison
# Lynching of John Harrison

John Henry Harrison (also referred to as Harry Harrison and John Harris) was a 38-year-old African-American man who was lynched in Malvern, Hot Spring County, Arkansas, by masked men on February 2, 1922. According to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary it was the 10th of 61 lynchings in America and 1 of 5 lynchings in the State of Arkansas during 1922.

## Background

According to the 1920 census John Harrison was thirty-eight years old, married, and worked as a laborer in a Malvern lumber mill. In 1917, when he registered for the military draft, he was living at 405 Vine Street in Malvern. In early 1922 he began to show troubling behavior including stalking and threatening women. One of these woman reported his actions to Hot Spring County, Arkansas Sheriff Donald F. Bray who arrested Harrison in February 1922.

## Lynching

Word of his arrest and that he was harassing white women spread and a mob quickly gathered on the evening of February 2, 1922. Sheriff Bray, fearing a lynching, tried to spirit Harrison out of the town by road to Arkadelphia, Arkansas, but found all roads blocked. He then tried to smuggle him out by train hiding him under a seat in the segregated "colored" section of the train around 10:30 PM. Just before the train could leave, a group of around 20 men stopped the train and went from car to car searching for Harrison. He was discovered, dragged a short distance away, and shot at least seventeen times.

## Aftermath

In 1923 John Henry Harrison's sister, Callie Henry, tried to sue Sheriff D. S. Bray, deputies W. T. Gamble and S. H. Leiper, and W. H. Cooper for his death while in their custody as well as alleged leaders of the mob, including Clarence Chamberlain, R. S. Hodges, Leonard Stanley, and Ray Galina, but the courts ruled against her the following year.

## National memorial

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018. Featured among other things is the Memorial Corridor which displays 805 hanging steel rectangles, each representing the counties in the United States where a documented lynching took place and, for each county, the names of those lynched. The memorial hopes that communities, like Hot Spring County, Arkansas where Mr. Norman was lynched, will take these slabs and install them in their own communities.

