Mobs’ Deadly Justice: 19-Year-Old Boy Hanged in Louisiana Lynching

Ruston, Louisiana – In a chilling display of extrajudicial violence, a mob of hundreds descended upon R.C. Williams, a 19-year-old black youth, and hanged him from a tree on October 13, 1938. The brutal act was carried out in the aftermath of a reported murder, in which Williams was accused of killing R.M. Blair, a 30-year-old foreman at the Jonesboro paper mill. Blair and his companion, a Ruston waitress, were beaten as they sat in a parked car on a side road three miles east of Ruston, the evening of October 11.