The Lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson: A Crime Without Justice
On the night of 24 May 1911, in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, Laura Nelson and her teenage son, L. D. Nelson, were dragged from their jail cells by a white mob. They were taken to a bridge over the North Canadian River, where they were lynched—strung up and left hanging as a warning to the Black community. The next day, a local photographer captured their lifeless bodies suspended over the water, with white onlookers standing below. The image was printed onto postcards and distributed, a chilling example of how lynching was not only tolerated but celebrated in early 20th-century America.
The lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson remains one of the most infamous cases of racial terror in American history. Yet, despite widespread knowledge of the event, no one was ever arrested, much less prosecuted. This was the reality of racial violence in America—a system in which Black lives could be taken with impunity, and murder could be turned into a souvenir.
The Arrest: A Crime, A Killing, and a Mother's Plea
The story began weeks earlier, on 2 May 1911, when Okfuskee County sheriff's deputy George Loney
assembled a posse including himself, Constable Cliff Martin, Claude Littrell, and Oscar Lane, after a steer was taken from Littrell's property in Paden on May 1. Littrell secured a search warrant from A. W. Jenkins, a Justice of the Peace, permitting the men to search the Nelson's farm. They arrived there on May 2 at approximately 9 pm and presented the warrant to Mr Austin Nelson before entering the residence. The steer's remains were discovered in either the barn or house.
Upon entering the Nelsons' home, Loney asked Constable Martin to remove the cap from a muzzle-loading shotgun that was mounted on the wall. The Independent reported that as Martin reached for the firearm, Laura Nelson exclaimed: "Look here, boss, that gun belongs to me!" Martin explained he only intended to unload the weapon.
The Okemah Independent and The Okemah Ledger provided differing accounts of the incident. According to the Independent, which showed more empathy towards the Nelsons, Laura seized another weapon, a Winchester rifle concealed behind a trunk. L. D. also grasped the Winchester, and during their struggle, it discharged. A bullet pierced Constable Martin's pant legs, slightly injuring his thigh, then struck Loney in the hip and entered his abdomen. He walked outside and died shortly thereafter.
As per the Ledger, L. D. seized the Winchester, loaded a shell, and fired. Austin then grabbed the rifle and attempted to shoot Littrell, according to the newspaper. During the subsequent gunfire exchange, Loney sought cover behind a wagon. His injury went unnoticed until he requested water; the newspaper reported Laura's response as: "Let the white ____ [sic] die." Loney apparently succumbed to his injuries within minutes. The Ledger characterised his death as "one of the most cold-blooded murders that has occurred in Okfuskee county".
Austin was arrested by Constable Martin on the evening of the shooting; he arrived with Martin in Okemah at 4 am on Wednesday, May 3. The Okfuskee county jail was in Okemah, a predominantly white town. Laura and L. D., described by the Ledger as "about sixteen years old, rather yellow, ignorant and ragged", were arrested later that day. Sheriff Dunnegan found them at the home of the boy's uncle. According to The Independent, they made no effort to escape and were brought to the county jail on the night train.
Austin admitted the theft of the cow, saying he had had no food for his children. According to his undated charge sheet, witnesses for the state were Littrell, Martin, Lane, and Lawrence Payne.(Lawrence Payne was also the name of the jailer on duty the night the Nelsons were kidnapped from the jail.) Austin's account of what happened tallied with that of the posse, except that he said he was the one, not Laura, who had objected to the shotgun being removed from the wall. He said Laura had been trying to take the rifle away from her son when it was fired.
At a May 6 hearing before Justice Lawrence, Austin was given a $1,500 bond, which he could not afford. After admitting to larceny, he received a three-year prison sentence on May 12. He was transferred to the state prison in McAlester, 59 miles away, on May 16, which the Ledger suggested might have saved his life. On May 10, the same judge charged Laura and L. D. (referred to by the Ledger as Mary and L. W. Nelson) with murder, and they were held without bail in the Okemah county jail. On May 18, the Ledger reported under the headline "Negro Female Prisoner Gets Unruly" that Laura had been "bad" on May 13 when jailer Lawrence Payne brought her dinner. She allegedly attempted to seize his gun as he opened the cell door and, failing that, tried to leap out of a window. Payne "choked the woman loose," according to the newspaper, and returned her to her cell after a struggle. The Ledger noted on May 25 that during the incident, she had "begged to be killed".
A Lynch Mob and a Town That Looked Away
Between 11:30 and midnight on May 24, a group of between a dozen and 40 men arrived at the jail Laura and L.D were being held at. They entered it through the front door of the sheriff's office. Payne, the jailer, said he had left it unlocked to let in a detective from McAlester, who was looking for an escaped prisoner. He said the men had bound, gagged and blindfolded him at gunpoint, taken his keys, and cut the telephone line. He was unable to identify them.
The boy was "stifled and gagged", according to the Ledger, and went quietly; prisoners in adjoining cells reportedly heard nothing. The men went to the women's cells and removed Laura, described by the newspaper as "very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years old, and vicious".
The jailer said that, after struggling for two hours, he escaped and raised the alarm at Moon's restaurant across the road from the jail.
Laura and L. D. were taken to a bridge over the North Canadian River, six miles west and one mile south of Okemah; it was described as on the old Schoolton road and at Yarbrough's crossing. According to the Associated Press and The Crisis, Laura was raped. The Ledger reported that the men gagged her and L. D. with tow sacks and, using rope made of half-inch hemp tied in a hangman's knot and hanged them from the bridge. They were found in the morning hanging 20 ft below the middle span. A local resident, John Earnest, reported the discovery to the sheriff's office. The front page of The Okemah Ledger on May 25, 1911, said the lynching had been "executed with silent precision that makes it appear as a masterpiece of planning":
The woman's arms were swinging by her side, untied, while about twenty feet away swung the boy with his clothes partly torn off and his hands tided with a saddle string. The only marks on either body were that made by the ropes upon the necks. Gently swaying in the wind, the ghastly spectacle was discovered this morning by a negro boy taking his cow to water. Hundreds of people from Okemah and the western part of the county went to view the scene.
The bodies were cut down from the bridge at 11:00 on May 25 by order of the county commissioner, then taken to Okemah. The Nelsons' relatives did not claim the bodies, and they were buried by the county in the Greenleaf cemetery near Okemah. Quoting the Muskogee Scimitar, The Crisis wrote that Laura had had a baby with her: "Just think of it. A woman taken from her suckling babe, and a boy—a child only fourteen years old—dragged through the streets by a howling mob of fiendish devils, the most unnameable crime committed on the helpless woman and then she and her son executed by hanging." According to William Bittle and Gilbert Geis, writing in 1964, Laura had been caring for a baby in jail and had the child with her when she was taken from her cell. They quoted a local woman:
"After they had hung them up, those men just walked off and left that baby lying there. One of my neighbors was there, and she picked the baby up and brought it to town, and we took care of it. It's all grown up now and lives here."
The Postcard: How the Crime Became a Spectacle
The scene after the lynching was recorded in a series of photographs by George Henry Farnum, the owner of Okemah's only photography studio. It was common practice to turn lynching photographs into postcards. In May 1908, in an effort to stop the practice, the federal government amended the United States Postal Laws and Regulations to prevent "matter of a character tending to incite arson, murder or assassination" from being sent through the mail. The cards continued to sell, although not openly, and were sent instead in envelopes. Woody Guthrie said he recalled seeing the cards of the Nelsons for sale in Okemah.
Seth Archer wrote in the Southwest Review that lynching photographs were partly intended as a warning —"look what we did here, Negroes beware"— but the practice of sending cards to family and friends outside the area underlined the ritualistic nature of the lynchings. Spectators appearing in lynching photographs showed no obvious shame at being connected to the events, even when they were clearly identifiable. Someone wrote on the back of one card, of the 1915 Will Stanley lynching in Temple, Texas:
"This is the Barbecue we had last night My picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe."
The Supposed Guthrie Connection
One of the lynchers may have been Charley Guthrie, father of the folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was born 14 months after the lynching. Charley was an Okemah real-estate agent, district court clerk, Democratic politician, Freemason, and owner of the town's first automobile. According to author Joe Klein, he was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. The allegation of his attendance stems from his younger brother, Claude, whom Klein interviewed on tape in 1977 for his book Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980). Klein published that Charley had been part of the lynching mob, but without referring to the interview.
The historian, Seth Archer found the tape in 2005 in the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, and reported Claude's statement in the Southwest Review in 2006. During the interview, Claude Guthrie told Klein:
It was pretty bad back there in them days [...] The niggers was pretty bad over there in Boley, you know [...] Charley and them, they throwed this nigger and his mother in jail, both of them, the boy and the woman. And that night, why they stuck out and hung [laughter], they hung them niggers that killed that sheriff [...] I just kind of laughed [laughter]. I knew darn well that rascal [Charley] was—I knew he was in on it.
Woody Guthrie wrote two songs, unrecorded, about the Nelson's lynching, "Don't Kill My Baby and My Son" and "High Balladree". The songs refer to a woman and two sons hanging. Guthrie recorded another song, "Slipknot", about lynching in Okemah in general. In one manuscript, he added at the end of the song: "Dedicated to the many negro mothers, fathers, and sons alike, that was lynched and hanged under the bridge of the Canadian River, seven miles south of Okemah, Okla., and to the day when such will be no more" (signed Woody G., February 29, 1940, New York).
No Investigation, No Prosecution
Despite the public nature of the lynching, no one was ever arrested for the crime. Governor Lee Cruce of Oklahoma publicly condemned the lynching and called for an investigation, but it was nothing more than empty rhetoric. No serious effort was made to bring the killers to justice.
This was not an anomaly. Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 Black people were lynched in the United States, most in the South but also in places like Oklahoma, where racial violence flourished. The vast majority of these crimes went unpunished, not because the perpetrators were unknown, but because there was no will to prosecute white men for killing Black people.
For the residents of Okemah, the lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson was not something to be hidden or denied. It was, for many, a demonstration of their power—an act of racial control that reinforced white supremacy.
Remembering Laura and L. D. Nelson
The names of lynching victims often faded into history, lost among the thousands who were killed in similar acts of terror. But the Nelsons were not forgotten. Their case became one of the most well-documented lynchings of the era, largely due to the surviving photograph and the work of activists and historians who sought to keep their memory alive.
In 2007, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) began collecting names of lynching victims for their Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Laura and L. D. Nelson’s names are among those inscribed, ensuring that their story is not erased.
In 2015, the town of Okemah finally acknowledged the lynching, albeit in a quiet and reluctant manner. The mayor stated that the town had no plans for an official memorial but acknowledged the incident in response to media inquiries. No apology was issued.
The lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson remains a painful reminder of America’s history of racial violence—a history that is not as distant as some might like to believe. It was a crime that was never punished, carried out in the open, and celebrated by those who committed it. Their story, like so many others, stands as a testament to the brutal realities of racial injustice in America.