The kind of heat that opens cotton bolls and splits pomegranates hung over Minden, La. (pop. 6,677) in the backwoods 265 miles northwest of New Orleans. Flies buzzed behind drawn curtains. People walked slowly, kept to the shade of the great spreading oaks beneath which Edmund Kirby-Smith's rebel troops had marched in '64. It was a quiet week. There was a little gossip about a Negro named John Johnson, who had been lynched; but nothing the folks in Minden felt was really worth talking about.
John Johnson had been a soldier in Europe, but in Minden the whites had figured he was a "bad nigger"; he got drunk and was uppity. Three weeks ago, a white woman said she saw him and a young Negro named Albert Harris trying to get into her house."She shined a light and they ran away. The sheriff picked them up and took them to the red brick Webster Parish jail. Along about dusk a couple of nights' later he let them go because nobody had filed any charges against them.
There were a couple of cars outside the jail. Afterward the sheriff said "he thought he had heard the nigger yelling something like, 'Don't take me.' " But he didn't pay much attention. Albert Harris turned up the next morning. All he remembered was a voice saying, "You're a good nigger—we aren't going to hurt you much." He'd been hit on the head with a pistol.
But that afternoon four men going down a path to fish for bass in Dorcheat Bayou found John Johnson. Somebody had lashed him good; you could see the marks on him from head to foot. It looked as though they'd just naturally whipped him to death.
It took six days for the story to get out —because, the sheriff said, an investigation was being made. But nobody had seen anything, not a thing. The sheriff and the prosecutor didn't know any more than anybody else. Minden dozed complacently.
It was the South's seventh death by lynching in three weeks.