Mar 30, 2023 - Sale 2631

Sale 2631 - Lot 145

Price Realized: $ 875
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(CIVIL RIGHTS.) A.M. Middlebrooks. All Friends of Human Rights. 2 printed pages, 12 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches, on one folding sheet, illustrated with a small Odd Fellows emblem above the text; partial separations at folds, minor wear; contemporary manuscript notes and embossed "Pine Bluff Lodge No. 1470" Odd Fellows stamp in upper margin. Pine Bluff, AR, October 1898 [1897?]
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Additional Details

The author of this appeal saved two men from certain death by lynching by posting their bond, and asks for help in recouping his loss.

The incident began at a picnic held "by the colored people of Kendall's Mills," a lumber mill south of Pine Bluff, where a white mill foreman "tried to decoy one of the women off into the bushes for immoral designs." This led to a fight, in which the foreman was killed. The white men of the neighborhood arrested thirty men, and lynched one Brother Wyatt in typically horrific fashion. Two men named Strickland and Parker who fled the scene were "rearrested to be brought back to the scene and mobbed." At this point, Aaron M. Middlebrooks of Pine Bluff stepped in to hire an attorney and posted bond for both men, then "told them to escape for their lives. They did so, and both of them are yet alive" (unsurprisingly, the account of the incident in the Daily Arkansas Gazette of 29 August 1897 gives a very different story).

This benevolent act left Middlebrooks out the substantial sum of $546. He was described elsewhere as "a formerly enslaved man who had become a Baptist minister and one of the leading black Republicans in Arkansas" (Byrd, The Black Republic, page 140). Here he appeals to "good men and women of the Negro Race--Masons, Odd Fellows, House Holds of Ruth, the Eastern Star, Pythias--all true friends of the negro to aid a little. Help." He asserts that "I have defended the race all my manhood days. . . . Have mercy and help in this great race conflict and battle for human rights and life."

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas states that William Wyatt was lynched in Cleveland County, AR on 23 August 1897 and Thomas Parker was lynched in the same county on 13 October 1897; this suggests that Middlebrooks' appeal may be misdated and should have read October 1897.

Written in the upper margin over the embossed Odd Fellow seal are the names of two Odd Fellows lodge officers, with their titles: "J.B. Beardon, N.G." (Noble Grand) and "G.M. Dowd, P." (Past Grand?). 4 other surnames are written to the side (Barton, Alexander, Floyd, and Bush). No other examples traced in OCLC or at auction.