Rights, Roberts was visiting relatives when he was killed. No one was tried for the murder.
Willie Pittman, a taxi driver, was found slain and mutilated on May 28, 1947 on a country road near Rocky Mount, North Carolina. His legs and arms had been cut off, his body split open, and his head smashed.
Hosea Carter, of Sandy Hook, Mississippi, was found dead on May 2, 1948 of a shotgun blast in the chest. Deputy Sheriff T. W. White said Carter had been killed by a white man “whose name I don’t remember.” He added, however, that the murderer had done “what any decent white man would have done,” because the white man had found Carter trying to enter a home.
Mrs. May Noyes, 22-year-old pregnant mother of three children was shot and killed on May 4, 1947 by a white man, Albert Huey, at Camp Hill, Alabama. Huey was running amuck shooting up the Negro community after an argument with a Negro war veteran, when he accosted Mrs. Noyes and shot her in the hip. She slumped to the street. Huey kicked her, shouting “Get up!” She staggered to her feet and started to run but Huey shot her in the back. She crawled on to the porch of a white woman, Mrs. Enory Reeves, where she died. Huey was released on $1000 bail and no charges were ever placed against him.
Charles Smith was slain by Marvin Matthews and Wyatt Adams on November 23, 1947 while they were terrorizing the Negro community at Lillington, North Carolina. At the same time they shot and wounded Daniel Lee Brasford and attacked four other Negroes. A Harnett County jury freed the men after deliberating twenty-seven minutes.
Wesley Thomas, 51, a Negro woodchopper, was shot in the back and killed by W. D. Thompson, 21-year-old white, on June 30, in Louisiana. Thomas had engaged in an argument that morning with a white farmer from whom he was asking back pay for work performed. A posse was looking for him when Thompson found him and shot him as he was running towards his house. “He tried to run into the house and I let him have it,” Thompson said—and was exonerated on the grounds that there were weapons in the house towards which Thomas was running.
Elmore Bolling 30, was shot and killed in December, 1947, in Lowndesboro, Alabama. Clark Luckie, a white man who claimed that the Negro had insulted his wife over the telephone, was arrested for the murder but was later released.
Calib Hill, prisoner in the Irwinton, Georgia jail, was taken from his cell on May 30, 1949 by two white men, according to Sheriff George Hatcher, who said they picked up the jail door keys from his desk. Hill was beaten, then shot to death. His body was found three miles from town.
Dr. M. A. Santa Cruz, prominent Negro dentist of Pulaski, Virginia, was beaten to death on February 6, 1951 by two white hoodlums who
