Sometimes a community buries a murder so deep that the people who live there forget what really happened, or even that anything happened at all.

Like Leonard Wood’s mutilated body, the facts surrounding his murder are buried so deeply that few people in Letcher County, Kentucky, know the atrocity took place. Even his name is not sure, with some reports calling him Leonard Wood and some calling him Leonard Woods. But Wood’s murder was so outrageous and his subsequent mutilation so horrendous that it made national news in a time when there was no television and precious little radio.


And still a community forgot. But then, Leonard Wood wasn’t that important.

He was only a black man.

With the so-called Jena 6 incident in the news, the imagery of the noose has made a comeback in America. The six black high school students in Jena, La., were arrested for the beating of a white student after nooses were found hanging in a tree on campus that blacks had dared to sit under. Since then, a black professor at Columbia University in New York found a noose hanging on her door. A Brooklyn high school principal received a package in the mail that contained a noose. A statue of rapper Tupac Shakur in Georgia was vandalized and draped with a noose.

The noose is a powerful symbol of racism, but in today’s world the concept of a noose may seem abstract. In Leonard Wood's day, there was nothing abstract about it. A noose was an ever-present threat. More than 4,700 lynchings of blacks have been documented in the United States, a figure that includes mutilations as well as killings. There were 16 deaths by lynching in 1927 alone. Wood was one of the victims, but even though his murder was well documented in newspaper stories and in at least one photograph, people in the very town where Wood's lynching began are often surprised to hear about it.

I had heard for years that there had been a lynching, but when I mentioned it to other people, most had not heard of it.

I had never taken the time to look up the specifics until recently, but an article caught my attention and prompted me to learn more. Benjamin Luntz, a native of the area whose family was historically at odds with the Ku Klux Klan, wrote a long article in a historical society newsletter called The Appalachian Quarterly in March 2004, and included reprints of several newspaper articles of the day. That led me to search for others.

The events that led to Wood’s murder and mutilation began on November 27, 1927, in the coal company town of Jenkins, Ky., five miles from the Virginia state line. In the decades following the murder, rumors developed that Wood had raped and killed a white woman – an unforgivable crime in the segregated South. In reality, Wood's crime had nothing to do with rape, and nothing to do with a white woman.

Wood became a wanted man for the murder of a white mine foreman. Though no one disputes that the foreman was shot, the circumstances surrounding his death probably will never be absolutely determined.

It was a Sunday night, long after dark, and Hershal Deaton was driving from his home in Coeburn, Va., back to his job site in Fleming, Ky. W.M. Townsley and Ernest Jordan were riding in the coupe with him. Townsley and Jordan told police that a black man and two black women stopped the car on the road from Jenkins to Fleming, another coal camp. The three supposedly asked for a ride. According to the two passengers, Deaton refused them, telling them it wasn’t a taxi and there wasn’t enough room for them. When he did, the witnesses claimed, the women jumped onto the running boards and back of the car and refused to get off. Deaton got out of the car to make them get off. Then, the passengers said, one of the women handed a gun to the man with them and he killed Deaton.

No one seemed to question why three African Americans, two of them women, would climb on a car carrying three white men in 1927, but the story seems highly suspect. Whatever the real reason behind the altercation, police bought Deaton’s passengers’ story, as did most members of the community.

The articles suggest nothing other than Wood’s guilt, and an editorial in The Mountain Eagle newspaper following the lynching opines that if the editor had sat on a jury judging Wood, he would have found him guilty. But, the editorial added, “There is no justification for mob law.”

Though Townsley and Jordan gave only a description of the three people, police later that night identified them as Wood, a Jenkins coal miner, and Susan Arminster and Anna May Emory, both of the Slick Rock section of the city.

Jenkins Police arrested Wood and the two women the next day and placed them in the town jail. Jenkins was at the time wholly owned by Consolidation Coal Co. of Cumberland, Md., the largest bituminous coal company in the country. The streets belonged to the company, the homes belonged to the company, the jail belonged to the company, and the police chief belonged to the company. Word soon reached the chief that a mob was gathering to avenge Deaton’s death. Chief Sam Privitt ordered Wood taken to Whitesburg, the county seat, and placed in the Letcher County Jail. The county jail at the time was a two-story stone dungeon with a tower and unglazed windows secured with steel bars. A high wrought-iron fence surrounded it. A mob might still get Wood, but it wouldn’t tear up company property doing it.

Wood and the women arrived safely at the jail, and stayed the night of November 28 under the watchful eye of a deputy jailer. The jailer, who inherited the office when her husband died in a car crash, was out of town to attend her father’s funeral and returned the next day, just in time for the … festivities.

Once again, the story goes, word arrived that a mob was on its way. Sheriff Morgan T. Reynolds later swore under oath that he had been out of town collecting taxes, and only learned of the mob’s plans a short time before it arrived. He testified that he got the jailer and her children out of their residence in the back of the jail and went across the street to his office in the courthouse to get handcuffs, intending to transfer Wood to safety. Reynolds said he was still in the office when a deputy told him it was too late. A crowd was already assembling between the courthouse and the jail. Estimates at the time placed the crowed at 200 to 300 men and women. The sheriff, an elected official who in that day would have campaigned door to door, swore under oath that he didn’t recognize any of them, though few wore masks. He refused them the keys to the jail, but the crowd was undeterred. The Mountain Eagle two days later said Reynolds was “overpowered,” he makes no mention of any physical confrontation in his statement, saying only that he “asked” the crowd to stop and they refused.

For an hour, the mob went at the locks of the jail with bullets, hammers and hack saws before some of the men were finally able to break in. Some accounts say some of the men climbed to the roof and tore a hole in it. Others say they sawed through the bars of a second-story window. However they got in, once inside, they sawed through the bars inside and removed Wood and the two women.

What happened then is also in dispute. Some reports say the women were whipped, some make no mention of it. All accounts say that Wood took full blame for the killing and the mob sent the women back into the jail. Woods was not so lucky. He was dragged about by a set of trace chains wrapped around his neck, then shoved into a car and the procession of vehicles left Whitesburg with a volley of gunfire.

The cars went first to Jenkins, where the men attempted to lynch Wood by tying him between the bumpers of two cars. First reports were that the crowd had taken Police Chief Privitt with them “for protection,” and that when the lynching began, he talked them out of lynching Wood in town. The Coalfield Progress in Norton, Va., reported that Privitt told the mob it would cause problems for the company because it had a large number of black employees. The newspaper later retracted that story after the chief and company officials complained. The second story told how Privitt had bravely stood up to the murderous mob and thought he had saved Wood's life. Apparently it didn’t occur to him that Wood was not out of danger when the mob carted him off to the Virginia state line, just outside of town.

Kentucky and Virginia had built a reviewing stand there to celebrate the opening of the new federal highway barely a week before. The stand was in Virginia, but the steps apparently led up from Kentucky. It was from that stand that the mob erected a makeshift gallows and hanged Wood. A crowd estimated at 500 had gathered for the hanging, and as Wood dangled from the rope many in that crowd stepped back into Kentucky and began shooting at the dying man. An estimated 100 bullets hit him and cut the rope, causing him to fall onto the platform below. Leaders of the mob, then obtained a can of gasoline from a woman in the crowd, doused the body and set it on fire.

A book called Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America includes a photo of Wood’s corpse lying on the platform, surrounded by whites. Though his body does not yet appear mutilated, and there is no sign of blood or burns on the wood reviewing stand, the photo appears to have been taken in daylight. Wood was taken from the jail around 11 p.m., and the crime allegedly occurred during the night. At least 18 people, including what appear to be one woman and one teenage boy, are visible in the photo, the boy hanging over the rail of the reviewing stand to see the corpse. The same photo and a short account of the lynching are included in a Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia By J. Douglas Smith

While most evidence points to the lynching itself occurring in Virginia, the governors of Virginia and Kentucky argued for days over that point. Kentucky officials claimed that the plot was hatched at Deaton’s funeral in Coeburn, Va., on the morning of the lynching and that few Kentuckians were involved. They also claimed the lynching took place in Virginia, and that Virginia should have been responsible for prosecuting members of the mob for murder. Virginia claimed that most of the mob came from Kentucky, and that the lynching occurred on Kentucky soil. Letcher Commonwealth’s Attorney Henry Moore investigated the incident from his office in Whitesburg. Though he claimed to know the probable identities of several of the people involved in the lynching, I could find no record that anyone was ever prosecuted.

A judge in Whitesburg released Susan Armister and Anna May Emory the next Monday after an examining trial. The Mountain Eagle reported on Dec. 8, 1927, that the two testified they had seen Wood kill Deaton, but had not participated in the crime. The judge apparently believed them over Deaton’s passengers' statements that one of the women had given the gun to Wood. Despite that inconsistency, he questioned no other part of the men's stories. What really happened on that gravel road and on the mountain above it two days later will never be known.

Despite the obvious participation by some county residents, the national attention and the subsequent investigation was apparently enough to dampen the spirits of other would-be vigilantes. Though there are reports of a white man being lynched in the same county in 1883 and an unnamed black man in 1901, the Leonard Wood lynching was the last ever reported here.