Luther Wilson

Luther Wilson was a Scott County man who shot and killed Frank Williams, an executive at the Robbins Brick Yard, in 1905. He later died in prison. Two of his brothers were also implicated in the incident, and one of them served time at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. The Wilson brothers were black, and Williams was white. The incident touched off a racial cleansing in Scott County that forever changed the racial demographics of the community.

See Also: Blood & Clay (Murders in the Heartland)

Biography

Born in January 1887, Luther Wilson was the son of Samuel Wilson and Marla “Mollie” Newton. His parents were married in 1882 in Taylor County, Ky., northeast of Bowling Green. His siblings included Arthur Wilson, Emmitt Wilson, Samuel Wilson Jr., Savannah Wilson, and Henry Wilson.

When the 1900 census was taken, the Wilson family lived in Robbins. Samuel Wilson’s occupation was listed as farmer. Although he and his wife were married in Kentucky in 1882, he appears to have lived in Scott County prior to that, and have been married before that. When the 1880 census was taken, a Samuel Wilson, black, about the same age as Luther Wilson’s father, was living at Robbins or Black Creek with his wife, Mary Wilson. Mary Wilson does not appear in subsequent census records. (Another possibility is that the “Mary Wilson” in the 1880 census was actually Mollie.)

Death of Frank Williams

On Jan. 11, 1905, 18-year-old Luther Wilson and at least two of his brothers — Arthur, age 21, and Emmitt, age 15 — were working at the Robbins Brick Yard. At least two men, one of them being Luther, was terminated from his job by Frank Williams, who was a shipping and receiving clerk and timekeeper for the Southern Clay Manufacturing Company. Newspaper accounts vary; some claimed that additional men were fired.

Reasons for the employees’ termination varied by news report. Some accounts stated that the company simply had too many workers and was cutting back. Others stated that the workers had been warned about picking up the pace on the job and had not done so.

Following the action, a group of eight to 10 men met and, according to news reports, drew lots to see who would shoot Williams. Luther Wilson drew the number. He armed himself with a .38 Winchester rifle, and the group of men approached Williams’ office. Luther Wilson reportedly hesitated, but went inside the office and shot Williams once in the abdomen. Williams died several hours later.

Luther Wilson was tracked down by a deputy sheriff who happened to be inside the company store when the shooting occurred, James Cook. Cook arrested Wilson without incident. Two other men, Arthur Wilson and Jule Henderson, were also arrested.

The death of Williams, who was about 30 at the time, a Roane County native who had worked at the Brick Yard for three years, caused an uproar. A newspaper in Chattanooga predicted that the three suspects would be lynched.

Sheriff William J. West was able to get the three suspects to Huntsville, where he hid them in a farm house rather than placing them inside the county jail, to escape the mob that was forming. The next day, a preliminary hearing was held at the county courthouse, and the suspects were bound over for trial.

Two days later, Sheriff West was back in Robbins when he learned that a lynch mob intended to break the men out of jail and hang them. The mob included friends of Williams from Roane County who had boarded a train for Robbins. West walked the nine miles to Huntsville, where he took the suspects from jail and prepared to take them to a train depot at Pioneer. Before he left, he spread several rumors about his intentions to throw the mob off. When the group left the jail, the mob was reportedly four miles from Huntsville.

Staying in the woods and off the beaten path, the group hiked through the night to the railroad depot at Pioneer, with West later telling reporters that the suspects had begged and pleaded for their lives throughout the 18-mile trek. After boarding the train, they were transported to Knoxville, Tenn. and imprisoned at the Knox County Jail for safekeeping.

The three men were later found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Aftermath

Luther Wilson died of pneumonia at a state penitentiary in Nashville on June 11, 1909. His death certificate listed his age as 23. He was actually 19. He was buried in LaFollette, Tenn.

Although Sheriff West had managed to save Wilson and the other two suspects from the mob, the death of Williams charged racial relations in Scott County. The Chattanooga Daily Times quoted a merchant from Chattanooga who returned to the city after spending a day in Robbins as saying that “wholesale lynchings” were being threatened toward black residents. The historian Esther Sharp Sanderson would write many years later in her book, “County Scott and Its Mountain Folk,” that black residents of Scott County were given two weeks to settle their affairs and move out of the county. Signs were later placed on Highway 27 at the county lines north (TN-KY border) and south (Morgan County line) saying, “N****er, don’t let the sun set on your head,” she wrote.

Census records show that Sanderson’s account was likely true. The number of black residents in Scott County numbered 337 in 1900. By 1910, that number had dropped to 77. By 1920, only seven black residents remained in Scott County. They never returned.

Some who stayed faced violence. In 1912, three 17-year-old black boys who were walking the railroad tracks in Robbins were shot and killed, according to news reports. Years later, a black man working at the Pearson Hardwood Flooring mill in Oneida was forced to move his family out of the county after a masked mob threatened to dynamite his home.

The Wilson family was among those driven out. By the time the 1910 census was taken, Samuel Wilson and his wife were living in Campbell County, where he was working in the coke ovens. Emmitt lived with them, as did Samuel Jr., or Sammie, along with Savanah and Henry. Luther had died in state prison by that time, and Arthur was imprisoned at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tenn.

A daughter who did not appear in the 1900 census, Lillie, age 25, also lived in the home, along with her children, Bridget and Bruce, ages seven and five. Their last names were listed as Henderson. This likely indicates that Jule Henderson, who was convicted in the plot to murder Williams, was married to Lillie and was a brother-in-law of Luther and Arthur Wilson. (In fact, when Bruce Henderson later died, his death certificate listed his father’s name as Julie Henderson.)

Records indicate a black inmate named Henderson at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary with Arthur Wilson in 1910. If that was Jule Henderson, he was originally from Georgia.

Lillie Wilson Henderson married Ulysses Brown in Campbell County in June 1913 and they moved to West Virginia, where he worked in the coal mines.