What The History Of 'Noose Road' Tells Us About Kansas, Race And The Lynchings Of Black Men [View all]

HAYS, Kansas — On the night of Jan. 6, 1869, Luke Barnes, Lee Watkins and James Ponder sat in jail accused of shooting a white railroad worker in this northwest Kansas town.

By sunrise, the three Black men had been dragged from their cell by a mob of white townspeople and hanged from a railroad trestle over the creek that separates the town from Fort Hays, where the men were stationed in the U.S. Army. A Leavenworth newspaper reported that the town “indulged them in a dance in mid-air.”

The Leavenworth Daily Commercial reports on the 1869 lynching of three Black soldiers in Hays.
One hundred and twenty years later — in 1989 — the county commission gave a five-mile stretch of road near that bridge a new name drawn from that ugly history: Noose Road.

“The lynching at the bridge was just one episode in a long story of bad blood,” said historian Jim Leiker, who grew up in Hays and now teaches at Johnson County Community College. “It kind of left a mark on Hays’ early history of race relations that never quite went away.”

The two events — the 1869 lynching and the 1989 naming of Noose Road — represent a small glimpse into an uncomfortable history of racism that lingers today.

Read more: https://www.hppr.org/post/what-history-noose-road-tells-us-about-kansas-race-and-lynchings-black-men