Witness Docs from Stitcher

Toward the end of his life, Isador Banks started carrying a shotgun with him wherever he went.

And he often drove around with a couple of his friends who tailed him through town, followed him out to his fields, and generally acted like bodyguards.

Isador seemed to know trouble was coming.

At first we didn't know what to make of this, because in nearly every other story we'd heard, Isador had steered clear of trouble.

People told us he worked hard and kept his head down.

But as we asked around about the gun and the guards, we started hearing other stories of Isador, and in them he was a very different guy.

Here's former Arkansas State Representative Ben McGee.

That was an Italian woman whose husband had died.

And when he died, the wife rented the balance of the family into Isador.

So a lot of the wife farmers that he went to her and told her you can't be doing this, you know, we got what we want to do.

She told them don't come back to her house.

Those farmers wanted the woman's land for themselves, but there's more.

It was the Jim Crow South, and an African-American man working with a white woman, it would have enraged people.

But Isador did it anyway.

Isador was over to her house one evening.

And the two or three of her bunch of white boys were calling them over there and they had to shoot out.

In other words, white guys tried to ambush Isador, but he was armed too.

And Isador was a locksman from World War I in the army.

And he had a couple of guns with him.

So you'd know shot up the trucks and they figured out right quick they could not take you as a door.

Isador blasted the white men's truck with a barrel full of buckshot and sent them scurrying back into town.

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