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This episode contains disturbing descriptions of violence and racism. Please take care while listening.

On a bright June morning in 1954, James Allen was at work in the Cretan-Den Memorial Park, mowing, weeding, digging among the graves of a sprawling cemetery just outside the center of Marion.

He was beautiful day. Beautiful day in that well, but he was just joking. I don't know if it was attractive. He was distant out there.

There were birds in the trees, trains in the distance, the sweet scent of fresh cut grass. James didn't see that then column of black smoke rising up from the woods across the road.

But when he heard the cars, he looked up. There were several of them coming fast down the road and one belonged to the county sheriff.

I saw my full car on that Monday. I knew he was a sheriff because at that time they had that long air on the back waving.

The sheriff's radio antenna, waving in the air as he rattled down the road and turned into the woods toward that line of black smoke and whatever had been burned beneath it.

James turned to his boss to ask what was going on. He said they found little banks back there. They had tied and burnt.

Eesador banks had been missing for two days and in that brief time rumors sprang up about where he'd gone and what had happened to him.

Some people thought he'd gone to Memphis or Mississippi. Some heard stories about a man screaming in the night. Some had even gone looking for him out among the fields.

But on that Monday morning, all the possibilities collapsed into one terrible fact. Eesador banks had been lynched, chained to a tree and burned almost beyond recognition.

Nobody speculated about who may have done it.

News of the lynching spread quickly through Marion and in the African American community was followed by an awful silence.

You had to keep your mouth shut because you were living in a white man's house. He was going to kick you out if you started talking about it.

A lot of them went on and said to him but they had to run old.

James told us that some people did talk about Eesador but if white people heard about it, they'd start getting threats and some people were run out of town.

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