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Truth gets in way of Tribune story
Published March 18, 2007
On July 6, 1920, Irving Arthur, 19, and Herman Arthur, 28, were taken to Lamar County Fairgrounds, lashed to the flagpole, doused with kerosene and burned alive.
Instead of receiving justice, the black men accused of murder were lynched — burned at the stake without a fair trial at which guilt or innocence could be established.
The ugly truth is that the lynching were among several that took place at the fairgrounds and on the plaza in Paris in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some are among the most notorious in the nation. They are ugly stains Paris can never wash away, and rightly so, lest this community forget the horrors to which racism leads.
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