Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer 2003, pp. 147-59.
Abstract
These killings, occurring three years apart in Coffeyville, Kansas, offer bookend images of interracial homicides in the Great Plains. In the first shooting, Charles Vann, a black man and the victim, had been drinking at Walnut and Eleventh Streets in the "tenderloin" district, a black neighborhood in Coffeyville. This region, near the railroad yards, provided entertainment for black customers and occasionally whites in saloons, brothels, and gambling parlors. William Rodecker, a white male horse trader, had just arrived from Missouri and started drinking heavily in this area. About 8 P.M. Rodecker accosted Vann at the corner of Twelfth and Walnut Streets and began to "rag" him. Apparently, Vann took offense and allegedly put his hand on his hip pocket. Rodecker quickly pulled a .38 revolver and fired four shots in quick succession, mortally wounding Vann.1 In the second example, on 5 February 1907 Rodecker, just released from prison, became involved in an argument in the exact same area. Al Jesse (one of Vann's friends) pulled a revolver and shot Rodecker three times.2 Not surprisingly, the killing of Rodecker occurred less than one block from the previous shooting.
These shootings typified violent behavior in Coffeyville at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since many men carried handguns, it is not surprising that violent confrontations often ended in death. Both homicides are especially significant because of the interracial factor. In the first case Rodecker, the white defendant, appeared before a justice of the peace and was quickly released on a five-hundred-dollar bond, and at a preliminary hearing the Montgomery County district attorney charged Rodecker with murder. Months later a jury found him guilty of manslaughter and a judge sentenced Rodecker from one to five years in prison.3 In the second killing, despite the defendant pleading self-defense (both men had drawn their handguns), an all-white jury found Al Jesse guilty of second-degree murder; he received a twenty-year sentence.4 These dramatic shootings provide historians with a window of opportunity to ask the question: how common were black homicides in Coffeyville, Topeka, and other eastern Kansas cities?
MEASURING BLACK VIOLENCE LEVELS
There is considerable literature on the black experience in Kansas. For example, Nell Painter and others have examined the black migration of the "Exodusters" who arrived to make a new life in rural Kansas after the Civil War. However, most of these studies deal with rural agricultural communities such as Nicodemus, Hodgeman, Morton City, and Parsons, which developed when blacks fled the South to escape mob violence, lynching, and discrimination.5 Arriving in large numbers, blacks soon discovered that discrimination also existed in Kansas and Nebraska.
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln