CHICKASHA — A resolution commemorating a lynching that occurred in Chickasha 93 years ago was to be considered Monday night by the City Council.
“You should never forget your history,” said Ward 3 Councilman Dr. R.P. Ashanti-Alexander, a Chickasha native who was inducted into the Oklahoma African American Educators Hall of Fame in 2021.
Mayor Chris Mosley concurred. “We need to remember all of our history, good and bad,” he said.
On May 31, 1930, a mob that reportedly numbered more than 1,000 white men and boys as young as 12 stormed the Grady County Jail in Chickasha, intent on killing a 19-year-old Black man named Henry Argo who was accused of assaulting a white woman.
The white mob used sledgehammers and battering rams in attempting to break into the jail. The National Guard was deployed to protect Argo but failed in their mission.
The mob broke through and someone shot Argo in the head; he survived the initial assault but was kept in the jail. After order was restored, visitors were allowed into the jail again – and Argo was fatally stabbed, allegedly by the leader of the mob.
The assailant was arrested but released soon afterward and no one was ever charged with the murder.
The lynching was “a tragic event,” Ashanti-Alexander said. “We need to acknowledge it and bring it out in the open to help guide us in race relations in the future.”
During that era, race alone made African Americans vulnerable to indiscriminate suspicion and false accusation after a reported crime, even when there was no evidence linking them to the alleged offense.
Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” Any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly; the mere accusation of sexual impropriety by a Black man with a white woman regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in murder – such as the savage beating and lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago, for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955.
Accusations against Blacks were rarely subject to scrutiny – and Henry Argo’s case was no exception. The Equal Justice Initiative claimed the Chickasha murder was one of at least 75 documented racial terror lynchings which occurred in Oklahoma.
While Henry Argo’s murder is a blight on Chickasha’s history, Ashanti-Alexander told Southwest Ledger that Chickasha was a city ahead of its time in youth sports.
“Dr. A” recalled that when he was a boy, Chickasha had an integrated Little League in which Black and white youngsters played on the same teams and had Black and white coaches. “And this was long before Lawton, Oklahoma City or Tulsa teams were integrated,” he added.
Although the City of Chickasha intends to publicly acknowledge the shameful episode in its past, it is doubtful that the Argo lynching – nor the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, nor the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that uprooted the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Muscogee (Creek) tribes from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States and relocated them via the notorious “Trail of Tears” to newly designated “Indian Country” in Oklahoma – will be taught to students in this state.
Two years ago the Legislature passed and Governor Kevin Stitt signed House Bill 1775, which decrees that schools in Oklahoma are forbidden from teaching lessons about race that may cause students to experience “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress…”