While looking for my COFFEE and JAMES families in southern Oklahoma, I read this discouraging word from The Caddo Herald newspaper - October 2, 1914:
It took a Bryan county jury but a short time Saturday afternoon to give Red Scott, the white man charged with living in adultery with a negro woman near Bokchito the extreme limit and returned a verdict in the district court at Durant sending him to the penitentiary for five years.
This case attracted a great deal of notoriety by reason of the fact that the good citizens of Bokchito had become very much incensed over the matter, and had threatened summary punishment to Scott if he did not leave the adultery. According to the testimony of witnesses Scott had been living there off and on for the past 8 years.
It took a Bryan county jury but a short time Saturday afternoon to give Red Scott, the white man charged with living in adultery with a negro woman near Bokchito the extreme limit and returned a verdict in the district court at Durant sending him to the penitentiary for five years.
This case attracted a great deal of notoriety by reason of the fact that the good citizens of Bokchito had become very much incensed over the matter, and had threatened summary punishment to Scott if he did not leave the adultery. According to the testimony of witnesses Scott had been living there off and on for the past 8 years.
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I wonder if the punishment would have been the same had she been Caucasian, and he African-American? Oh wait. A lynching would have occurred long before the couple reached the jailhouse. This area of Oklahoma is known as "Little Dixie" after all.
NOTE TO SELF: Read Oklahoma statutes to determine when "race-mixing" was no longer considered a heinous crime. Considering that "women and children are as chattel" was only just voted out by the Oklahoma Legislature in the late 1980s, it may not have been that long ago.