Born July 15, 1895 Isadore Banks joined the Army at 22-years-old in the last few months of World War I, it isn’t clear if he was deployed overseas. Banks was given an honorable discharge on August 2, 1919. After coming home from the Army in the 1920s according to CNN, he helped bring electricity to Marion, Arkansas. Banks would later become one of the wealthiest Black landowners in Arkansas. At one time he owned as much as 1,000 acres, according to newspaper accounts.

On June 5, 1954 African-American landowner, Isadore Banks, vanished from Crittenden County in Arkansas. Then days later his body was found mutilated and burned in a small wooded area on his property. Banks’ wife was the last person to see him on June, 4, 1954 when he left home with the intentions to go pay his farmhands. On June 8, Banks’ truck was discovered in a wooded area on his property inside of the truck was his loaded shotgun and his coat. Authorities later found his body tied to a tree, drenched with fuel, mutilated, and burned beyond recognition.

The coroner, T. H. McGough, found no sign of robbery or struggle at the scene, saying that the killing may have occurred elsewhere; the 300-pound body of Banks was likely carried by several people to the site. The coroner also reported that either a knife or firearm discharge left a hole in Banks’ right side. Banks’ murder, one of Arkansas’ most notorious cold cases of the civil rights era. No one was ever charged for the murder of Banks. There are three theories that locals have said since Banks’ killing on why people went after him in 1954 CNN reported:

– He had beaten up a white man who had courted his oldest daughter, Muriel.

– White men had made several offers on his land, but he refused to sell.

– Banks was involved with a white woman who rented her land to him, and white people were upset.

“Until we know who the culprits were who took dad’s life and until we know what happened to our land, it can never be a complete closure,” Jim Banks, Banks son, told CNN in 2010.

Sources:

http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/isadore-banks/

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