into the house, retrieved a gun, and returned fire, killing John and Will Hodges. With a tip from "Pitt" McGrew (née James McGrew; 1875–1943), Herman and Ervie Arthur were arrested the morning of July 6, 1920, in Valliant, Oklahoma, by McCurtain County Deputy Sheriff Weaver and the City Marshall of Valliant, who brought them to Hugo, and at about noon, placed them in the Choctaw County Jail. At about 1:45 , the captors left with their prisoners for the Lamar County jail in Paris. When they reached the Red River, about fifteen automobiles were waiting at the south bank, but no one attempted to take the prisoners. They reached their destination at 3 . McGrew, who was African American, has been chronicled as notorious and disliked by the African American community. Notice of Herman and Ervie Arthur's impending lynching was openly advertised, to wit: "Niggers caught. Black brutes who killed Hodges will be burned in the fair grounds. Be on Shortly after their arrival, several hundred men approached the jail with a pinch bar and the leaders battered the outer door. The jailer and two guards, all heavily armed, were inside the jail. After some "parlaying," the jailer proposed that if twelve of the mob came forward as a committee, he would surrender the keys. At 7:30 , July 6, 1920, twelve men took Herman and Ervie Arthur from the jail and dragged them out to North Main, to the fairgrounds. At 8:00 , the Arthur brothers were burned alive at the fairground in Paris while a mob of 3,000 watched. According to the NAACP letter, members of the mob dragged the charred remains behind an automobile for hours through the streets of an African-American neighborhood—up West Sherman Street and down 7th Street SW, between Sherman and Washington Streets, past Will Hodges' residence—while screaming, "Here are the barbecued Niggers, all you Niggers come out and see them and take One witness remembered it as a "regular parade of seventeen cars and a truck, all filled with armed men". According to the Dallas Morning News of July 8, 1920, Pine Bluff Street was "the general dividing line between the two Meanwhile, the three sisters—ages 14, 17, and 20—were being held at the Lamar County jail under the pretense of "protection". While the Arthur brothers' remains were being dragged through Paris, the sisters were severely beaten taken to the basement, stripped of