The lynching of the Walker family took place near Hickman, Fulton County, Kentucky, on October 3, 1908, at the hands of about fifty masked Night Riders.
The entire family of seven African Americans including parents, infant in arms, and four children were killed, with the event reported by national newspapers.
After two prominent white attorneys related to the land company were kidnapped and one murdered in Lake County, Tennessee governor Malcolm Rice Patterson directed an investigation and ordered in the state militia to suppress the violence.
[2] In the spring of 1908, white yeoman farmers and fishermen in Fulton County, Kentucky, and Lake and Obion counties in neighboring western Tennessee began to organize as Night Riders in opposition to the West Tennessee Land Company, a group of private investors who had acquired most of Reelfoot Lake and announced plans to drain it for cotton cultivation.
For months they hanged, beat and threatened other locals, with violence extending to threats and lynchings of African Americans to drive them out of the area.
The Courier-Journal reported, "There is hardly a doubt but the oldest son of Walker preferred death by burning rather than to placing himself as the mercy of the mob, and it is probable that his charred body will be found among the debris.
[6] According to local newspapers, the Fulton County Night Riders claimed that David Walker had sworn "at a white woman",[7] considered a violation of Jim Crow custom.
He said, "If two or three men had gone to this poor cabin and murdered this family, the crime would have shocked humanity with its revelation of incredible weakness, brutality and dastardly cowardice.
That a larger number—some fifty men—joined in such a crime, multiplies its cowardliness and wickedness fiftyfold, and makes every member of the band guilty of murder in the first degree.
"[9] From 1907 through 1908, other Night Riders had committed increasingly destructive crimes in the Black Patch Tobacco Wars, especially in Kentucky and Tennessee counties to the east of here.
[4] Violence continued in the region, culminating in the kidnapping of two prominent white attorneys and lynching murder of one, Captain Quentin Rankin, a shareholder in the Land Company.