Tag: blacks

Fleenor Talks

May 21, 1907
Los AngelesIn a jailhouse interview before he was taken to San Quentin, James G. Fleenor, the barefoot burglar, set the record straight on his escapes, his relationship with a white woman and how he began a life of crime.

It had been rumored that Fleenor returned to Los Angeles after escaping from a San Francisco jail because of his relationship with Mrs. B.J. Byres of 1669 Tennessee St. He insisted that he hopped the first freight train leaving the yard and discovered later that it was going to Los Angeles.

Fleenor, who used a real estate business as a front for his burglaries, said that she was one of only three customers who continued paying on her property after he was sent to jail.

Mullen in Bad Plight


May 18, 1907
Los Angeles

William Mullen, a black strikebreaker for the Pioneer Truck Company, was delivering a shipment of lumber when he realized that he had lost some of his load and retraced his route to look for it.

At the Southern Pacific railroad crossing at Alameda and 2nd streets, Mullen noticed some lumber leaning against a shack belonging to a railroad flagman named Caulfield, who was presumably white. Mullen asked Caulfield if there was more of his lumber inside the shack and Caulfield said no.

Mullen challenged Caulfield, knocked him to the ground and began kicking him when Patrick Connelly, a union teamster for the Water Department and also presumably white, intervened, although it