MSNBCW The Rachel Maddow Show July 25, 2014
Her name was Florence Schumaker Thompson. She was asked if she would fill in and become the sheriff in her husbands absence. She said yes. She was sworn in in davis county the day after her husbands funeral. And as unusual as it was at the time, in the 1930s, to have a woman sheriff in the United States, the reason Florence Schumaker Thompson became nationally famous as a local county sheriff in kentucky at the time is because while she was sheriff of that county, she had to carry out a hanging. Just a few weeks after she was sworn in, an africanamerican man named rainy bathea was sentenced to...