Biography
Yank Ellington was one of three Black Mississippi sharecroppers sentenced to death on a tortured confession whose case became the landmark Brown v. Mississippi (1936). Ed Brown, Henry Shields and Yank Ellington were three Mississippi sharecroppers convicted of murder and sentenced to death on confessions extracted by torture and the threat of lynching. In Brown v. Mississippi (1936) the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions, holding that confessions coerced by physical brutality cannot be used — a landmark due-process decision.