Arthur Lee Vesie was born on May 25, 1901 in Elon College, Alamance County, North Carolina. In July 1920, Vesie and two other men were accused of sexually assaulting Eula Virginia Riddle in Alamance County. The state's governor deployed a national guard unit out of Durham to prevent the lynching of these three men. Mrs. Riddle did not identify any of the three as her attacker. It's not clear what happened to Vesie in the immediate aftermath of the threat on his life. He next appears in the public record in the 1940 census and the draft registration files of World War II. In these, Vesie places his residence as Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.