Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century by Jason Morgan Ward (review)

Over the course of the twentieth century, the bridge that spans the Chickasawhay River in Clarke County, Mississippi, was the site of terrible violence. In December 1918 two pairs of siblings—Major and Andrew Clark, and Maggie and Alma Howze—were lynched on the bridge for allegedly conspiring to murder their employer. Later, in October 1942, white vigilantes in Shubuta lynched two teenaged black boys, Ernest Green and Charlie Lang, hanging them from the same bridge because they had the misfortune of being spotted in the company of a white girl. By 1966, as civil rights groups campaigned in Mississippi, the so-called Hanging Bridge had become a visible warning to those who would dare to challenge the racial status quo.

In his book Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century, Jason Morgan Ward offers a masterful and multilayered exploration of lynching through the lens of place and memory to powerful effect. Like many trees, riverbanks, and courthouse squares throughout the South, Shubuta's bridge, as a site of horrendous violence, became an enduring symbol of white supremacy. As Sherrilyn A. Ifill has written, "public spaces were used to enforce the message of white supremacy, often violently. Lynching, particularly in the twentieth century, was most often an explicitly public act" (On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century [Boston, 2007], 16).

Ward, following the methodology of Mary L. Dudziak and Carol Anderson, recasts these atrocious incidents and the responses to them through a prism of national and international politics, building out concentric circles of impact from the local to the national to the international. "In 1918, and again in 1942," Ward notes, "the UnitedStatesembarkedonglobal crusades to secure freedom and democracy while denying those privileges to millions back home" (p. 15). During both World War I and World War II, civil rights groups and the black press took advantage of the breach between American rhetoric and reality to advance the cause of black equality. Instances of lynching were very powerful weapons on that front. Ward assiduously details the circumstances of these two lynching incidents, skillfully balancing newspaper articles and editorials from white-owned and black-owned publications, archival records, and personal accounts from African Americans, reconstructing the varying interpretations of the events held by black and white communities.

In the book's third part, "1966," Ward meanders from the site of the Hanging Bridge that served as the geographic anchor of the first two parts. By that year, the civil rights movement had come to Mississippi, with the Congress of Racial Equality establishing its base of operations in Meridian, just one county over from Shubuta. Ward profiles local black leaders like Rev. Jesse Charles Killingsworth and John Otis Sumrall, who, through their activism, made sure that the civil rights movement did not bypass Shubuta. As in many communities throughout the South, they employed the tactics of marching, sit-ins, and boycotts; however, one of the more intriguing facets of the struggle in Shubuta involved the fight over Head Start. Through the Child Development Group of Mississippi, women like Jimana Sumrall, Mamie Jones, Allie Jones, and Garlee Johnson led what Ward describes as a "quiet revolution," using federal funds to care for impoverished youth, to support struggling parents, and to empower the community by allowing them the ability to shape and administer programs for their own benefit—activities that had been unavailable to them during the height of the Jim Crow era (p. 192). The program's efficacy, however, was ultimately eroded by the white leaders who maintained political control in the new Jim Crow system erected in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution. In this new era, Ward argues, poverty continued to be a form of violence that whites employed to contain and control African Americans and their political aspirations.

A skilled storyteller, Ward has...