A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940

1. “Strictly a White Man’s Country,with a White Man’s Civilization: Lynching in Mississippi

13 1 “Strictly a White Man’s Country, with a White Man’s Civilization” Lynching in Mississippi On the afternoon of 26 June 1919, several thousand Mississippians from around Ellisville in Jones County watched eagerly as a mob hanged John Hartfield from a tree near the same spot where Hartfield allegedly had raped a white telegraph operator a week and a half earlier. Although Hartfield had been mortally wounded during an intensive, ten-day manhunt, a mob hanged him and then inflicted further vengeance on his corpse, which was mutilated with gunshots and burned. After the ghoulish spectacle concluded, onlookers retrieved “souvenirs” from Hartfield’s charred remains.1Afterthelynching,astorycirculated among whites that Hartfield had been hanged from the same sycamore tree that Confederate troops had used to execute three insurgents in 1863.2 During the Civil War, Ellisville had been part of the so-called “Free State of Jones,” which had been a bastion of Confederate dissidents . Many whites from this section of Mississippi’s Piney Woods had an ingrained fear of interracial contact and cooperation that was reminiscent of attitudes that had been common during Reconstruction, and some whites deftly utilized the “rhetoric of rape” to suppress both class and racial discord.3 John Hartfield, however, did not fit the stereotypical profile of a menacingrapist .Hartfieldwasamiddle-agedporterwhoworkedatahotelin nearby Laurel. Whites claimed that Hartfield had raped eighteen-yearold Ruth Meeks after the two of them had disembarked from a trolley 14 a deed so accursed in Ellisville on Sunday evening, 15 June 1919. Some African Americans, however,claimedthatMeekswasmucholderthanwhitesacknowledged (in fact, she was in her mid-twenties) and that Hartfield and Meeks had been on intimate terms for years.4 Whatever the truth of the matter, whites conceded that social changes that had coincided with World War I had heightened anxiety about the proper place of African Americans in southern society and had contributed to the lynching. The Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo, for instance, noted that “the attempt of the negro race to seek social and political equality” had increased after African American soldiers had returned from France, where Bilbo claimed that a “certain class of white women” had granted African American soldiers an inappropriate “social reception and familiarity .” Although Bilbo claimed that whites deplored lynching, he insisted that racial tensions had been exacerbated by the opinions of northern African Americans, many of whom viewed intermarriage as “the only solution to the race problem.” Bilbo declared bluntly that Mississippi was “strictly a white man’s country, with a white man’s civilization ” and that the dreams of blacks “to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end.” Lynching would cease, Bilbo claimed, when a “right conception of the proper relation that must exist between the races” was restored and when white and black southerners were “left alone . . . to solve their own problems.” The Jackson Clarion-Ledger affirmed the governor’s observations and claimed that lynching would remain a problem “so long as busy-bodies, who know nothing of conditions south of the Mason and Dixon line attempt to regulate our affairs and preach social equality to the negro.”5 Both Governor Bilbo and the Clarion-Ledger attempted to project blame for racial violence on outsiders who supposedly did not understand southern society. In reality, however, the prospect of equality between white and black Mississippians generated profound anxiety and discord in the local population that often manifested itself in violence and lynching. White Mississippians had not always been so pessimistic about the prospects of race relations in their state. After the Civil War, whites had been eager to develop the fertile soils and abundant natural resources of the state and sought the assistance of African American farmers and Lynching in Mississippi 15 laborers. The rich lands of the Yazoo Delta, for example, could not be utilized for cotton production until a reliable system of levees had been constructed for flood control, a process that took twenty or more years after the end of the Civil War.6 In the latter part of the nineteenth century , newspapers routinely published stories about the mass exodus of African Americans from older regions of the South to parts of Mississippi , such as the Yazoo Delta, which white planters portrayed as a land of opportunity. In March 1890, for instance, stories circulated from New Orleans that Delta planters wanted to attract one hundred thousand African Americans and had “actually given homes to...