Bridge in Mississippi Hosted Decades of Racial Violence

[struggle4progress]

By Seth Ferranti
April 27, 2016

... Jason Morgan Ward: I first ran across newspaper stories about the Hanging Bridge when I was researching my dissertation. I started collecting documents related to the lynchings and the broader history of the community. I wanted to write a different kind of book, both in structure and style. Being in Mississippi certainly helps when you're writing this kind of book, but one of the things that really motivated me to keep going was the discovery that pieces of the story were scattered across the county — it was truly national in reach and impact ...

It's significant, because the history of lynching and racial violence has a complicated relationship with place—bodies are hung from trees that eventually die or are cut down, killing fields and burial sites become thickets and forests, mobs set fire to buildings and bodies. The fact that a steel bridge remains gives us a site that we can connect to a story, and that is somewhat unique ...

In 1918, a mob hanged two black men and two black women from the river bridge. According to white officials, the four had confessed to a murder conspiracy shortly after their white employer turned up dead. Walter White, a blond-haired, blue-eyed black southerner who had recently gone to work for the NAACP, posed as a white traveling salesman and investigated the lynchings personally ...

In 1942, a smaller group of vigilantes lynched two adolescent boys, aged 14 and 15, for allegedly attempting to rape a 15-year-old white girl. The incident prompted the first FBI lynching probe in Mississippi history, several undercover investigations by white and black journalists, and even inspired a eulogy poem by Langston Hughes ...

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/this-bridge-in-mississippi-has-hosted-decades-of-racial-violence

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. Great article ...

{Vice Question in bold}Why have southern whites clung to white supremacy for so long even as the rest of the world moves on?

I don't know if the rest of the world has moved on, but white southerners are used to being scapegoated for the sins of white supremacy, and would rather throw the charge back at their critics than own up to the historical and contemporary reality that race still matters immensely in southern politics and culture.

Great response ... but I would not have limited race mattering to only Southern politics and culture ... that seems an example of the scapegoating that Ward speaks of.

When Victor Bernstein, the Jewish journalist, interviewed the governor of Mississippi after the two boys were lynched in 1942, he asked what would end mob violence—especially when white folks refused to tell on their neighbors and law enforcement failed to prosecute. When the governor replied, "Education," Bernstein wrote, "I wonder what their mothers are thinking now about education as a cure for corpses swinging in the wind."

Wow, Bernstein.

Thank you for posting this, struggle4progress.