Up from the comments, Susan Klopfer writes about a little known, late 19th century pogrom against African Americans in Mississippi. I believe most Americans are ignorant of or in denial about the prevalence in our history of this kind of organized, mass racial violence. One reason for our country's present impotence in dealing with racial inequalities and violence against people of color is our inability to face the truth about our own past.
The wonderful part about living in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta is hearing the "whispers" of what went on years ago. Mississippi's history, oral but not always written, includes routine reports of brutality and murder.
Early Delta planters were always fearing a race war and in September of 1889, the Governor sent three regiments to Minter City (in Leflore County but close to Money in Tallahatchie County where Emmett Till was kidnapped) to ensure that CFA members were unarmed. Completing their assignment, the state regiments withdrew and allowed a massacre of CFA [Colored Farmers Alliance] members and families to proceed.
There were no reports of blacks being armed or of whites being shot; estimates of African Americans murdered reached as high as one hundred. From his research on the massacre, historian William F. Holmes observed that neither the National Guard, nor the governor and black residents of Leflore County were forthcoming with accounts of the incident. But he discovered several first-hand accounts by travelers who happened to be in the region, including the observations of J. C. Engle, an agent for a New York textile company, who was in and about Greenwood during the trouble:
When he arrived at New Orleans several days later, Engle told reporters that Negroes “were shot down like dogs.” Members of the posse not only killed people in the swamps, he said, but they even invaded homes and murdered “men women and children.” Engle recalled one act in which a sixteen year old white boy “beat out the brains of a little colored girl while a bigger brother with a gun kept the little one’s parents off.” Several sources reported that the posse singled out four well-known leaders of the Colored Farmers Alliance whom they shot to death: Adolph Horton, Scott Morris, Jack Dial and J.M. Dial. “A black undercover reporter sent to the region stated that the truth may never be known because terrified blacks dare not speak of the matter, even to each other.”
The lack of coverage of this massacre by the Mississippi press, and the failure of state and federal officials to lead investigations, left researcher Holmes wondering how many other instances of violence of a “greater and lesser magnitude” happened in Mississippi during this era. (There were many.)
Recently, one young African American who grew up in Minter City in the late 1970s and early 1980s told me he had never heard of the massacre but did report of folk lore from his youth about "dead bodies" in the “Singing River,” who could sometimes be heard at night.
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