Murders Around Mississippi

"Nineteen fifty-six was Edward Duckworth, shot to death by a white man who claimed self-defense. It was Milton Russell burned to death in his home in Bloody Belzoni, no one arrested.

"Nineteen fifty-seven was Charles Brown, shot to death by a white man near Yazoo City. Nineteen fifty-eight was George Love, killed by a twenty-five man posse. No arrests.

"It was Woodrow Wilson Daniels, who died of a brain injury nine days after a beating by a white sheriff; the sheriff tried and acquitted of manslaughter.

"Nineteen fifty-nine was Jonas Causey, killed in Clarksdale, with fifteen policemen accused of the crime. No arrests.

"It was William Roy Prather, fifteen years old, killed in what whites called a ‘Halloween prank.’" (Myrlie Evers, with William Peters, “For Us, The Living,” (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 24-25.)

There were so many others senselessly killed around Mississippi – most already forgotten. Twenty-three-year-old Mack Charles Parker, a black truck driver from Lumberton, was accused of raping a white woman (his long time girlfriend). Witnesses had seen the couple together in the past, but on April 25, 1959, Parker was taken and dragged by a lynch mob from the jail in the rural logging town of Poplarville and shot to death on a river bridge north of Bogalusa, Louisiana three days before his scheduled trial date.

Believed to be in the lynch mob were a former deputy, a Baptist preacher, and the jailer. The local prosecutor refused to press charges and no one was ever indicted. An FBI investigation took place only because “moderate” Governor J. P. Coleman called for it, after Parker’s body washed ashore several weeks later.

An excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited"Publish Date: June 28