Based on previously unreleased F.B.I. and Justice Department documents, extensive interviews with many of the surviving principals involved in the case, and a variety of newspaper accounts, Smead meticulously reconstructs the full story of one of the last lynchings in America, detailing a grim, dramatic, but nearly forgotten episode from the Civil Rights era. In 1959, a white mob in Poplarville, Mississippi abducted a young black man named Mack Charles Parker-recently charged with the rape of a white woman-from his jail cell, beat him, carried him across state lines, finally shot him, and left his body in the Pearl River. A massive F.B.I. investigation ensued, and two grand juries met to investigate the lynching, yet no arrests were ever made. Smead presents a vivid picture of a small Southern town gripped by racism and distrust of federal authority, and describes the travesty of justice that followed in the wake of the lynching. Ultimately revealing more than an account of a single lynching, he offers what he calls "a glimpse at the tidal forces at work in the South on the eve of the civil rights revolution."
Author(s): Howard Smead
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 1988
Epilogue
Introduction ix
1. "Just Joe-Jacking Around" 3
2. Some Proud Southern Whites
3. A Quiet Friday Evening
4. The Morning After the Night Before
5. A Small Town in Mississippi
6. "The Floodgates of Hate and Hell"
7. "Don't Let Them Kill Me"
8. The FBI in Peace and War in Mississippi
9. Bad News from Bilboville
10. No Apologies
11. The Triumph of Southern justice
Appendix A
Appendix B
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations follow page 106
The lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna, Florida, held special significance because of its effect on
The lynching of Mack Charles Parker in Poplarville, Mississippi, in 1959 was one of the last lynchin
The lean, bespectacled, popular jurist was born one of twelve children in the tiny hamlet of Hathorn
Sometime after 11:30 p.m., as jewel Alford and his wife sat in the living room of their small, clapb
The mob huddled nervously by the doorway, waiting for Jewel to appear from the darkness of the hallw
At 4:00 a.m. the FBI contacted Joseph Ryan, second to W. Wilson White in the newly created Civil Rig
While generally making light of the lynching to reporters with jokes and buffoonery, local residents
Federal authorities were uncertain what to do in the case. The heinous nature of the crime had creat
With M. C. safely buried, blacks and whites alike hoped life would return to normal. This was not to
In Poplarville the fear of retaliation by local blacks, which had existed since the lynching, was re
condition unchanged and Arthur Smith languished in the Poplarville hospital still unable to speak, a
couldn't continue to lynch." We "found out pretty quick those things were not good for the state." A
