A lynching monument in Mississippi

There is a dirt road north of Shubuta, in Clarke County, Miss., that seems to lead to nowhere anyone might want to go. If you turn onto East Street and follow the bend in the road, you encounter a padlocked gate emblazoned with orange No Trespassing signs. A few hundred yards farther, a rusty bridge spans the Chickasawhay River. Between World War I and World War II, white vigilantes lynched six black victims at this spot. There is no historical marker, no memorial; just a rickety span that locals call the Hanging Bridge.

On Feb. 10, the Montgomery, Ala.-based organization Equal Justice Initiative released "Lynching in America," a searing report that documents 3,959 lynchings in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950. The news media seized on the numbers and paid less attention to what the group characterized as an "astonishing absence" of lynching memorials in communities that boast monuments to Confederate soldiers and architects of the South's Jim Crow regime.

But lynching monuments of a kind do exist, like the bridge over the Chickasawhay. It first earned its place in history in 1918, when a mob hanged brothers Major and Andrew Clark and sisters Maggie and Alma Howze, both pregnant, after their white boss turned up dead. When the NAACP, just 10 years old at the time, requested an investigation, Mississippi's governor told its members to "go to hell."

Twenty-four years later, in 1942, white vigilantes hanged Ernest Green and Charlie Lang--ages 14 and 15, respectively--for the "attempted rape" of a white girl. Noting that the bridge's death toll stood at six, a black journalist branded Shubuta's Hanging Bridge "a monument to 'Judge Lynch.'"

In the 1960s, when civil rights workers arrived in Clarke County, the bridge was already a memorial of sorts. One local worker occasionally drove volunteers out to the place "where they hang the negroes." A former summer volunteer recalled 40-odd years later, "The way he said it, it could have happened a hundred years ago, or last week."

The Equal Justice Initiative report emphasizes that the trauma of racial terrorism extended far beyond the immediate victims and the immediate moment. Mob violence spurred a variety of black responses, from outmigration to political action.

Many of those migrants headed to Northern cities, where they tipped the balance of power in urban congressional districts and helped elect Democrats and Republicans who sponsored pioneering civil rights legislation. From anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells to NAACP officials to civil rights workers in tiny towns across the South, black freedom fighters credited brushes with the mob and memories of racial violence as an inspiration for activism.

Jason Morgan Ward is associate professor of history at Mississippi State University.

Editorial on 03/01/2015

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