Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century (2016) by Jason Morgan Ward is a book about the ugliest side of my hometown of Shubuta, Mississippi. There were two sets of lynchings of African-Americans that took place at the bridge of the title, known as Hanging Bridge, though people also called it Hangman’s Bridge. One was in 1918, with four victims: two men and two pregnant women. The other was in 1942 and the victims were two boys, Earnest Green, age 14, and Charlie Lang, age 15.
Both stories brought national attention and investigations, the 1942 incident more than the 1918 one. Both happened during world wars. But the latter happened in the Second World War when Germany and Japan were using stories of lynching for purposes of their own propaganda purposes against the United States. So the federal and state government took the 1942 case more seriously than the one in 1918, though no one was ever charged in the murders in either incident.
I was born 12 years after the lynch-murder of the two boys, Earnest Green and Charlie Lang. As a child and even as a teenager, something that happened 12 years before you were born seems like a long time ago. Now that I remember things that happened 50 years ago as though they were yesterday, I realize what a contemporary event the 1942 murders were for adults in Shubuta when I was growing up.
For white kids like me – or at least for me personally – the story of the Hanging Bridge was something like a ghost story, a long-ago murder mystery that would never be solved. The adults didn’t talk about it much, at least not around me. And they were quick to deflect any questions by saying they didn’t know anything about it. But we were also given to understand that this was a subject we really shouldn’t bring up very often.
Ward covers the 1918 lynching in one long section, the 1942 one in another and devotes another to the civil rights movement in the town and county in the 1960s. The latter included a thankfully non-lethal but unquestionably violent moment in 1966 in which white Mississippi highway patrolmen and white thugs armed with clubs of various kinds showed their manly and Southern Christian honor by bravely beating the crap out of unarmed black protesters just off the main street in downtown Shubuta.
The book is well written and obviously carefully researched. The author is a professor of history at Mississippi State University. I've read some of the contemporary documentation of the events he describes, especially the 1942 lynching, and I can see that he uses it carefully. What surprised me was the amount of contemporary documentation on both the 1918 lynching and that of 1942, the latter especially. Part of the 1942 documentation came from the lead investigator of the Jackson FBI office, John Falkner, a cousin of William Faulkner (despite the different spelling of the surname). He interviewed the black man who was an eyewitness to the kidnapping of Earnest Green and Charlie Lang from the Quitman (county seat) jail on the night they were murdered. The fact that there had been such an eyewitness was a new element for me.
It was also covered by African-American news outlets and investigated by the NAACP. The investigation for the NAACP was handled by a respectable young white woman named Sara Craigen Kennedy who grew up in Mississippi and Alabama and was a sorority member at the University of Alabama. The story of how she did her work is a fascinating part of the book. It turns out that she somehow developed the idea that "race prejudice" against blacks was a bad thing that was undermining the American cause in the World War and endangered "the preservation of the principles of democracy." For white people, in the Deep South in 1942, this was a fairly heretical brand of Christian and patriotic thinking.
Given the lack of cooperation from either blacks or whites in Shubuta on the case, which was typical of lynching cases at that time, no one was ever charged in the crime. But it's very clear from the contemporary documentation that local and county law enforcement were complicit in the murders. Ward's book confirmed something that I had only heard bekfore from my mother, that the day after the murders someone had displayed the bodies of the murdered boys on the back of a truck at the local white school. The white kids needed to be educated in the "folkways" of the South, as polite Yankee writers sometimes called it. He also confirms what I had seen in a contemporary news report, that the bodies were displayed publicly downtown. The necrophiliac lynching brand of Southern honor couldn't even be bothered to respect the dead bodies of the dead. The father of one of the murdered boys first learned that his son had been murdered when he say his body on the back of the flatbed truck on which they were displayed.
But another thing I didn't know, and I'm really surprised I'd never heard of this before, is that someone took a photo of the murdered boys on the flatbed truck. Ward's book reproduces the photo, with the nooses still around the boys' necks. The photo was displayed on anti-lynching fliers in cities across the country.
Some white folks from Shubuta are still objecting to anyone talking about the 1942 killings. There's a "Shubuta, Mississippi" Facebook page, where various white folks have grumped about why some writer had to disturb their pristine childhood memories by writing a book on this topic. (Including some guy who advertises himself on his Facebook page with “Three Percenter” militia hate group flag and, uh, a Confederate flag featuring the cartoon character Elmer Fudd.) I probably made some of them unhappy by commenting there on the most recent series of whines that if someone can't value their own personal good memories from Shubuta without trying to pretend that particular ugly event in 1942 never happened, well, that's really kind of sad.
But facts can be annoyingly stubborn. Whether it's comfortable or not, racial lynch-murder is part of the "heritage" of the United States and Mississippi and Shubuta, too. And that 1942 double-murder remains the best-known event nationally that ever occurred in Shubuta. Given the wartime context, it's very likely the only time officials in Washington actually worried about something happening in Shubuta in particular affecting international relations.
The older I get, the more I realize the fact that the murders of 1942 were never prosecuted was not only a miserable failure of Mississippi justice. The effect of intimidation on black people in the area should also be obvious. Lynching was an act of terrorism, meant to support the segregation system. But it also had a particular effect on how white people looked at each other. Because Shubuta was and is a really small town. Which meant that many people in town knew or thought they knew people who had been somehow involved in the murder.
One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan stories is "Young Goodman Brown," about a man in Salem village who one night found himself in a kind of Witches Sabbath in the woods, which included the minister and others townspeople, including his own wife. But when he woke up the next morning, he couldn't tell whether it had been real, or just a very vivid bad dream. And he went through his long life wondering if the people he interacted with daily in the village were actually part of some evil cult. Not knowing in its way was more horrible than being sure.
But I don’t say that to pity the white people who participated in the 1942 murder, or those who had guilty knowledge of it. The crime was the murder of two teenage boys in an act of racial terrorism. Somebody murdered those two boys. And there is no statue of limitations on murder in Mississippi. But no one with direct knowledge of the situation ever came forward with the information, even decades later.
Reading Ward's book doesn't interfere with my childhood memories. It does remind me why it doesn't surprise me in 2016 that lots of white people still need to be reminded that "black lives matter."
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