Leflore County, Mississippi: History
Leflore County was formed in 1871 during the Reconstruction era from portions of Carroll, Sunflower and Tallahatchie counties. It was named for Greenwood LeFlore, a Choctaw chief. During the period of Indian Removal in the 1830s, he was one of the chiefs who signed the Treaty of Dancing Creek of 1830, by the terms of which the Choctaw sold to the US their remaining lands east of the Mississippi River. Most Choctaw migrated to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), but Leflore and some others remained in Mississippi. He became a state and US citizen, a planter who owned African-American slaves, and at times served as a politician.
Following the American Civil War, during Reconstruction the majority-black population of freedmen in the county gained emancipation and suffrage, participating for the first time in formal politics. They supported the Republican Party, as President Abraham Lincoln had gained their freedom. In the mid-1870s, the Red Shirts, a white paramilitary organization working on behalf of the Democratic Party, developed chapters in Mississippi. They worked to disrupt Republican meetings, suppress the black vote, and turn Republicans out of office so that white Democrats could regain control of the state legislature.
One particular act of mass violence stands out: In September 1889, organizing by the Colored Farmers' Alliance sparked false rumors of an impending Black "uprising." Mississippi Governor Robert Lowry ordered the state militia to Leflore County. Militia troops killed an estimated 25 Black people.
In the period from 1877 to 1950, Leflore County had 48 documented lynchings of African Americans, by far the highest number in the state and third highest in the United States. Most occurred around the turn of the 20th century, as part of white imposition of Jim Crow conditions and suppression of black voting. Mississippi had more lynchings than any other state and used violence as a means to terrorize and retain control the African-American population. In 1890 the state legislature passed a new constitution that had a variety of devices to disenfranchise blacks; they developed ways around court cases that tried to dismantle these, and kept blacks excluded from the political system and racially segregated into the 1960s. …