Kemper County, Mississippi: History
In the wake of the county's founding, Abel Mastin Key served as the first circuit clerk. Land in the area was developed in the 19th century by white planters for cotton cultivation using enslaved African Americans. Blacks have comprised the majority of the county population since before the American Civil War. The county continues to be largely rural.
After the American Civil War and Reconstruction, racial violence increased as whites struggled to regain power over the majority population of freedmen and to suppress their voting. In the period from 1877 to 1950, Kemper County had 24 documented lynchings of African Americans, the third-highest of Mississippi counties. Hinds and Leflore counties had 29 and 48 lynchings, respectively, in this period. This form of racial terrorism was at its height in the decades around the turn of the 20th century, which followed the state's disenfranchisement of most blacks in 1890 through creating barriers to voter registration.
In 1877 the Chisolm Massacre occurred, the murder by a mob of a judge, his children, and two of their friends while they were in protective custody in jail.
In 1890, blacks made up the majority of the county' population: 10,084 blacks to 7,845 whites. They generally worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Often illiterate, many of the sharecroppers were at a disadvantage in the annual accounting that was done by the landowners. Sometimes the planters had grocery stores on their property and required the sharecroppers to buy all their goods there, adding to their debt.
Beginning in late December 1906, there were several days of racial terror in the county. After violent incidents on the railroad between conductors and black passengers, whites attacked blacks at the rural towns of Wahalak and Scooba; by December 27, whites had killed a total of 13 blacks in rioting. The events started with a physical confrontation between a conductor and an African-American man on a Mobile & Ohio Railroad train. The conductor was cut, and he fatally shot two black men. George Simpson, another African American thought to be involved, escaped from the train. When captured in Wahalak by a posse, he killed a white constable and was quickly lynched by the other whites.
As reported by The New York Times, …