In the Pines, page 6
As this kind of political violence decreased in the twentieth century, lynching gradually took on a more specific meaning. Rather than any act of violence in which vigilantes killed someone, lynching became a racialized crime in which groups of white men who understood their own actions as delivering justice or upholding tradition killed Black people they accused of violating the law. The key characteristic was not how the victims died. Hangings and shootings and burnings could all be lynchings. What made a murder a lynching was not the manner of death but the intentions of the killers and the fact that they acted as a group. And these groups were bigger than they might have seemed at first glance; beyond the ranks of the direct participants always stood other white people who either condoned the violence or refused to hold the perpetrators accountable. Lynching became a more communal affair.
While many white men self-servingly perceived lynching and other kinds of collective violence as virtuous, Black southerners understood these acts as terrorism. And the practice was rampant in Mississippi. Calculated as a rate—the number of Black lynchings per 100,000 Black people—Mississippi ranked among the top four or five among eleven southern states. But in terms of raw numbers, Mississippi, with its large Black population, led the region. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented 656 lynchings of Black people in Mississippi between 1877 and 1950, the largest count for any state in the nation.
Wood may not have known all the specifics of this history, but what it meant for him would have been crystal clear. Given this context, he could not have been surprised when, after midnight, a mob of white men formed outside the jail.
Some of the white men who gathered that night were likely related to my grandfather Oury Berry, whose many ancestors lived in and all around the new town. Berrys had probably participated in vigilante violence in the past, before Jeff Davis County had even been incorporated. But this night marked the shocking inception of this kind of violence in the new county, a history in which Berry men would play an outsize role.
A Black Chicago paper offered a blunt report: “A mob of Christian gentlemen last Sunday busted in the jail at Prentiss, Mississippi and lynched a Negro by the name of Wood Ambrose, who had been charged with wounding a white man.” White papers softened the story. In one account, “unknown” persons “overpowered” the jailer and tried to take Wood, but he fought back so ferociously that they killed him there, in the cell, firing over one hundred bullets into his body. In another account, this mysterious crowd shot through a barred window and killed Wood in his cell. Then they broke into the jail, stole Wood’s body, and strung it up on a post nearby. Residents woke up the next morning to find what was left of Wood “dangling” there, a gruesome trophy for a half-finished town. Before Jeff Davis had even started building its courthouse, the new county had its first lynching.
In the aftermath of Wood’s murder, a handful of unreliable details remained as a testament to his life, a few sentences sent out on the Associated Press wire and published in newspapers across the country and a few more substantial newspaper articles. If Wood’s relatives remember him, they have kept their memories private. For everyone else, he has become Jeff Davis’s only official entry in the lynching lists, the solitary name chiseled in the pair of rusting steel boxes that represent the county at the lynching monument in Montgomery, Alabama, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. But just because there were no other recorded lynchings in Jeff Davis did not mean that no other lynchings occurred.
Wood’s death was notable in another way, too. It helped establish a pattern for the use of vigilante violence in a new and modernizing county—a model that, over time, varied in only one respect. Back then, at the start of the twentieth century, many whites still bragged about killing or injuring Black people, though they did not always take care to get the details right. The lying would come later.
3.
A SEPARATE WORLD
When white people attacked Black people in the South, they did not just kill individuals. They took aim at entire communities. Yet despite this violence and other forms of white supremacy and as a form of resistance to it, Black residents built their own separate world in the light between the pines. South-central Mississippi, where Versie Johnson lived, was not just a place of Black death. It was also, first and foremost, a place of Black life.
No one had gotten all the way to southern Mississippi without generations of violence and trauma: the Middle Passage, enslavement in the Caribbean and in older slave states like Virginia or South Carolina, the internal slave trade, the children sold away, the couples parted, parents and grandparents and siblings lost, and the murders that continued after Emancipation—all the rips in the fabric of family, the holes where loved ones were supposed to be. For a while, it looked like the pine woods and creek bottoms of the area that would become Jeff Davis County might be a refuge where Black folks could build what white Americans had denied them, the rich layers of deeply rooted lives: grandparents and parents and children baptized and married at the same church, land and houses shared across generations, and peach and apple trees planted so grandchildren could eat the fruit.
The four decades between Ambrose Wood’s lynching and Johnson’s killing were relatively peaceful years in Jeff Davis County compared to other parts of Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South. Though lynching statistics are widely agreed to be an undercount, no evidence of any other lynchings or other suspicious killings of Black people in Jeff Davis County survives in newspaper databases or the weekly Prentiss Headlight. When white Americans across the country joined a new version of the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of World War I, white residents of Jeff Davis County did not seem to form a chapter. Until 1940, the county had never even conducted a legal execution.
As the county grew, Black residents built their own rural world, a place where they could live relatively separate from white people. Black landowners had started buying land and homesteading in the area that would become Jeff Davis during Reconstruction. Paradoxically, the destruction of the longleaf forests made it possible for even more families to acquire property. Timber companies like J. J. Newman harvested the old pines and put cutover tracts up for sale at bargain prices. Poor men and women bought these ruined acres, often with money the men earned working at sawmills or on timber harvesting or railroad construction crews. Whole families went to work burning the slash, pulling out the stumps, and smoothing out the ruts left by steam loaders and temporary railroad tracks. Muscle and will, a dream of a homeplace, they believed, could make a farm. Sometimes they were right.
As Black southerners gained a measure of hard-won social, cultural, and even economic autonomy, white southerners worked to limit their political rights. Mississippi led this backlash. The state’s 1890 constitution pioneered understanding clauses and poll taxes, new techniques for disfranchising Black citizens without mentioning race that quickly spread to other states. In theory, Black southerners retained the citizenship rights guaranteed by the Reconstruction era constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth, which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth, which established equal protection under the law; and the Fifteenth, which guaranteed the right to vote. In practice, Black voting disappeared, along with Black postmasters and politicians. Undermining the law while pretending to uphold it—a form of government-sanctioned lying—became an essential feature of the Jim Crow South. In the new century, it was hard to remember that such wonders as the first two Black senators to serve in Congress, Mississippi’s own Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, had ever existed.
In this context, economic independence increasingly seemed like the only possible form of safety. Landownership meant families could feed and house themselves and separate their interests from white people. Freedom required property.
By the time Versie Johnson was born in neighboring Lawrence County in 1914, Black families with names like Polk, Hall, Griffith, and Johnson owned land all over Jeff Davis. The farms they built anchored communities connected by churches and the small primary schools they often housed, country stores, and a secondary school and college called the Prentiss Institute. Separation kept many of the daily humiliations of Jim Crow at bay. People could pray and learn and live with one another without having to answer to white folks. In the 1930s, Black sociologist Charles Johnson found that most Black farmers went into southern towns, where they had to navigate segregation laws and conventions and deal with white people, about once a month; the rest of the time, they stayed in their own, separate spaces. Around the same time, researchers working for the New Deal’s WPA counted six hundred Black farm owners compared to nine hundred Black renters and sharecroppers in Jeff Davis County, an astonishingly high rate of property ownership for Black southerners and possibly a decline from an earlier, pre-Depression peak. In fact, some Black renters and sharecroppers worked land owned by other Black families, often relatives.
Well before Versie Johnson’s birth and while he was growing up elsewhere in Mississippi, Black people in Jeff Davis had a great deal of success creating their own separate Black world. Other, most likely unrelated Johnsons—the educators Jonas Edward and Bertha Johnson and the farmer and business owner Estus Johnson—played important roles in making the county a place where a not-insignificant number of Black people flourished despite Jim Crow segregation.
Yet this thriving Black community was built on a foundation more precarious than it seemed when Versie Johnson moved into a house near Prentiss in the mid-1930s. The events of his death would have a profound impact not only on his own relatives but on Black people across the county.
Today, not much of this mostly rural and separate Black world has survived. By the time I made my first childhood visits to Prentiss, Jeff Davis County had already entered a period of economic decline and outmigration that would still be unfolding half a century later when I set out to write this book. Today, the county’s half dozen country churches welcome dwindling congregations and are sustained as much by members who have moved away as by those who have stayed. Scattered homeplaces shelter former migrants who have come back to the family land to retire after working for decades in Atlanta, Chicago, or Oakland. The rest is fragments: the collective memories of scattered Black families, a handful of written memoirs, Black cemeteries, the mostly ruined campus of the Prentiss Institute, a slim file of historical photographs, occasional references in old copies of white newspapers, and the land deeds filed in the big red ledgers in the Jeff Davis chancery clerk’s office. It’s not enough, really, to conjure the enormity of what local people lost in the years after Versie Johnson died.
It took one kind of courage for a Black man with a gun to gamble with white men. It took an altogether different kind for a Black man with a college degree to ask a white man he hardly knew for money.
On an April day in 1907, less than a year after white men lynched Ambrose Wood, Jonas Edward Johnson must have made his way through Prentiss with care, stepping lightly between the mud and the manure, trying to keep his shoes neat. Maybe he walked in from a nearby farm. More likely, the family he was staying with hitched up a mule or a horse to a wagon and gave him a ride into Prentiss. They probably dropped him out past the Pearl and Leaf depot near Prentiss mayor J. S. Bozeman’s cotton gin in the tiny Black part of town called the Quarters. From there, it would have been a short walk up Columbia Avenue, then more of a farmyard than a road with its wide expanse of rutted dirt and low well for watering stock. Along the way, Johnson would have passed businesses like J. H. Williams and Sons, a store that carried everything from coffee and corsets to coffins, and Palace Drugs, with medicine for sale on the first floor and doctors’ offices on the second. Though Johnson was from Pike County, about fifty miles southwest of Jeff Davis, it would not have been hard for him to find his destination. After the brand-new courthouse, the Bank of Blountville was the second most impressive building in town.
A group of relatively prosperous local Black farmers, many of them landowners, had a bold vision of an independent Black future in Jeff Davis County, and they invited Johnson to Prentiss to build one pillar of this plan. At the time, two small Black schools already operated in the county. The oldest, Mt. Zion, opened in 1870 to educate the freed people. Around the time of Wood’s lynching, local families organized a second school at Mt. Carmel, an old settlement taken over by Black folks after white residents abandoned it to move to the new railroad town of Prentiss. But farmers who lived near the county seat needed a school close enough that students would be able to walk to classes after finishing morning chores.
They could not count on any help from the state. Across America, only about one third of Black children ages five to fourteen attended school in 1900. In Mississippi, the situation was likely worse. Not only had Governor James K. Vardaman, who served from 1904 to 1908, condoned lynching and other forms of vigilante violence, but he had also called openly for the closing of public schools for Black residents and the repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteeing Black citizenship rights. “Education,” the governor argued, was “ruining our Negroes.” If Black families wanted more educational opportunities, they would have to build their own institutions.
Five years earlier, Johnson had graduated from Alcorn, a public Mississippi college founded during Reconstruction to educate the descendants of enslaved people. His wife, Bertha LaBranche Johnson, also from Pike County, earned her degree from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she had met Booker T. Washington, the college’s founder and president. In the Piney Woods region where college degrees were extremely rare, J. E. and Bertha stood out.
Because of the Johnsons’ qualifications, Black farmers in the Prentiss area offered them an opportunity. If the couple would agree to move to the brand-new county and found a school, local people promised to help acquire the necessary land. Johnson had gone to Prentiss that day to inquire about a loan.
At the bank, Johnson would have faced the public humiliations of segregation. He had to enter through a side door. After he stated his business, a clerk whisked him to a back room away from the lobby to wait. Johnson must have been nervous, standing there in the suit that Bertha had probably wiped and pressed, as sweat began to dampen his best collar. At some point, a clerk appeared again to take him to the office of Leon Tyrone, the head of the bank.
Like Ambrose Wood, Johnson played his own dangerous game of chance. Black people in the Jim Crow South took a risk whenever they talked to white strangers. Just as many Black men worked hard to avoid ever having to speak to white women they did not already know because white men were so quick to make accusations of attempted rape, direct conversations with unknown white men could also be dangerous. As one of the new county’s leading citizens, Leon Tyrone was probably secure enough not to take easy offense at Johnson’s presence, but Johnson could not have been sure. Well-educated, well-spoken, and well-dressed Black people made it clear to many white people that their vaunted supremacy was a lie, and yet here was Johnson with his college degree and his suit asking for money. Somehow, he had to convey deference. His gestures had to be assuring, easy, even flattering. If Tyrone told a joke, even a racist one, Johnson had to laugh. Yet the educator also had to project competence. Eye contact, always risky when a Black man met a white stranger, was probably necessary.
Whatever Johnson said to the banker, he walked out that day with both his life and a loan, so he must have been convincing. The days when the state government of Mississippi had been interested in founding public colleges for Black residents had long passed. Alcorn was not a viable model. Instead, Johnson laid out a vision based on his wife’s alma mater, that thriving Black school in rural Alabama called Tuskegee.
By 1907, Booker T. Washington had become a nationally known leader. White politicians sought his advice. Wealthy white philanthropists and business leaders gave him money. President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to dine at the White House. But both Washington and the school he had run since its founding had humble beginnings, an 1881 grant from the Alabama legislature for $2,000 and a one-room cabin owned by a Black church. Over a quarter century in which white southerners killed and assaulted Black folks with impunity and white supremacist politicians took over local and state governments across the region, Washington built one of the nation’s most important Black educational institutions right in the middle of all that violence. He performed that miracle by persuading some wealthy white Americans to value a form of Black education that would teach students to be “useful” and “productive” citizens. While white Tuskegee supporters believed that meant Black subservience, rural southern Black people understood what Tuskegee offered as Black self-determination.
In Jeff Davis County, Black residents wanted to build their own Little Tuskegee, as the Prentiss Institute and two other Mississippi schools would one day be called. They recruited Jonas Edward Johnson to make their dream a reality.
Johnson had grown up “country” in a large, hardworking farm family in rural Pike County. At Alcorn, he had focused on science. But his future success suggested he also learned something watching Alcorn administrators and professors keep their school going even as radical white supremacists dominated Mississippi’s state government. By the time he arrived in Jeff Davis County, Johnson already knew how to get along with Mississippi’s white people by carefully attending to their anxieties and desires. In Prentiss, he frequently described himself as “plain as an old shoe.” He also referred to himself and Bertha—who were more educated and cultured than most people in the county, Black or white—as just “home folks.” In Johnson, locals found an educator who would not engage in risky talk or behavior that their white neighbors might interpret as advocating equality. He would keep his institution open.
