![]() The exact date of his lynching is in dispute.īy being lynched, The Columbus Dispatch wrote, Colvin had “gone the way of all bad negroes.” In the same article, the newspaper wrote, “For reasons which are good and sufficient, people who are present at lynchings do not talk freely to newspaper men regarding what transpires on occasions of this kind, so it is impossible to accurately describe the proceedings which took place.” Instead, he was lynched by an Alabama mob. He was eventually captured, the paper said, and was expected to be brought back to stand trial. When a white posse looking for Colvin broke into his cabin, the newspaper reported that Colvin shot one of the men and escaped. The Columbus Dispatch reported in its May 24, 1906, edition that Colvin, who was also known as George Younger, was suspected of burglarizing a store on May 19, 1906. Both reported on the 1906 lynching of George Colvin, a Black man. Thirteen African Americans were lynched in Lowndes County after Reconstruction, between 18, according to a Howard Center analysis of the Beck-Tolnay Inventory of Southern Lynch Victims.īefore they were combined into The Commercial Dispatch on March 12, 1922, The Columbus Dispatch and The Columbus Commercial were the newspapers for Lowndes County. “They are completely unafraid of using violence to reinforce the intent of those laws … and to force Blacks into that social etiquette.” “I think that at the turn of the century, Mississippians were very pleased with how the rest of the country was coming around to their thinking,” said Shennette Garrett-Scott, an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University. Mississippi that literacy tests and other barriers to voting for African Americans “do not, on their face, discriminate between the white and negro races.” Two years later, the Court held in Williams v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation. Instead, The Commercial Dispatch and other white-owned Mississippi newspapers cultivated an environment where the lynchings of African Americans were socially acceptable.Ĭontributing to the climate of racial terror in Mississippi and other states was the landmark 1896 U.S. The white press was not an innocent bystander in these gruesome murders. Lowndes County, located in eastern Mississippi right on the border with Alabama, accounted for 20 of those murders, the analysis shows. ![]() Lynchings, were a form of racial terror, said historian Elijah Gaddis, an assistant professor of history at Auburn University.No state used the tactic more than Mississippi. It led the country with at least 673 lynchings, according to an analysis of the Beck-Tolnay Inventory of Southern Lynch Victims by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland. Then there are those other stories published by the paper and its predecessors: the editorial praising the Klu Klux Klan, a racist caricature of an old Black man that ran daily on the front page, a letter to Mississippians supporting white supremacy and the stories that reported and condoned the lynchings of Black men. ![]() The Commercial Dispatch documented the opening of the Varsity theatre, garment plant employees returning to work,the county’s vote to legalize beer, the tragic death of a Lowndes County farmer and the county’s efforts to be a part of a soil erosion project.
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