Mississippi Today

Book excerpt: ‘The Barn’ by Wright Thompson

Published

1 month ago

September 23, 2024

mississippitoday.org – Mississippi Today – 2024-09-23 06:00:00

Editor’s note: Wright Thompson’s “The Barn” is the story of the place where Emmett Till was tortured to death in the summer of 1955, and a thousand-year history of the dirt surrounding that barn, an attempt to map the forces that drove a mob of white men to kill a Black child. It follows the curdling of the Mississippi Delta as the global cotton markets rise and then, starting in 1920, collapse. This is one story among many.

On Friday, December 14, 1923, a sharecropper outside Drew named Joe Pullum went to visit his plantation manager, Tom Sanders, to settle his annual accounts. Pullum carried a .38-caliber revolver. He’d learned to shoot fighting with the famous U.S. Army Buffalo Soldiers in the hills of Cuba during the Spanish-American War. When he returned home to farm, he lived with his family in a small tenant house east of town. The crop had been harvested and now came the tense settlement day. The only input a farmer controlled was the price of labor, a fundamental that remains true today, and for some men the temptation to cheat people with no legal recourse remained too great. Settlement day was an annual test of honesty and honor and most men failed. Pullum already suspected his boss would try to cheat him.

It had been another terrible year, the third in a row. Rain fell for nearly the entire cotton season and many farmers picked the worst crop they’d picked in decades, ten acres to make one bale in some places instead of three bales an acre. These plagues of sun and sky felt biblical. Banks wanted money or land from farmers. A third fewer bales got picked statewide and many farmers just abandoned the crop in the fields rather than pick at a loss. The jarring sign of untouched cotton in winter haunted the memories of farmers for a generation. It was the smallest crop in fifty years. That was a problem for management.

Pullum wanted his money.

Sanders said Pullum owed him fifty dollars.

They began to shout at each other. Nobody knows who drew his weapon first. Sanders and his manager, John Manning, stood on a back porch. Pullum stood on the ground below them and shot both men before fleeing east towards the Brooks plantation headquarters—the same land that in five decades would become Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm.

Sanders was dead. John Manning was wounded. Pullum ran to his house and loaded his shotgun with the only ammunition he had: lightweight bird shot. The posse went to Pullum’s house. Pullum aimed at their heads because of the low-caliber bird shot. He shot R. L. Methvin in the face and killed him. He wounded another man, then slid into the Wild Bill Bayou and started trying to move his way north. His mother sharecropped on the next road to the north and, under threat, he tried to make it to her. A witness saw him cross Brooks Road to the west side of the bayou. The posse couldn’t follow him through the thick swamps, still uncleared, and lost his trail at an abandoned tenant house. For two hours they searched, until someone found boot tracks leading down into a drainage ditch that fed back into the Wild Bill Bayou. They spread out along both sides of the swamp. Joe Pullum hid in the thick undergrowth, careful like those ancient deer about where he put his feet, and he listened as they approached. His military training kicked in.

The posse got closer and closer. Pullum waited.

Finally they were within pistol range. Just a few yards away. He shot Kenneth Blackwood in the face, Luther Hughes in the head, and Bob Stringfellow in the side and the arm. He shot Archie Manning, a local cotton gin employee and ancestor of the famous quarterback, in the face and the throat. The posse emptied eight or ten boxes of ammunition into the swamp but hit nothing. Pullum slipped silently away from his pursuers, moving through the bayou toward his mom’s house on what is now Swope Road.

The posse called for help. The sheriff from my hometown of Clarksdale, along with a half dozen prominent citizens, arrived with two Browning machine guns. Other men went into Drew and loaded ten fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline onto a truck, which they drove as far as it could go into the muck. A wagon pulled by a team of four mules took it the rest of the way into the swamp. At 11:30 p.m., more than fourteen hours after the first shot was fired, the mob rolled the first barrel of gasoline into the swamp. They lit it on fire and ran down shooting wildly.

J. L. Doggett, from Clarksdale, saw something move in the darkness.

“There he is!” he shouted.

Pullum shot him immediately.

Doggett was a prominent lumberman. I knew his daughter when she was an old woman. She played bridge at the Clarksdale Country Club, in one of the rooms just off the snack bar, where kids would go to get chicken tenders and lemonade to charge to their parents’ accounts.

“All my friends are dead and gone,” she’d say.

Back at the Wild Bill Bayou the mob rolled a second barrel of gasoline into the water. The machine guns fired belts of withering fire into the darkness. Pullum remained hidden and picked off his attackers whenever he got a clear shot. He had only a shotgun and a small pistol, so he had to get close to kill. The posse rolled a third barrel of gasoline into the swamp and lit it on fire. This time the fire made Pullum move and the machine guns opened up and cut him down. Pullum had killed at least four people and wounded at least nine, although local oral accounts put that number higher.

The posse threw his dying body on a horse and they took him to a waiting car, which drove him to town. They left him to die on the cotton platform on Main Street. His shotgun got displayed in downtown Drew. Some older Black citizens tell how their parents and grandparents told them that parts of Pullum’s body—multiple people mention his ear or ears—got displayed for decades after that in local shop windows as a warning.

After the lynching Drew and other nearby towns enforced a strict curfew for Blacks. More lines got drawn on the Delta, unmarked on any map but understood by everyone as law. Boundaries governed more and more moments and spaces, and crossing one of those boundaries would be Emmett Till’s fatal crime. When a local dance hall closed and the crowd didn’t clear fast enough, the local sheriff shot and killed seven or eight people, including two of the musicians.

The Franklin family left Sunflower County because of the killing. Their nine-year-old son, who would name his daughter Aretha, heard his parents talking about it. In nearby Webb, twenty-three miles from the barn and less from the spot where Pullum died, Mamie’s father packed up his family and moved to Chicago.

Pullum’s family disappeared. His great-grandson Thomas Pullum, who lives in Oakland, California, spends his free time trying to find out what happened to them, especially to Joe’s two sons, who were never heard from again. Thomas came to Mississippi for the first time in 1967 and sat with his grandmother in the shadow of the Wild Bill Bayou. In a quiet moment he asked her to tell him about Joe. He saw a cloud of “pain and misery” pass over her face as tears welled in her eyes. But then something strange happened. Something in her eyes changed, a defiant sparkle emerging, and she smiled and settled back into the pillows on her bed and started to tell the kids the story.

“I had heard of Mr. Joseph Pullum, your great-grandfather, all my life,” she began and told them the tale of a Black man who had the courage to say no, to stand up for himself, and when it became clear he would not survive, a man who decided to send as many of the enemy to hell as he could before they got him. Those stories are all that’s left, along with some newspaper clippings and a smudged death certificate, signed by the same local doctor who would later buy the barn where Emmett Till was tortured to death.

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson will be released on Sept. 24, 2024.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Post Views: 135

Related Topics:Featured Mississippi News Mississippi Today News

Up Next

On this day in 1955

Don't Miss

Mike Chaney is not the first state politico to call for his elected post to be eliminated

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1926

Published

3 hours ago

November 5, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Debbie Skipper – 2024-11-05 07:00:00

Nov. 5, 1926

Victoria Gray Adams, Freedom Summer, 1964, Herbert Randall Freedom Summer Photographs. Credit: University of Southern Mississippi

Victoria Gray Adams, one of the founding members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was born near Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

“(There are) those who are in the Movement and those who have the Movement in them,” she said. “The Movement is in me, and I know it always will be.”

In 1961, this door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman convinced her preacher to open their church to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which began pushing for voter registration. A year later, she became a field secretary for SNCC and led a boycott of businesses in Hattiesburg, later helping found the umbrella group, the Council of Federated Organization, for all the civil rights groups working in Mississippi.

In 1964, she and other civil rights leaders fought the Jim Crow laws and practices that kept Black Mississippians from voting, marching to the courthouse in the chilly rain to protest. By the end of the day, nearly 150 had made their way to register to vote.

Adams became the first known woman in Mississippi to run for the U.S. Senate, unsuccessfully challenging longtime Sen. John Stennis. She also helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. It was time, she said, to pay attention to Black Mississippians, “who had not even had the leavings from the American political table.”

In August 1964, she joined party members in challenging Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention.

“We really were the true Democratic Party,” she recalled in a 2004 interview. “We accomplished the removal of the wall, the curtain of fear in Mississippi for African-Americans demanding their rights.”

Four years later, the party that once barred her now welcomed her.

She continued her activism and later talked of that success: “We eliminated the isolation of the African-Americans from the political process. I believe that Mississippi now has the highest number of African-American elected officials in the nation. We laid the groundwork for that.”

In 2006, she died of cancer.

“When I met … that community of youthful civil rights activists, I realized that this was exactly what I’d been looking for all of my conscious existence,” she said. “It was like coming home.”

.wp-block-newspack-blocks-homepage-articles article .entry-title {
font-size: 1.2em;
}
.wp-block-newspack-blocks-homepage-articles .entry-meta {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
align-items: center;
margin-top: 0.5em;
}
.wp-block-newspack-blocks-homepage-articles article .entry-meta {
font-size: 0.8em;
}
.wp-block-newspack-blocks-homepage-articles article .avatar {
height: 25px;
width: 25px;
}
.wp-block-newspack-blocks-homepage-articles .post-thumbnail{
margin: 0;
margin-bottom: 0.25em;
}
.wp-block-newspack-blocks-homepage-articles .post-thumbnail img {
height: auto;
width: 100%;
}
.wp-block-newspack-blocks-homepage-articles .post-thumbnail figcaption {
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
}
.wp-block-newspack-blocks-homepage-articles p {
margin: 0.5em 0;
}

.wpnbha.ts-3 .entry-title{font-size: 1em}.wpnbha.ts-3 article .newspack-post-subtitle, .wpnbha.ts-3 article .entry-wrapper p, .wpnbha.ts-3 article .entry-wrapper .more-link, .wpnbha.ts-3 article .entry-meta {font-size: 0.8em;}

Vote today: Mississippi voters head to the polls. Here’s what you need to know

Published

5 hours ago

November 5, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Geoff Pender – 2024-11-05 03:00:00

Polls in Mississippi will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. today as voters make their picks for presidential, congressional, state judicial and some local races.

Voters are reminded to bring a photo identification. This can include a valid Mississippi driver’s license, an identification or employee identification card issued by any government entity of the U.S. or state of Mississippi, a U.S. passport, a military photo ID card, a current student ID card issued by an accredited college or university or a Mississippi voter ID card. For more information on voter ID rules, check here.

Those who do not have a valid ID can vote affidavit, but must return and present a photo ID within five days for their ballot to count. Voters waiting in line as polls close at 7 p.m. will still be allowed to vote. If you vote absentee or affidavit, you can track the status of your ballot here.

POLLING PLACE LOCATOR: Use the secretary of state’s online locator to find where you vote

Stay tuned to Mississippi Today for live results, starting after polls close.

LISTEN: Podcast: Mississippi’s top election official discusses Tuesday’s election

The Mississippi secretary of state’s office offers an online resource, My Election Day, where voters can locate or confirm their polling place, view sample ballots and view current office holders. Those with doubts or questions about their precinct locations are urged to contact their local election officials. Contact info for local election officials is also provided on the My Election Day site.

The secretary of state’s office, U.S. attorney’s office and the state Democratic and Republican parties will have observers across the state monitoring elections and responding to complaints.

The secretary of state’s elections division can be contacted at 1-800-829-6786 or ElectionsAnswers@sos.ms.gov.

The U.S. attorney’s office investigates election fraud, intimidation or voting rights issues and can be contacted at 601-973-2826 or 601-973-2855, or complaints can be filed directly with the Department of Justice Civil Rights division at civilrights.justice.gov. Local law enforcement holds primary jurisdiction and serves as a first responder for alleged crimes or emergencies at voting precincts.

The secretary of state’s office also provides some Election Day law reminders:

It is unlawful to campaign for any candidate within 150 feet from any entrance to a polling place, unless on private property.

The polling places should be clear of people for 30 feet from every entrance except for election officials, voters waiting to vote or authorized poll watchers.

Voters are prohibited from taking photos of their marked ballots.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Post Views: 17

Mississippi Today

Senate panel weighs how much — or whether — to cut state taxes

Published

18 hours ago

November 4, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Taylor Vance – 2024-11-04 15:42:00

A group of state senators on Monday grappled with how much to slash state taxes or if they should cut them at all, portending a major policy debate at the Capitol for next year’s legislative session.

The Senate Fiscal Policy Study Group solicited testimony from the state government‘s leading experts on budget, economic and tax policies to prepare for an almost certain intense debate in January over how much they should trim state taxes while balancing the need to fund government services.

Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins, a Republican from Flowood whose committee has jurisdiction over tax policy, told Mississippi Today that he wanted senators to have basic facts in front of them before they help decide next year if Mississippi should cut taxes.

“We’re getting a tax cut the next two years whether we do anything or not,” Harkins said. “I just want to make sure we have all the facts in front of people to understand we have a clear picture of how much revenue we’re bringing in.”

Mississippi is already phasing in a major tax cut. After a raucous debate in 2022, lawmakers agreed to phase in an income tax cut. In two years it will leave Mississippi with a flat 4% tax on income over $10,000, one of the lowest rates in the nation.

However, the top two legislative leaders, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the Senate and House Speaker Jason White, have both recently said they want legislators to consider new tax cut policies.

Hosemann, the Republican leader of the Senate, has publicly said he would like to see the state’s grocery tax, the highest of its kind in the nation, reduced, though he hasn’t specified how much of a reduction or how long it would take for the cut to be implemented.

White, a Republican from West, said last week that he would like to see the state’s 4% income tax phased out and have the state’s 7% grocery tax cut in half over time.

“We are hoping to construct a tax system that, yes, prioritizes certain needs in our state, but it also protects and rewards taxpayers,” White said last week.

But it’s difficult to collect accurate data on the state’s grocery tax, and state lawmakers must grapple with a laundry list of spending needs and obligations based on testimony from state agency leaders on Monday.

Mississippi currently has a 7% sales tax, which is applied to groceries. The state collects the tax but remits 18.5% back to cities. For many municipalities, the sales tax is a significant source of revenue.

If state lawmakers want to reduce the grocery tax without impacting cities, they could pass a new law to change the diversion amounts or appropriate enough money to make the municipalities whole.

State Revenue Commissioner Chris Graham said the Mississippi Department of Revenue, the agency in charge of collecting state taxes, does not have a mechanism in place for accurately capturing how much money cities collect in grocery taxes. This is because the tax on groceries is the same as non-grocery items.

However, Graham estimates that the state collects roughly $540 million in taxes from grocery items.

The other problem lawmakers would have in implementing significant tax cuts is a growing list of spending needs in Mississippi, a state with abject poverty, water and sewer and other infrastructure woes and some of the worst health metrics in the nation.

Representatives from the Legislative Budget Office, the group that advises lawmakers on tax and spending policy, told senators that lawmakers will also be faced with rising costs in the public employee retirement system, the Medicaid budget, public education, state employee health insurance, and state infrastructure projects.

State agencies, including the employee retirement system, also requested $751 million more for the coming budget year.

“That’s the billion dollar question, I guess,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson, a Republican from Vicksburg, said. “How we’re able to fund basic government services?”

Harkins and Hopson said the committee would likely meet again before the Legislature convenes for its 2025 session on January 7.

A House committee on tax cuts has also been holding hearings, and White in September held a summit on tax policy.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Post Views: 31