Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century

by Jason Morgan Ward

Overview

Lying just south of Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers were murdered during Freedom Summer, Clarke County lay squarely in Mississippi's — and America's — meanest corner. Even at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when the clarion call for equality and justice echoed around the country, few volunteers ventured there. Fewer still remained. Local African Americans knew why the movement had taken so long to reach them. Some spoke of a bottomless pit in the snaking Chickasawhay River in the town of Shubuta, into which white aggressors dumped bodies. Others pointed to an old steel-framed bridge across that same muddy creek. Spanning three generations, Hanging Bridge reconstructs two wartime lynchings — the 1918 killing of two young men and two pregnant women, and the 1942 slaying of two adolescent boys — that propped up Mississippi's white supremacist regime and hastened its demise. These organized murders reverberated well into the 1960s, when local civil rights activists again faced off against racial terrorism and more refined forms of repression. Connecting the lynchings at Hanging Bridge to each other and then to Civil Rights-era struggles over segregation, voting, poverty, Black Power, and Vietnam, Jason Morgan Ward's haunting book traces the legacy of violence that reflects the American experience of race, from the depths of Jim Crow to the emergence of a national campaign for racial equality. In the process, it creates a narrative that links living memory and meticulous research, illuminating one of the darkest places in American history and revealing the resiliency of the human spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199376582
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	315,482
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Jason Morgan Ward is Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965.

Table of Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: 1918 Chapter 1: The Most Atrocious Affair of Its Kind Chapter 2: Not Made Safe Part II: 1942 Chapter 3: The Way You Treat Your Niggers Chapter 4: A Monument To "Judge Lynch" Part III: 1966 Chapter 5: The Formation Of An Ugly White Crowd Chapter 6: The Real Battle For Freedom Epilogue Notes Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

If racism is America s original sin, lynching represents its unresolved legacy, one with a residue that lingers today. Jason Ward s Hanging Bridge exposes how the architecture of white supremacy and racism led to brutal acts of violence in a small corner of Mississippi, yet the impact of this masterfully written book reaches well beyond the borders of the place it examines. Ward weaves a compelling narrative that makes the reader pay close attention to history s echo and see and hear how the past often reveals itself in the present. —W. Ralph Eubanks, author of Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road

Hanging Bridge is a compelling, insightful, and deeply moving investigation into the history of racial terror that has shaped America. Our nation has long ignored the era of violent resistance to racial equality and today the shadow of this painful, persistent American problem can still be seen. Timely, urgent, and beautifully written, Jason Morgan Ward s work is a much needed light into a past that we have refused to see for far too long. —Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy:
A Story of Justice and Redemption

Racial violence in Mississippi is vividly rendered and carefully chronicled in Hanging Bridge. In this thoroughly researched bridge to the past, Jason Ward takes us back to this remote space of terror and shares one gripping story that represents many stories of terror under the violent wings of Jim Crow. We must never forget these stories. —Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, winner of the National Book Award

"Ward assiduously details the circumstances of these two lynching incidents, skillfully balancing newspaper articles and editorials from white-owned and black-owned publications, archival records, and personal accounts from African Americans, reconstructing the varying interpretations of the events held by black and white communities....A skillfully storyteller, Ward has proffered a refreshing and enlightening approach to longitudinal studies of local race relations. Hanging Bridge is a wonderful and unique contribution to studies on lynching, civil rights, and memory, all told through the lens of a tragic and singular location in Mississippi."—Tameka Bradley Hobbs, The Journal of Southern History

"Jason Ward has written a compelling account of racist atrocities in an obscure Mississippi county in the early twentieth century, reminding us once again that for many white Americans, black lives have never mattered. But this is also the story of local people coming to grips with this legacy of terror, overcoming it, and demanding their freedom. 'Hanging Bridge,' then, is both a sobering and inspiring book, solidly researched and beautifully written."—John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi

"Jason Morgan Ward delves deep into the violent heart of one rural county in Mississippi to tell a powerful and provocative story. Two lynchings, six victims, and generations of terror, trauma, and lies-this book excavates key truths about the politics and culture of white supremacy, as the ever-present threat of murder evolved into subtler attacks on African Americans. 'Hanging Bridge' tells a ghost story that continues to haunt us-absolutely unforgettable."—Daniel J. Sharfstein, Vanderbilt University, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America

"With insight and eloquence, and in the best tradition of civil rights scholarship, Jason Ward locates in a remote Southern hamlet the exposed roots of our long history of racial intolerance."—Philip Dray, author of At The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

Jason Ward has ventured into one of the darkest corners of our history, and brought back the long-hidden story of Shubuta, Mississippi s notorious lynching site. Hanging Bridge is harrowing, meticulously-documented, and vitally important to the ongoing struggle for truth and reconciliation. —Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

Hanging Bridge is a beautifully written, harrowing story of America s bloody history of racial violence and the long African American struggle for freedom. The horrific crimes committed on a lonely bridge in Shubuta, Mississippi will haunt America until we come to terms with our past—a past that is more terrible and less hopeful than many realize. —Danielle L. McGuire, author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

From the Publisher

2016-02-18
History of the most notorious sites in Mississippi for white-on-black violence, from 1918 to 1966. A place of enormous symbolic power, the Shubuta bridge over the Chickasawhay River, in Clarke County, Mississippi, became the most heinous "monument to Jim Crow," the site of numerous lynchings of African-Americans by white mobs. In this painstaking study spanning decades, Ward (History/Mississippi State Univ., Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965, 2011, etc.) delves into the specifics of the gruesome crimes and the crusading work by journalists and NAACP activists like Walter F. White to expose the lynchings in the South. Waves of violence between the white supremacists and the black Mississippians who had seen their promise of freedom betrayed after Reconstruction broke out during moments of crisis, as Ward notes, especially following three eras of global war. The first, in 1918, a quadruple hanging of two brothers and two sisters (both pregnant) from the bridge, followed the murder of the young women's boss as an attempt at protecting their honor. White, a black man who could pass for white, went undercover in Shubuta to expose the lynchings, but he was unable to publish the terrible details in mainstream magazines. In October 1942, the bridge was again the site of a lynching, this time of two teenage boys. Ward sees the violence as a reflection of white wartime anxiety over the fear of losing control of black workers, who were fleeing to the North. The Mississippi violence prompted renewed attempts at anti-lynching legislation in Congress. Finally, in 1966, after successive civil rights bills, the small but growing presence of the NAACP in Clarke County helped crack the widespread fear of registering to vote "or joining up with anything smacking of civil rights." A thoughtful historical study of the entrenched symbolism of a dreaded bridge in Mississippi, a landmark that "fixed attention on Jim Crow's brutal excesses and unresolved legacies."

Kirkus Reviews