Mississippi Murder Mystery

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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Sorry, no cheery St. Patrick’s Day column to celebrate the holiday at the end of this week. Instead, Friday is also the 137^th anniversary of anything but a cheery holiday: One of most shocking mass murders in American history, and one that remains unsolved. (Perhaps some enterprising podcaster will tackle this mystery.)

Let’s travel back to Carroll County, Mississippi, in January 1886, when trouble began. Two brothers, Ed and Charley Brown, half-Black and half-American Indian, were delivering molasses to a local saloon in Carrollton, the county seat. They bumped into and spilled molasses upon the clothing of Robert Moore, a White man from a neighboring community.  Though the matter was quickly resolved, it did not end there.  A month later, Moore told his friend James Monroe Liddell, a Carrollton attorney and a newspaper editor, about the incident.  Liddell decided to get involved.

On February 12, he confronted the Browns and accused them of deliberately spilling the molasses on Moore.  A verbal dispute erupted, and when Liddell attempted to assault Ed Brown, onlookers intervened and prevented the argument from escalating to a full-scale fight. Liddell then walked down the street to a hotel for dinner.  Told by a friend that the Browns were making vulgar comments about him, Liddell left his meal to confront the brothers once again.  This time there was shooting and both Liddell and the Browns injured. 

Many of Carroll County’s White citizens were incensed when the Browns charged James Liddell with attempted murder.  Under the law they had a legal right to do so, but that a Black person would charge a White person with a crime infuriated Whites.  When the trial got underway on March 17, a number of Black and White citizens were seated in place for a hearing of evidence. Suddenly, a group of 70 or so armed men rode into town, dismounted at the courthouse, and ran inside. 

In the courtroom, they fired a barrage of shots at the Brown brothers and the Black citizens in attendance.  Those who escaped from the second-story windows were shot as they lay upon the ground or while hanging from windowsills. No White person was hit. The renegades then rode out of town, leaving behind 23 dead or dying. According to Rick Ward in a 2012 article for “Mississippi History Now,” bullet holes on the courtroom walls were not covered until the courthouse was renovated in the early 1990s.

Within hours newspapers reported the attack. When a New Orleans newspaper story hit the telegraph wires, people across the country and even abroad were outraged about this miscarriage of justice.  Newspaper accounts and editorials in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ohio, and even Canada called for an investigation of the killings.  However, there was no coroner’s inquest, no grand jury indictment, and no action taken by Mississippi Governor Robert Lowry. His only comment was, “The riot was provoked and perpetrated by the outrage and conduct of the Negroes.”

In the United States Congress, Mississippi Senator James Z. George, who was from Carrollton, took no action. No surprise there: Four years later he would take a leave of absence from the U. S. Senate and become the chief architect of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890, noted for its restrictions on Black suffrage and its institution of Jim Crow segregation.  Such racial views reflected those of the most-often elected Carroll County politician at the time – Hernando DeSoto Money, who had refused to press for an investigation. He had served in the U.S. House of Representatives and in 1897 he became a member of the U.S. Senate when James George died.

Pleas for justice came when Blanche K. Bruce, who had been elected to the U.S. Senate by Mississippi’s Republican legislature during Reconstruction, and Mississippi ex-Congressman John R. Lynch, both African Americans, visited President Grover Cleveland on March 24 to request action by the federal government. President Cleveland declined.  Congressmen and senators from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina introduced bills and resolutions calling for an investigation of the massacre. Black Congressman James E. O’Hara of North Carolina made an impassioned speech and offered a resolution that an investigation be made in Mississippi by a committee of five congressmen, but it did not receive sufficient support.  

Mississippi newspapers had previously mostly ignored incidents of African Americans murdered by White people. However, in the wake of the Carrollton Courthouse massacre, newspapers in Natchez, Vicksburg, Jackson, and Raymond condemned the killings. The editor of the Jackson Weekly Clarion wrote, “There can be no adequate punishment for the injury that has been afflicted upon the good people of Mississippi by the murderous mob at Carrollton.”

Such rallying cries fell on deaf ears. Witnesses could have identified any local men among the renegades, and perhaps even some from nearby Leflore County where hostilities toward African Americans ran high. But no witnesses came forth, and no one was willing to implicate Liddell.  Still, to be on the safe side, he left Carrollton, and later it was reported that he was living in the Philippines. 

As time went by, Carroll County citizens dropped discussion of the event. Thus, well into the 20th century the next generations knew little to nothing about  the horror of March 17, 1886. According to Ward’s 2012 article, there is no mention of the Carroll County Courthouse killings in any general history of the state. A well-known author who hailed from Carrollton, Elizabeth Spencer, born in 1921, acknowledged that she had heard only the faintest sketches of the massacre, which she included in her novel The Voice at the Back Door. A local journalist, Susie James, resurrected the story in brief form for a Greenwood newspaper in 1996. Overall, though, not much attention was devoted to 23 lives lost.

In 1889, there would be another massacre in the area, this time in Leflore County. At least two dozen African Americans were hunted down and slaughtered in the Shell Mound area, about 30 miles from Carrollton.  The basis for that massive search for Black farmers was the fear among some White people that an agricultural alliance formed by Black leaders would result in too many production and marketing advantages for Black farmers over White cotton growers.  Just like the Carrollton massacre, neither local nor state officials took any action against the posse that carried out the murders. Those who were identified refused to talk, and African Americans were too terrified to speak, even to one another. Obviously, it was dangerous for Black residents to try to improve themselves economically, especially if the livelihood of Whites was jeopardized.

Regarding the Carroll County event: Who plotted the attack?  Who enlisted the force that stormed the courtroom?  And who were the individuals in the murderous mob? To this day the Carroll County Courthouse Massacre of 1886 remains a cold case file.   

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including The Last Hill, with Bob Drury. To purchase a copy or to pre-order Follow Me to Hell (to be published on April 4), please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.