Lynching in America / The Lynching of Elwood Higginbottom

Lynching in America, also, The Lynching of Elwood Higginbottom. Community Remembrance Project. Lynching in America. Thousands of black people were the victims of racial terror lynching in the United States between 1877 and 1950. The lynching of African Americans during this era was a form of racial terrorism intended to intimidate black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy led to fatal violence against black women, men, and children accused of violating social customs, engaging in interracial relationships, or committing crimes. Community leaders who spoke against this violence were themselves often targeted by mobs. Racial terror lynching became the most public and notorious form of subordination directed at black people and was frequently tolerated or even supported by law enforcement and elected officials. White mobs were usually permitted to engage in brutal violence with impunity. Many black people were pulled out of jails or given over to mobs by law enforcement officials who were legally required to protect them. Terror lynchings often included burnings and mutilation, sometimes in front of crowds numbering in the thousands. Many names of those whose lives were claimed by these acts of violence were not recorded and will never be known, but over 650 racial terror lynchings have been documented in Mississippi alone, at least seven having taken place in Lafayette County., The Lynching of Elwood Higginbottom. On the evening of September 17, 1935, Elwood Higginbottom, a 28-year old African-American tenant farmer, husband, and father to three children, was in custody in the Oxford jail. Four months earlier, landholder Glen Roberts led a posse to Higginbottom's house over a property dispute. Higginbottom defended himself and fled after Roberts was fatally shot. After Roberts's funeral, “citizens of Oxford and the county joined with officers of [Lafayette] and other counties” in a manhunt. They beat Higginbottom's sister and threatened burning his brothers to death in retaliation. Captured a few days later in Pontotoc County, Higginbottom was held in Jackson until his trial date in Oxford. With anger mounting that a guilty verdict was not forthcoming quickly enough, a mob of 50-150 white men gathered outside the jail. They broke in and drove Higginbottom to a wooded area near this location, the Three-Way, on Old Russell Road. Higginbottom fought for his life, but the mob forced a rope around his neck and hanged him to death. Reports described five bullet holes in his body. The lynching sparked outrage from the NAACP, which wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt and blamed Higginbottom's death on “callous indifference” toward federal or state protections against “anarchic mobs.” Roosevelt's administration did not respond. Officials in Mississippi charged no one for Mr. Higginbottom's murder.