The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted on Jan. 19 to place a marker dedicated to lynching victims on the grounds of the Lafayette County Courthouse. The marker is estimated to be placed around September or October, according to April Grayson, a member of the Lynching Memorialization in Lafayette County steering committee.
The marker will have the names of seven Black men who were lynched in Lafayette County, and it is the result of advocation from the steering committee — a group of local citizens committed to telling the stories of lynching victims — and the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal aid organization that seeks to reframe the narrative around racial justice.
This is the second lynching marker the steering committe has advocated for. The first memorialized Elwood Higginbotham, the last Black man to be lynched in Lafayette County. Higginbotham was murdered by a mob in Oxford in 1935.
Grayson said the steering committee decided the courthouse would be the most appropriate place for a lynching marker that would memorialize all seven victims because it is the center of the community. Not only is the courthouse the center of the community, but at least three of the lynchings occurred either at the courthouse or in the general vicinity of the Square, according to Grayson.
The steering committee approached the board in Sept. 2019, presenting their case for a lynching marker. Following the approval from the board, the county had to submit a formal application to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to allow the marker to be placed in front of the courthouse — because the courthouse is a protected historical landmark.
The entire process took over a year, leading up to a final vote on signing the permit in Jan. 2021. The Board of Supervisors was originally going to vote on the memorial in Dec. 2020, but members decided to postpone it.
Grayson said one struggle that the steering committee faced in getting the marker approved was that District 3 Supervisor David Rikard originally did not want to vote on it. Rikard said one of the men included on the marker –– Lawson Patton –– was allegedly “caught red-handed” killing a woman.
“Our argument really has been that we don’t know the full facts of the case because he never got due process. What is very common in lynching history is that even though there are newspaper accounts, often newspapers were framed in very, very white supremacist language,” Grayson said. “He never got due process. He was kidnapped from jail and brutally murdered before any of the facts could really become part of the public record or better known.”
Rikard’s issue was solved, however, during a Zoom meeting with the rest of the Board of Supervisors where he discussed his reservations. Rikard thanked the committee for being willing to discuss his issue and said that the Zoom meeting helped a lot, according to reporting in the Daily Journal.
The Board of Supervisors unanimously voted in favor of signing the permit on the third Tuesday of January, allowing the lynching marker to be placed in front of the courthouse. The steering committee is now working with the Board of Supervisors to order the marker and plan a formal unveiling of the marker.
Grayson said that while it is most likely that the marker is going to be unveiled in the early fall, it really depends on how the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, along with home football games and other factors.
Members of the Board of Supervisors were unable to be reached by the time of publication.
Deterrian Jones, a director of political action for the university’s Black Student Union, said he thinks the lynching marker is a great step to counteract the Confederate monument that remains in the Square. Jones also said he is appreciative of Lafayette County recognizing the hard truths of its past.
“My first thought was that of the years of advocacy and hard work it took for the Confederate statue on campus to come down. Confederate statues glorify a glossed over and romanticized version of the Old South while refusing to acknowledge the atrocities committed during that same period of time,” Jones said. “Taking down the Confederate statue was the initial request of not only the minority community, but the entire university community as well.”
Associated Student Body president Joshua Mannery said that while he did not personally advocate for the lynching marker’s approval, he was excited to hear the news.
“I’m always a fan of contextualizing history and, given our own to acknowledge the places that we’ve come from and the direction where we’re headed, but I think it’s a step in the right direction,” Mannery said.
Grayson said that the steering committee of the Lynching Memorialization of Lafayette County is happy about the marker being put up since it is going to bring attention to history, and hopefully provide the community with a good way to have conversations.
“It’s just part of our work, which is really about the larger issue of enabling us to have hard investigations into histories and move forward from them because they provide some level of healing for some people,” Grayson said. “They also provide our community an opportunity to wrestle with things that have not been properly acknowledged or dealt with and then go forward, collectively.”
