Mississippi murder movie trial#
Those who died at the hands of mobs, Litwack notes, some were the victims of "legal" lynchings - having been accused of a crime, subjected to a "speedy" trial and even speedier execution. Turning to home, this number also represents 1,700 more than who were killed on Sept. In modern terms, that number represents more than those killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and more than twice the number of American casualties in Operation Enduring Freedom - the Afghanistan conflict. That number contrasts with the 1,401 prisoners who have been executed legally in the United States since 1976. The impact this campaign of terror had on black families is impossible to explain so many years later. In Without Sanctuary, historian Leon Litwack writes that between 18 an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs. But I note that today, the Equal Justice Initiative released Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror apparently, it too is a must-read. Vivid accounts of brutal and terrifying lynchings in Mississippi are chronicled in various sources: Ralph Ginzburg's 100 Years of Lynching and Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, just to name two. While other states engaged in these atrocities, those in the Deep South took a leadership role, especially that scar on the map of America - those 82 counties between the Tennessee line and the Gulf of Mexico and bordered by Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama. A lynching was a public ritual - even carnival-like - within many states in our great nation. Lynchings were prevalent, prominent and participatory. Mississippi has expressed its savagery in a number of ways throughout its history - slavery being the cruelest example, but a close second being Mississippi's infatuation with lynchings. Walton goes on to explain that "there is something different about Mississippi something almost unspeakably primal and vicious something savage unleashed there that has yet to come to rest." To prove his point, he notes that, "f the 40 martyrs whose names are inscribed in the national Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL, 19 were killed in Mississippi." "How was it," Walton asks, "that half who died did so in one state?" - my Mississippi, your Mississippi and our Mississippi.Ĭode Switch The Man Behind The Speech: Judge Carlton Reeves Takes On Mississippi's Past The name evokes strong reactions from those who live here and from those who do not, but who think they know something about its people and their past." Because of its past, as described by Anthony Walton in his book, Mississippi: An American Journey, Mississippi "can be considered one of the most prominent scars on the map" of these United States. "Mississippi," he says, "is a place and a state of mind. One of my former history professors, Dennis Mitchell, recently released a history book entitled, A New History of Mississippi. A warning to readers: He uses the word "nigger" 11 times.
We have decided to publish the speech, which we got from the blog Breach of Peace, in its entirety below. And it's breathtaking, in both the moral force of its arguments and the palpable sadness with which they are delivered.
The speech is long Reeves asked the young men to sit down while he read it aloud in the courtroom. They were part of a group that beat Anderson and then killed him by running over his body with a truck, yelling "white power" as they drove off. He read it to three young white men before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in a parking lot in Jackson, Miss., one night in 2011. District Judge Carlton Reeves, who in 2010 became the second African-American appointed as federal judge in Mississippi. Reeves, for the Southern District of Mississippi.
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