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.

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9780190905842

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Reviews

Winner of the 2017 Nonfiction Award, Mississippi Society of Arts and Letters Winner of the 2017 McLemore Prize, Mississippi Historical Society 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

Winner of the 2017 Nonfiction Award, Mississippi Society of Arts and Letters Winner of the 2017 McLemore Prize, Mississippi Historical Society 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'

Author Information

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.

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