Bloody Mississippi

The black residents of Hickory, Mississippi, are “terror stricken” and “shaking with fear” due to the brutal lynching of a man who committed a crime and three of his innocent friends.

Hickory, Miss., Oct. 10 - Terror-stricken and making every effort to leave the county, Negro residents in this community are shaking with fear lest some of their number by lynched by a mob, which tonight is searching for ‘Sheep’ Jones, a Negro who shot and killed Albert J. Wall, a planter, and for which crime three innocent Negroes were lynched last nights. “Soon after the shooting Jones escaped. A posse went to the home of his father-in-law, William Felder took him out and hanged him to a tree. Frank Johnson, a friend of Jones and Dee Dawkins, at whose home the fugitive spent a few hours, were shot to death. Then the mob began a campaign of extermination. “Already a Negro church and lodge hall have been destroyed and the posse threatens to lynch an old Negro unless Jones is apprehended.” One is led to ask if these people are civilized. The remedy may may in the education of the white hoodlums guilty of these outrages; but it seems to us that the same kind of treatment that they accord to others should be accorded to them by way of the strong arm of the law. It is certainly a “condition and not a theory that confront us” and colored men who arm and sell their lives as dearly as possible will be the pioneers in the movement that will result in a changed condition of affairs in this section of the Southland. The man who uses force, fears force, the man who uses the shotgun for lawless purposes fears the shotgun in the hands of another, and this rule applies to the gallows as much as to anything else. Lynch-law must go!

“Bloody Mississippi,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed January 20, 2026, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/729.