The land lost to time
Released on bail, Crawford was cornered by about 50 whites who beat and knifed him. Stephens and his family fled Mississippi in 1950, abandoning their property after a clash with the local sheriff. Norman Stephens, right, shown in a 1939 photo owned by the family in Flora, Miss. Three clerks grabbed ax handles, and Crawford backed into the street, where the sheriff appeared and arrested Crawford – for cursing a white man. Barksdale called him a liar Crawford called the storekeeper a cheat. Crawford replied that he had a better offer. Richard Manning detail what followed: Barksdale offered Crawford 85 cents a pound for his cottonseed. Contemporary newspaper accounts and the papers of then-Gov. While waiting his turn at the gin that fall day in 1916, Crawford entered the mercantile store of W.D. In other cases, the attackers wanted the land for themselves.įor many decades, successful blacks “lived with a gnawing fear … that white neighbors could at any time do something violent and take everything from them,” said Loren Schweninger, a University of North Carolina expert on black landownership. Sometimes, black landowners were attacked by whites who just wanted to drive them from their property.
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The other cases involved trickery and legal manipulations. The Associated Press documented 57 violent land takings – more than half of the 107 land takings found in an 18-month investigation of black land loss in America. And the resulting land losses suffered by black families such as the Crawfords have gone largely unreported. Racial violence in America is a familiar story, but the importance of land as a motive for lynchings and white mob attacks on blacks has been widely overlooked. In the decades between the Civil War and the civil rights era, one of those limitations was owning land, historians say.
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“There were obvious limitations, or ceilings, that blacks weren’t supposed to go beyond.” Tolnay, a sociologist at the University of Washington and co-author of a book on lynchings. The success of blacks such as Crawford threatened the reign of white supremacy, said Stewart E. “He was getting rich, for a negro, and he was insolent along with it.”Ĭrawford’s prosperity had made him a target.
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Holman would say a few days later in a letter published by The Abbeville Press and Banner. 21, 1916 – the day the 51-year-old farmer hauled a wagon-load of cotton to town.Ĭrawford “seems to have been the type of negro who is most offensive to certain elements of the white people,” Mrs. Crawford, was one of the most prosperous farmers in Abbeville County. She learned that in his day, the man in the portrait, Anthony P. “It’s too painful,” her elderly relatives would say, and they would look away.Ī few years ago, Johnson, now 40, went to look for answers in the rural town of Abbeville, S.C. Part 1 available in The Authentic VoiceĪs a little girl, Doria Dee Johnson often asked about the man in the portrait hanging in an aunt’s living room – her great-great-grandfather. (AP Photo/Al Behrman)īy Todd Lewan, Dolores Barclay and Allen G. In the 1950s, the family fled their home in Yazoo City, Miss., when they feared for their lives from the local sheriff. Rosie Fields poses in her home with son, Marion Edward Stephens, in Cincinnati.