McComb, Mississippi, SNCC's First Battleground

McComb was a railroad creation. Henry Simpson McComb of the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern line moved his maintenance shops here in eighteen seventy-two, and three nearby communities merged to form the town around them.

Ninety years later McComb became the opening front of one of the most dangerous civil rights campaigns in American history. In the summer of nineteen sixty-one, SNCC field secretary Bob Moses arrived to launch the organization's first voter registration drive. Of roughly four thousand Black residents in the area, fewer than two hundred fifty were registered. The backlash was violent: farmer and SNCC supporter Herbert Lee was shot and killed in broad daylight by a state legislator who was never charged. Student protesters were beaten and jailed. Three years later, during Freedom Summer, McComb would be called the bombing capital of the world after a wave of bombings struck Black homes, churches, and businesses in the area. It was here, in nineteen sixty-one, that the civil rights movement first learned the depth of what it was facing in rural Mississippi.