The Hanging Bridge at Shubuta

On the Chickasawhay River near the town of Shubuta in Clarke County, Mississippi, there stands a steel-framed bridge that has no plaque, no memorial, and no official recognition of what happened there. It is known, simply, as the Hanging Bridge. The name is not a metaphor.

On December twentieth, nineteen eighteen, two months after the end of World War One, a white mob hanged four Black residents of Clarke County from this bridge. Their names were Major Clark, Andrew Clark, Maggie Howze, and Alma Howze. Maggie and Alma Howze were young women, both pregnant at the time of their deaths. The NAACP sent an investigator named Walter White to Clarke County, a light-skinned Black man who posed as a white traveling salesman to gather evidence. No one was ever charged.

Twenty-four years later, in nineteen forty-two, in the middle of another world war, two Black teenagers were lynched from the same bridge. Again the NAACP investigated. Again the national press covered it. Again no one was prosecuted.

Historians who have studied the Shubuta lynchings describe them as deliberate acts of racial terrorism, spaced across a generation but identical in their purpose: to deter Black Mississippians from challenging the social order. Each atrocity happened at a moment of national crisis, when local whites perceived the established hierarchy to be under threat, from returning Black soldiers in nineteen eighteen, from wartime labor markets in nineteen forty-two.

The bridge still stands. The Chickasawhay River still flows beneath it. What happened here is documented, specific, and unreconciled.