MISSISSIPPI: Awaiting Action

The trail of lynch law led from the mob murder of four Negroes on a lonely Georgia roadside (TIME, Aug. 5) to a Mississippi bayou deep in the land of Bilbo. There it was marked by the battered corpse of a Negro tenant farmer floating in the scum.

The body was what remained of 35-year-old Leon McAtee who had been locked up in Holmes County jail four days before on suspicion of stealing a saddle from a white planter named Jeff Dodd. After Dodd had pleaded that he needed McAtee to help harvest his corn crop, the sheriff released him to Dodd on payment of $15.25 jail costs. Then Jeff Dodd, his son and some neighbors led Leon McAtee down to the pasture.

With an inch-thick unstranded rope the white men in the pasture took turns at flogging their prisoner. McAtee’s wife, watching from a clump of bushes, finally saw her husband doubled up in a truck heading down the road. When the body of Leon McAtee floated up in the bayou later, it was 60 miles from the scene of the flogging.

Last week, after nearby Greenwood’s enterprising Morning Star had broken the story of Mississippi’s latest lynching, prosecutors in Holmes County (80% Negro) moved with commendable speed. Before a jampacked courtroom, District Attorney Harold Dyer Jr. accused Jeff Dodd, his son and three others of Leon McAtee’s murder. Said he: “The citizen of Holmes County holds a white man accountable if he commits a crime, the same as he holds a Negro accountable.”

At the end of a three-hour hearing (which disclosed that Leon McAtee had not stolen a saddle after all), the local judge freed each of the accused under $2,000 bond until a grand jury convenes in October.

Near Collins, Miss. Buddy Wolfe, a Negro, dropped in to a highway cafe for a cup of coffee. Deputy Sheriff John Lewis dropped in at the same time, opened the ice box and demanded to be sold four pounds of lard. Lewis thought he overheard someone in the cafe make a critical remark. In the scuffle that followed Buddy Wolfe, father of ten, went down under a blackjack, was shot thrice. Last week Lewis was also free under $2,000 bond. The charge: murder.