MISSISSIPPI: The Children’s Children

Davis Knight had lived in Mississippi all of his 23 years, except for three years in the Navy. He married blonde, blue-eyed Junie Lee Spradley and farmed a poor piece of land. One night the county police arrested him. Knight was a Negro, they said; Junie Lee was white. In Mississippi, that kind of marrying was against the law.

Knight said they were wrong. But a relative, irked by an old family feud, had dug up Davis Knight’s genealogy. His great-grandfather had been Cap’n Newt Knight, who deserted the Confederate Army and set up “The Free State of Jones” in Jones County. Cap’n Newt had had children by Rachel, a Negro slave girl. Rachel was Davis Knight’s great-grandmother.

Through succeeding generations the Knights had married white men or women. Davis Knight’s own parents had not known of the Negro strain in their ancestry. The story the relative dug up would affect a number of other families in the neighborhood, all sprung from the loins of Cap’n Newt and Rachel. Last week a court in Ellisville convicted Cap’n Newt’s great-grandson of miscegenation, sentenced him to five years in jail.