Mississippi Burning

When twenty-two year old African American Lloyd Clay was strung up from an old elm tree, burned alive, and his body riddled with bullets by a white lynch mob of approximately one-thousand people on the corner of a major intersection in Vicksburg, Mississippi, nothing happened. Vicksburg in the year 1919 was typical of many other cities throughout the United States deep South. When Clay was unjustly crucified, no whites from the mob were put on trial; and there was no backlash or retaliation from the black Vicksburg citizenry. As a matter of fact, Clay's mother was even told by whites not to go to the morgue to identify her dead son's body; it would be best, they suggested, if she stayed out of it. This case study will specifically situate Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the lynching of Lloyd Clay within the context of the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, called by many historians, the Progressive Era. It will examine why black lynchings increased after slavery was constitutionally abolished and the Reconstruction Era in the American South came to an end. It will also juxtapose Mississippi lynchings, blamed for the maintenance of economical, political, and social white privilege, against the Progressive Era to show how those lynchings encumbered black economic, political, and social progress.