Last night, the Lafayette County Board of Supervisors delayed the approval of placing a marker dedicated to victims of lynching on the Lafayette County Courthouse lawn. https://twitter.com/DJournalnow/status/1336304168726892546

The marker lists seven names of people who are documented to have been lynched in the county. One supervisor, who is white, raised concerns that one of the men on the marker was "caught red handed" doing a violent act.

But the group advocating for the marker's placement said the larger point is the man, whether he was guilty or not, was never afforded due process under the law and a mob of white citizens took justice into their own hands to kill the man.

The main documentation of Lawson Patton is from newspaper articles of the day. But it doesn't take a history professor to know that newspapers in the early 1900s, especially in the deep South, often sensationalized and dehumanized African Americans who were accused of crimes.

According to the New York Times, W.V. Sullivan, a former U.S. Senator from Mississippi, instigated the mob an later said he was glad to have encouraged the lynching. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1908/09/09/105011229.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0

For a little over a year now, the Lynching Memorialization in Lafayette County has been worked to tell the stories of these lynching victims that have long been overlooked or covered up. https://www.djournal.com/news/local/lafayette-county-group-tells-overlooked-story-of-lynching-victim/article_309ce292-3428-5a03-9a26-bd31584bdd51.html