From “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future” by Robert P. Jones
White Mississippians retrenched and set out to regain with violence what they had lost at the ballot box. One of the bloodiest events occurred on September 4, 1875, in the Baptist college town of Clinton, home of my alma mater, Mississippi College. An estimated crowd of two thousand Black Republicans and their families gathered on the grounds of the former Moss Hill plantation for a barbecue and political rally, just ahead of the 1875 elections. Approximately seventy-five white supporters also attended. During a speech, several young white men from the nearby Raymond Democratic Club began to heckle the speaker. When Alex Wilson, a Black deputy, confronted them and attempted to arrest one of the men, they shot him. Then a white man in the crowd let out a rebel yell, shouting, “Fall in, you Raymond crowd!” Representative Eugene Welborned, an African American state representative and one of the rally organizers, testified that the white group moved into a military-like formation, brandished pistols, and opened fire on those assembled. “The thing opened just like lightning,” he recalled, “and the shot rained in there just like rain from heaven.” When the mayhem ended, five African Americans, including two children and one of Mississippi’s first Black state senators, and three white people were dead. Nearly thirty others were wounded.
The violence then spilled over across Warren and Hinds counties. Over the next few days, organized white mobs broke into homes and indiscriminately shot and killed as many as fifty African Americans in the surrounding area, along with a white schoolteacher working in the African American community. Representative Welborned testified that whites “just hunted the whole community clean out, just every [Black] man they could see they were shooting at him just the same as birds.