Doddsville, MS, February 7, 1903 – Jim Crow Laws were brutal by intention, the intention was to dehumanize African Americans in the most severe way possible. It wasn’t just prejudice by Whites; it was their emotional need to remind the Negro that they would never be equal to Whites and that Negroes were responsible for not only their lot in life but for the lower quality of life for all people of the south. For this reason, there were “Negro” laws in the deep south that were not really laws but unspoken extensions of the written laws, unspoken based on how a White person was affected and that were cruel and sadistic when enforced.
In Doddsville, as in all of Mississippi, cruelty was the point when Blacks stepped out of place or went against the culture standards of Whites. One of these being that there were Blacks who were more accepted and liked, “good niggers,” and others who were too independent and thus “bad niggers”
Luther Holbert was classified by many Whites as the latter, apparently because his employer, or the landowner he sharecropped for; there is no report that makes it clear what his actual status was, had grievances against him.
Holbert lived on and worked for a plantation owner named James Eastland. Newspaper accounts, and the later biography of Eastland’s nephew and namesake explains what the nature of the grievance was but that it involved the unnamed woman, generally referred to as Holbert’s wife, he lived with and that another Negro. It is hinted at that the other Black man was favored by Eastland who apparently gave his permission to pursue the woman.
It all seems melodramatic and sounds like a Shakespearean farce, but the core situation was extreme hatred and prejudice. Holbert was 52 years old and had been born in slavery but had only been given “freedom” as a concept nothing real and in the 40 years after the end of the Civil War was taught there was no prospect for a more successful life than what he had.
On the evening of February 5th Eastland and another Black man of his employee, Albert Carr, arrived at Holbert’s shack and ordered him off Eastland’s plantation. Once again, the newspapers aren’t informative of why this was happening or why Eastland had such dislike for Holbert. For that matter, the details are just presented without context, such as Eastland and Carr entered the shack and were shot in the head by Holbert. The newspaper accounts suggest there were facts everyone knew and it was unnecessary to report.
Eastland’s brother Woods quickly gathered a posse to find Holbert and the woman. The 50 men in the posse searched the roads between Doddsville and the Eastland plantation and the woods in between. At this time much of the Delta was still forested wilderness with only about 20% cleared for cotton and sugarcane farming. Still, Holbert didn’t go deep into the wilderness. Perhaps it was that there were savage wild hogs and panthers, bears and even wolves; regardless Holbert didn’t run and disappear into the wilderness. Tips came back to Woods Eastman and his posse, and they gathered more men as the day progressed and they gained hunting dogs from the new state prison at Parchman, an institution that would gain its own hellish reputation regarding race, to join the chase. At least two of these White mobs ran into two groups of Black farm laborers and ended up killing four of them for unreported reasons.
The Sunflower County region was gripped with Black fear and White terror when a Negro boy reported too two men, V.H. Lavender and E. L. O’Neal that he had just seen a couple sleeping on the ground in the woods. The two White men knew of the possess and the reported reward, so they went and captured the couple, which did turn out to be Holbert and the unnamed woman. Holbert didn’t even try to escape apparently exhausted from two days on the run. The two White men reportedly found $285, a Winchester rifle, a pistol and gold watch. A detail reported by the Vicksburg Evening Post a testament of how the most useless detail of a crime against a White man was more important than the name of a Black who was murdered in a field, the names of the Blacks killed in the man hunt were never reported,
The two men took Holbert to the Sunflower County Sheriff and turned he and his companion into custody. In a surprise he did not inform Eastland and when the mob appeared in the county seat, Indianola tried to convince them to let the law handle the case. Of course, that was a not going to happen with a mob approaching 1,000 now on hand.
The mob took them back to Doddsville and tied them to trees, for what became on of the most sadistic murders on record. Eastland had ordered a specific spot at the edge of the woods where the church Holbert attended and where is lodge held there meetings could clearly be seen, and where the murders could be seen. A message was being sent.
Eastland waited until midafternoon when he knew Sunday services were going on before he allowed the mob to begin, and then he ordered the couple burned alive. Before that though he allowed souvenir hunters to collect. They forced the couple to hold out their hands while they cut off their fingers at the joints and cut off their ears passing them out to the crowd. Then Eastland took a club and beat Holbert shattering his skull, knocking out an eye. The mob even tore off pieces of flesh with a corkscrew before finally allowing the fires to do the final work.
“It was a scene,” wrote a reporter from the Greenwood Commonwealth, “such as a man wants to witness once in each lifetime.”
The taking of souvenirs was not unusual in itself. One of the worst aspects of lynching from the 1890s to at least the 1920s was this gross and dehumanizing action. Also, a lynching in an area where the murder or the victim’s body would be seen by other Blacks was a consistent part of intention to intimidate by White mobs. Burning victims alive was much rarer, but not unheard of. However, the extremes of all three in the case of Luther Holbert and his female companion makes this incident standout historically.
What led to such a produced and brutal lynching is part of the unanswerable question that follows almost any murder. There seem to be two parallel stories as to what caused James Eastman to make threats to Holbert in the first place.
Historian and writer Dr. J. Todd Moye has produced strong evidence based on the 1900 and 1910 census that the woman who was murdered with Holbert was not his wife. Holbert was living in Doddsville, while his wife Anne and their children were living in the town of Forest 100 miles south. Were they separated or Did Holbert take a job on the Eastland Plantation in hopes of making more money to build a better future for his family. The family was still listed as living in Forest in 1910. Dr. Moye has also found that in the 1900 census Albert Carr had been married to Emma Carr and both are absent from the 1910 census, Holbert killed Albert Carr, was the woman with him on the run Emma Carr? Was the core of the dispute that this triangle was causing disruption on the plantation and got involved to settle it for his “Good Negro”? Obviously, it’s a patch of rumors that can’t be unwound 120 years after.
Interestingly the Black news magazine, “The Voice of the Negro” ran an entirely different story of what led to the horrible deaths. The Voice of the Negro had just started publication in January of 1904 in Atlanta. It was intended by its creators to become the black literary and political voice of the “New South” where equality was coming even as segregation stayed. The Voice of the Negro had a story about the lynching in which it was stated that a prominent White witness had brought forward information that Luther Holbert was a Black leader in the community and had been advising another Black man who was working off peonage on the Eastland Plantation to just run away. According to this prominent witness James Eastland had become violently angry over Holbert interfering in his business as the man being advised owed Eastland a great deal of money.
In this unique, otherwise unreported history, James Eastland had determined to kill Holbert and that is why he went to his house the evening he was killed. Reviewing the slim news of these events, including the brutal murders as reported over the few days of the drama, none of this was mentioned, and it seems the news magazine was pulling facts out of the Delta mud.
Regardless of the reasons for James Eastland disregard for Holbert, he wasn’t the man who directed the barbarous and sadistic lynching as if it were a dark Broadway play. Woods Eastland was known to be a domineering employer, husband and father, his attitude in this case appears to be one of absoluteness, that no Negro should even have a passing thought about disrespecting a White man, or even look at one.
The merciless way Woods Eastland took revenge for his brother’s death might have played a small part in him being arrested in September of 1904. Given the business status Eastland had in the community, both in Doddsville and 100 miles away in Forest it is shock that the sheriff of Sunflower County charged Eastland for, “Having caused Luther Holbert and his wife to be burned at the stake.” The state was apparently preparing to vigorously prosecute Woods Eastland so he hired what was a high-powered legal time for the time and place. His defense lawyer was Mississippi Senator, and former governor, Anselm J. McLaurin. Of course, the power of White Supremacy then stepped in and after the prosecution made their opening remarks McLaurin stepped up and asked for the case to be dismissed, and it was.
And so, it goes in the Deep South with Jim Crow
The story of Luther Holbert and the unnamed woman partly inspired the novel “The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist” by then well know minister, academic and novelist Sutton E. Griggs. The novel takes the basic events of the Holbert murder and uses them in his novel. Sutton was an African American who supported the NAACP and civil rights. The novel is graphic in its portrayals of events, Griggs stated it was written as a response to avowed racist and Klan myth maker Thomas Dixon’s “The Leopard’s Spots”. Sutton blamed Dixon for increasing the violence committed by Whites on Blacks. In an odd coincidence of history, Dixon stated he wrote his novel as a reply/reaction to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin” which Dixon found sympathetic to Blacks and not respectful enough for Whites or the Ante Bellum Plantation system. Sutton’s novel much like the writer himself are largely forgotten now, his style and technique didn’t translate even to African American readers in modern turns of the 20th Century.
In the end not only did Woods Eastland unforgiving savagery get dismissed; he triumphed in ways other Jim Crow murderers did not. His son was born in November 1904; he named the boy James after his brother. James Oliver Eastland went on to enter local and state politics which led to him being named a U.S. Senator in 1943, he served from 1943 until 1978 and he rose to become one of the most powerful of the southern block, consistently blocking civil rights legislation and being vocal in his resistance when he couldn’t. He became the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1956 from where was able to control several civil rights bills. He was also a military hawk opposed to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and arguing for military invasion of Cuba.
There are few cases that show the injustice of the monolith of White Supremacy in Mississippi as Holbert’s savage murder set against the long shadow of political power his murderer attained through his son.
Sources:
Moye, J. Todd. Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986. United Kingdom: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Moskowitz, Milton. Review of How the Negro Was Fitted for His Natural and Logical Calling, by Leon F. Litwack. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 21 (1998): 133–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/2999028.
Bloomfield, Maxwell. “Dixon’s ‘The Leopard’s Spots’: A Study in Popular Racism.” American Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1964): 387–401. https://doi.org/10.2307/2710931.
Palmer Jr., L.F., “Lynching: America’s Disgrace: Most Sadistic Murders” The Chicago Defender, page 17, September 12, 1959. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1139582087/
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