CHAPTER FIVE
Broken Promises
The man who expects to live until the timber is exhausted must think that he has a very long lease on life.
—Hattiesburg Daily Progress, 1902
No white Hattiesburg migrant found greater success than William Sion Franklin Tatum. Like many arrivals to the Hub City, W. S. F. Tatum came from an exceedingly difficult background. Born in 1858 into a struggling Tennessee farm family, his childhood was beset by the Civil War and its tragic aftermath. Tatum’s family lived only about twenty miles from the site of the Battle of Shiloh, where more than twenty-three thousand men were felled in the spring of 1862. One of his earliest childhood memories was of two aunts, both of whom had husbands fighting in the battle, rushing into the yard of his boyhood home “crying and wringing their hands.” The following year, the young boy lost his mother to disease. At the age of five, W. S. F. was held up to his mother’s deathbed and instructed to “kiss his dying mother goodbye.” He was six when the war ended, leaving behind a defeated and deprived region where Tatum spent the remainder of his youth.1
As the son of a widowed farmer, W. S. F. was needed to work in the fields as a child and rarely attended school. At the age of six, he was already “dropping corn and throwing cotton,” and by eight he was driving the plow. Eventually, Tatum’s father opened a small general store where W. S. F. worked through much of his adolescence. In 1879, Tatum was still working for his father when he met a local girl named Rebecca O’Neal at a holiday party. The pair began exchanging letters, which led to in-person visits and eventually marriage in the summer of 1881. When Rebecca became pregnant, Tatum arranged with his father to take over the family store, which he ran for the next eleven and a half years. Although they struggled at times, the store left them better off than most.2
W. S. F. Tatum. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
Sometime in 1892, Tatum learned of a promising new lumber town named Hattiesburg sprouting deep in the Mississippi Piney Woods. Having previously dabbled in the timber trade by selling logs on the land next to his store, Tatum was intrigued by the future prospects of the Southern lumber industry and journeyed about three hundred miles to inspect the area. He liked what he saw and decided to move his family to southern Mississippi. With the help of capital provided by his in-laws, Tatum bought a 2,200-acre plot along the tracks of the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad and erected a sawmill.3
Struggling against “many anxious days and nights,” W. S. F. slowly built a local lumber empire. The family lived frugally and used extra earnings to expand the company’s holdings. Tatum also made a shrewd entrepreneurial move by constructing a company town named Bonhomie near his sawmill. Employees of Tatum Lumber traded wages or borrowed against future pay in exchange for goods at the overpriced commissary (which some employees spitefully dubbed a “robbissary”), thus enabling their employer to profit off the very wages he paid them. As the local timber trade grew, Tatum Lumber did extremely well. Over the following years, the firm went on to acquire more than forty thousand acres and employ up to four hundred workers at a time. W. S. F. made a fortune. Having once earned $500 a year working for his father, Tatum by 1916 was worth more than $930,000 (nearly $20 million today). He became the city’s wealthiest resident and a two-time mayor.4
Thomas Smylie Jackson was another white Hattiesburg migrant who found prosperity near the turn of the century. The son of a prominent slave-owner, T. S. Jackson was born in Amite County, Mississippi, one year before the Civil War ended. Emancipation freed much of his father’s wealth and labor, forcing Jackson and his brothers to work in the fields. When asked later in life, Jackson classified the work as being “so hard he didn’t care to refer to it.” With six brothers, Jackson could not count on inheriting his father’s land, and so he pursued other interests. Soon after marrying his childhood sweetheart, he opened a little general store, and for a while he operated a small cotton gin.5
T. S. Jackson was in his mid-thirties when Hattiesburg started to boom in the early 1900s. At the time, virtually every newspaper in the region was gushing about the promise of this new city located deep in the Piney Woods. Wondering what opportunities might exist in the growing young town, Jackson examined Hattiesburg’s business community and discovered a need for a shoe store. In 1902, he moved his family to Hattiesburg and opened a new downtown shop. Soon thereafter, Jackson sold his shoe store and invested in a wholesale grocery company. This was a wise decision. Merchants Grocery Company filled the city’s growing need for a wholesale grocer. The company grew quickly. Within a few years, it moved into a new downtown building, expanded its cold-storage facilities, built warehouses in surrounding towns, and eventually added a cornmeal mill and mixed feed plant. As a founding partner, Jackson emerged as one of Hattiesburg’s leading white businessmen and most affluent citizens.6
Louis Faulkner traveled much further on his journey into the ranks of Hattiesburg’s white elite. Born in 1883, the Pennsylvania native started his adult life as a teacher but was quickly drawn out of the classroom by more lucrative opportunities. After just one year of teaching, the young man took an engineering job with a West Virginia railroad company. Faulkner was no engineer, but the line needed smart, educated men and offered him an entry-level position. This initial experience enabled Faulkner to secure a position with the Buffalo & Susquehanna Railroad, a syndicate of logging railroads operating in northern Pennsylvania and western New York. One of the Buffalo & Susquehanna Railroad’s best clients was the Pennsylvania lumber magnate Fenwick Peck.7
Peck was in the process of expanding his recently established Mississippi Central Railroad and needed experienced railroad men to oversee his growing operations in Mississippi. In 1905, Louis Faulkner secured one of these positions and moved south to work in the Mississippi Central’s office at Brookhaven. Over the subsequent years, he advanced in the company from level man to resident engineer to division engineer and eventually chief engineer. In 1912, he was promoted to general manager of the Mississippi Central, a job that brought him and his wife, Vera, to Hattiesburg. The Faulkners bought a house, had a baby, and began settling into comfortable lives among Hattiesburg’s prominent whites.8
Hattiesburg may have been founded by Captain Hardy and capitalized by Northerners, but local life was shaped by prominent white residents like W. S. F. Tatum, T. S. Jackson, and Louis Faulkner. Each man touched the city in different ways. Tatum was the primary benefactor of the Main Street Methodist Church, a major supporter of several local educational initiatives, and a patron of the Hattiesburg YMCA. T. S. Jackson was a longtime deacon in the Main Street Baptist Church and heavily involved with the Rotary Club and the Red Cross. Louis Faulkner was a Sunday school superintendent, deacon at the First Presbyterian Church, and a major supporter of the local Boy Scout troop. These prominent men participated in a variety of local initiatives based on their own particular values, interests, and goals. There was one group, however, that drew them all together: the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce.9
Originally established as the Commercial Club in 1906, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce operated with the stated goal to “promote the civic, economic and social welfare of the people of Hattiesburg and vicinity.” The organization typically included between 150 and 250 dues-paying members, but its leadership for decades was dominated by a core of about four dozen prominent white men.10
W. S. F. Tatum, T. S. Jackson, and Louis Faulkner each played crucial roles. Jackson was a founding member and served as its president between 1909 and 1911 and then secretary-manager throughout most of the 1920s. Faulkner served as president in 1920 and remained on the executive board for nearly twenty years. Tatum never formally headed the organization, but for decades he was a dues-paying member who worked very closely with the organization, especially during his mayoral terms. In 1929, his oldest son, West, was elected Chamber of Commerce president. Another son later served as vice president.11
Comprised of an elite body of white men—bankers, politicians, businessmen, and the editor of the Hattiesburg American—the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce exerted influence over virtually every aspect of local life, ranging from municipal expenditures to local elections to media coverage. It was the Chamber of Commerce that convinced Fenwick Peck to rebuild J. J. Newman Lumber in the Hub City after the fires of 1903 and 1908; that helped persuade the Mississippi Normal College board to locate the state’s new teacher school in Hattiesburg; that wrote a report advising white employers how to handle the mass departures of black workers in 1917 and 1918; that used personal connections in 1917 to help convince General Leonard Wood to establish an Army training base just outside the city. And it was the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce that scrambled to save the city in the mid-1920s when things suddenly took a turn for the worse.12
For most of the early migrants, life in Hattiesburg revolved around wages. By 1920, Hattiesburg’s manufacturing establishments were paying a combined average of $86,500 per month in wages, approximately one-third of which came from J. J. Newman Lumber. Thousands of workers and their families carved lives out of those wages. Wages paid for coffee, milk, flour, sugar, coats, shoes, and coal. Wages provided for church donations, doctor visits, haircuts, and clean laundry. Wages bought Coca-Colas, ice cream floats, hats, and stationery. Perhaps most importantly, wages funded the unforgettable moments that enriched their working-class lives—weddings, anniversaries, graduations, vacations, and the births of their children. Most people in Hattiesburg did not have much, but whatever they did have was provided by those wages. Earned hour-by-hour and day-after-day, the wages of the New South were a foundation, a promise, even an identity. But then something went horribly wrong.13
On January 2, 1924, officials at the Hattiesburg J. J. Newman Lumber Company sawmill announced the termination of the third shift, meaning hundreds of layoffs and the reduction of the company’s payroll by about a third. Newman was not alone. Other mills experienced similar layoffs or closed entirely, leading to a decline of wages and commercial activity that started pulling Hattiesburg’s economy into a downward spiral.14
The origins of Hattiesburg’s recession were far less complex than that of the major recession that eventually affected the rest of the United States. As one resident later explained, “We would have had a depression here in the late 1920s [even] if all of the rest of the world had been prosperous.” Hattiesburgers could find the roots of their economic woes in the areas just outside the city. All they had to do was take a walk in the woods. Vast swaths of the forest were simply gone.15
There had been prior warnings. As early as 1903, an official for the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad told the Wall Street Journal, “The forests are being rapidly destroyed and a period will soon be reached when the operation of the road will be unprofitable.” Three years later, the conservationist Gifford Pinchot stood with National Lumber Manufacturers’ Association president N. W. McLeod and cautioned American lumbermen that “there is less than twenty years supply of Yellow Pine in the South.” President Theodore Roosevelt, among many others, also chimed in. “If the present rate of forest destruction is allowed to continue,” Roosevelt warned the American Forest Congress in 1905, “a timber famine is obviously inevitable.” Some Southern lumber firms did practice conservation. Near the turn of the century, a group of Alabama lumbermen proposed minimum price scales to ensure fair competition and to encourage conservation, and more than three hundred sawmills in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina agreed to run at two-thirds capacity.16
But there was little conservation in southern Mississippi. Most of the Northern lumbermen who came to Mississippi tore through the Piney Woods with the discretion of a lawnmower. Trees that had survived untouched for hundreds of years were chopped down or bled for their sap. Lumber railroads used large cranes known as skidders to pull fallen timbers through the forest like dragnets, trampling young saplings in their path. The railroads ensured access to every patch of forest, and steam technology offered unprecedented levels of production.17
The sawmills harvested lumber at astonishing rates. At its height, the J. J. Newman Lumber Company produced approximately 200 million board feet of lumber per year. To put that into perspective, 200 million board feet is enough timber to erect a three-foot-tall wooden fence around the entire coastline of the United States of America, including Alaska and Hawaii. And that was merely one year in one sawmill. J. J. Newman was Mississippi’s most productive sawmill, but by 1910, the state had over sixteen hundred others. Between 1905 and 1925, those sawmills produced more than forty-five billion board feet of lumber. At some point, they were simply bound to run out of trees.18
New trees could be planted, but virgin forests like the one Captain Hardy traversed in the summer of 1880 are irreplaceable. Even if the sawmill companies had immediately begun planting trees (which they did not), it would have taken a hundred years or more for the new trees to grow as large as the ones they cut down. According to a 1929 study conducted by the Mississippi State Forestry Commission, an eighty-year-old longleaf pine forest can produce up to 33,500 board feet per acre. At forty years old, a forest can produce about 11,000 board feet per acre. At twenty, the potential productivity plummets to approximately 1,000 board feet per acre. In describing the old forest, one resident remembered, “When I was a boy it wasn’t anything unusual to see a log that was six feet in diameter, or eight feet, or something like that.” To this day, the people of the Mississippi Piney Woods have never again seen longleaf pines that size.19
By 1930, Mississippi’s original longleaf pine forest had been reduced from 11.7 million to 2.6 million acres. One of the last great forests east of the Mississippi River, the Mississippi Piney Woods had essentially been destroyed in just over three decades. Lumber production rapidly declined. In 1925, Mississippi’s lumber industry produced more than 3.1 billion board feet. By 1932, that figure dropped to roughly 531 million feet—an 83 percent decrease in only seven years.20
Ultimately, Northern lumbermen like Fenwick Peck cared little about the Mississippi Piney Woods or the sustainability of its forests. Peck owned sawmills in three other states. When the trees were felled, he was prepared to simply move on to the next forest. It was a classic case of cut-out and get-out, a cruel but common tactic that left behind heartbroken communities and destroyed forests across America. “When the timber was gone,” Hattiesburg native Buck Wells bitterly remembered, “they folded up their carpetbags and left.” For the sawmill workers of the Piney Woods, a way of life hung in the balance.21
In 1923, workers at Hattiesburg’s J. J. Newman Lumber sawmill earned nearly $360,000 in wages. When the layoffs went into effect the following year, the payroll dropped to just over $236,000. This payroll remained about the same for the next five years, but by 1930, it was clear to virtually everyone that the mill would soon cut out. In 1929, T. S. Jackson predicted that “the Newman Lumber Company at Hattiesburg has only about two and one-half years cut.” “We will have a thousand men seeking employment,” Jackson warned his colleagues. The final years at J. J. Newman Lumber were characterized by declining hours and widespread layoffs. Many of the employees who were lucky enough to keep their jobs were forced to travel up to fifty miles to work. But even these unsteady arrangements lasted only a few years. In 1935, after forty-one years of operation, J. J. Newman Lumber shut its doors for good.22
There was a time in early Hattiesburg history when up to one-fourth of the city’s population either worked at J. J. Newman Lumber or lived with someone who did. As one local historian noted, for some Hattiesburg boys, “working for the Newman Lumber Company had been ordained from childhood.” That opportunity was never again to be. And Newman was just one example. Layoffs occurred in every sawmill, and many closed. In a short span of time, the nearby firms of Ferguson Lumber, James Hand Lumber, Helen White Lumber, Love Lumber, Nortac Manufacturing, Red Creek Lumber, and the Major-Sowers Saw Mill Company all ceased production. Precise employment figures for each mill are unavailable, but the closing of Major-Sowers alone cost Hattiesburg approximately three hundred jobs. Even Tatum Lumber would eventually cut out, leaving about four hundred men with no work. In Hattiesburg, the closing of the mills signified the start of the Great Depression. “They cut all the timber,” remembered Henry Watson, the son of a J. J. Newman employee. “That brought the Depression, that made a depression. There wasn’t nothing else for nobody to do. It just wasn’t no more jobs.”23
The timber decline affected virtually every other industry, especially the logging railroads, which were also hurt by the emergence of automobiles. Rapidly losing revenue, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad sold out to the Illinois Central in 1925. The Mississippi Central Railroad, whose annual lumber freight declined from over 500,000 tons in 1925 to less than 175,000 tons by 1931, laid off hundreds of workers and ended passenger service on some existing routes. Dozens of other timber-related companies laid off their workers or closed for good. The closing of the Hattiesburg Veneer Plant left behind $75,000 in lost payroll. The layoffs affected almost every local business. Merchants who had for years depended on sawmill workers as customers suddenly found their revenues slashed.24
As the 1920s wore on, signs of the oncoming depression could be seen across Hattiesburg. Jobless men from nearby lumber towns began entering the Hub City, camping under railroad bridges and begging for food at people’s back doors. According to the son of a local attorney, some doctors and lawyers were forced to begin accepting “potatoes and hams and turnip greens” in exchange for medical and legal services. Downtown stores that had operated for decades held liquidation sales and closed for good. The Hotel Hattiesburg, for decades the city’s finest guesthouse and restaurant, was hit by a string of robberies and ultimately defaulted on its taxes in the late 1920s. The Hub City even lost its semi-pro baseball team, the Pinetoppers, whose owners moved the club to Baton Rouge when they could not meet payroll because of declining attendance. In one of the cruelest incidents of the era, the body of a dead white infant was discovered floating amid piles of wood in Gordon’s Creek during the fall of 1928. A coroner’s report revealed that the poor child’s head had been crushed before the body was dumped into the creek. The murder was not necessarily related to the recession, but it was impossible to ignore the context. Tragedies mounted as the promises of the New South came undone.25
The Chamber of Commerce mobilized to save Hattiesburg. The worst of the sawmill layoffs would not come until the 1930s, but by the close of the 1920s, it was clear that if the town were to survive, it needed to replace the declining number of jobs in the lumber industry. “Unless Hattiesburg brings new industrial plants, new capital, more payrolls, increasing your taxable values, the result is sure,” T. S. Jackson warned his Chamber of Commerce colleagues. “Hattiesburg, the city that you love so well, will no longer be prosperous, but will decline from year to year until we will be like unto a deserted saw mill town.”26
Such a solution would require outside help. Although the Chamber of Commerce was composed of Hattiesburg’s wealthiest white citizens, this group did not possess the capital to establish new industries on its own. “There are few business men in Hattiesburg who are clear of debt,” explained one local banker. “We do not possess wealthy citizens.” Like the previous generation of white developers operating in southern Mississippi, this group also desperately needed the help of Yankees.27
Not all the news was bad. There were a few promising recent developments. As lumber production declined, a small number of innovative companies began finding new ways to produce timber products. By the late 1920s, Hattiesburg’s manufacturing community had added several newer companies, including a creosoting plant, a pine felt plant, and several sawmills that converted production to naval stores.28
The Hercules Powder Company was the largest and most important of these new manufacturers. A Delaware-based chemical firm that opened a large factory in Hattiesburg in 1923, Hercules actually benefitted from the destruction of the Mississippi Piney Woods. They were most interested in Mississippi’s tree stumps. The company helped pioneer a steam-solvent process that produced turpentine by collecting and distilling the vapor from leftover sap found in the stumps. “You could see for yourself that literally billions of old stumps were available,” explained a company official of the region’s appeal. Hercules purchased cut-over land from J. J. Newman Lumber for as little as 75¢ an acre and established a new plant about a mile from downtown Hattiesburg. The company employed over four hundred workers through much of the Great Depression.29
The new firms offered some jobs but had a fairly limited effect on the local economy. Their combined workforces never approached the number of people once employed at J. J. Newman Lumber, let alone the total number of other laid-off sawmill employees. Moreover, their impact was also stymied by an expanding labor pool. As dozens of sawmills cut out across the Mississippi Piney Woods, thousands of laid-off workers poured into Hattiesburg from dying lumber towns across the region. Hattiesburg’s population expanded by more than 40 percent during the 1920s. The Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce sought to not only replace the lost sawmill jobs but to add as many new positions as possible to help meet the growing demand for work.30
Seeking to attract external investors, the Chamber of Commerce worked to promote the desirability of the region and its population. The organization formed a publicity committee that spent $750 to publish fifteen thousand copies of a sixteen-page pamphlet titled “Introducing Hattiesburg: ‘The Hub’ of South Mississippi,” which was mailed to businesses and municipal leaders across the United States. Dedicated to “disseminating plain facts,” the publication outlined Hattiesburg’s merits as a potential site for new industries. The brochure highlighted Hattiesburg’s strategic geography and climate and showcased the local workers, schools, railroad lines, highways, retail stores, and churches. Each description was accompanied by a serene image depicting life in Hattiesburg.31
Hercules Powder Company. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
The Chamber of Commerce formed a bevy of committees to execute its mission. Along with the publicity committee, other committees included municipal affairs, industrial affairs, county affairs, mercantile, agricultural, airport, conventions, building, canning plant, local finance, federal soldiers home, and the brick, tile, and pottery factory committee—each charged with formulating proposals to solicit external investment capital. Various other impromptu committees were formed to work with specific companies. And several additional ad hoc committees hosted visiting potential investors or traveled to special events such as industry or trade conventions.32
From afar, the early Chamber of Commerce committee work appears both desperate and dull. The organization’s records are filled with dozens of far-reaching proposals and unsolicited correspondence, including an initiative to persuade Detroit automaker Henry Ford to establish a vocational training school in Hattiesburg; an effort to convince a Navy official that Hattiesburg would be an ideal location for a naval air base; a proposal for a federally funded narcotics farm; a political lobbying campaign designed to convince the state legislature to appropriate $950,000 for new facilities at the state normal college; and a series of schemes aimed at securing new industries such as a silk-weaving plant, a hosiery manufacturer, and a garment factory. None of these came to fruition. At best, they were overly ambitious. At worst, they resembled begging.33
The most desperate appeal of the era came from F. W. Foote, president of the Hattiesburg First National Bank. During an effort to raise capital to subsidize a new factory, Foote decided to ask J. J. Newman Lumber Company president Fenwick Peck to invest $3,000. To ensure the appropriateness of such a request, Foote asked Louis Faulkner to review his appeal to Peck. Faulkner, by then a high-ranking employee of Peck’s Mississippi Central Railroad, was as well positioned as any Hattiesburg resident to correspond with Peck. The two men regularly exchanged letters and even Christmas gifts; in fact, Faulkner had received Peck’s Christmas gifts of a pair of neckties just a few weeks prior to Foote’s request. With Faulkner’s blessing, Foote submitted his request to Peck, confessing, “It is always embarrassing to me to be appointed to call on friends for money.” There is no record of Peck’s reply, but he appears to have chafed at the request, even going so far as to scold Hub City residents during his annual trip to Hattiesburg the following year for what he perceived to be a lack of local initiative. “The great trouble with people in south Mississippi,” Peck chided a local audience, “is that they sit around on a gallery and say what ought to be done without showing any disposition to do it.”34
The Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce did try to achieve some things on its own. Most visibly, it worked hard to inject the city with a sense of optimism. The editor of the Hattiesburg American, himself a dues-paying member of the Chamber of Commerce, invited his colleagues to contribute reassuring updates about the organization’s program for economic recovery. Even in the midst of the recession, locals on almost any day could pick up a copy of the Hattiesburg American and find encouraging stories about the city’s bright future.35
The most concerted attempt at optimism occurred in 1928, when the Chamber of Commerce helped publish a special “Club and Achievement Edition” of the Hattiesburg American. With the headline “City and County Move toward Destiny of Greatness,” the issue fondly retold the story of Hattiesburg’s emergence from a “struggling village” to a “rapidly growing industrial center.” Dozens of feature articles invoked the “dream” of Captain William Harris Hardy and his sagacious visions for the future of southern Mississippi. T. S. Jackson composed a special article outlining the contributions of the Chamber of Commerce. Other leading white men contributed pieces on the city’s history, growth, and promising future.36
That same year, members of the Chamber of Commerce sold municipal bonds to finance the construction of a new downtown hotel. In their minds, this new venture would impress visiting potential investors and help Hattiesburg “become a tourist center.” W. S. F. Tatum, several of his children, and Louis Faulkner were all major investors. Opening in 1929, the Forrest Hotel was an impressive nine-story brick tower featuring chevron-and-lozenge molding and four large, open-winged eagles that adorned each corner of the building’s top floor. It was indeed a beautiful building, but the hotel did not help boost the local economy in the way the Chamber of Commerce had envisioned. The construction jobs were only temporary, and the hotel did not reach even a 50 percent occupancy rate for its first ten years. During its first five years of operation, the company lost an average of $15,500 per year.37
During that same autumn of 1928, W. S. F. Tatum responded to popular demand by announcing his candidacy for mayor of Hattiesburg. Having previously held and then lost reelection to that same office, Tatum ran unopposed. Many locals saw Tatum’s own financial success as a model for the entire city. In their view, his rise to prominence from a country-store owner to major industrialist epitomized the ingenuity, resolve, and innovation that Hattiesburg needed if it was to restore its once promising future. “He had the vision to see opportunities and the courage to seize them,” the Hattiesburg American editorialized. “The story of Mr. Tatum’s success … points the way to useful achievements to others.” Just days after W. S. F. Tatum’s victory, his oldest son, West, was elected as the new president of the Chamber of Commerce.38
By the time of Tatum’s election in December of 1928, the Chamber of Commerce did finally have one promising lead. Since the previous summer, the organization had been engaged in serious talks with an Arkansas firm named the Tuf-Nut Garment Manufacturing Company. Tuf-Nut, which had recently opened branch factories in McComb, Mississippi; Wichita, Texas; and Columbia, Tennessee, was looking to add another plant. The company anticipated that the new factory would employ approximately two hundred people (mostly women) and provide a total annual payroll of “about $120,000.” This factory alone could not save Hattiesburg, but at that point, this was the city’s most promising proposition. When T. S. Jackson called a meeting to examine the “financial and moral standing” of the Arkansas company, he emphasized to his colleagues that “this is the most important meeting that has been called since I have been secretary of the Chamber of Commerce.” After a thorough investigation of the company, including a trip to Little Rock by T. S. Jackson, members of the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce decided to proceed with negotiations.39
Just three days after Tatum’s mayoral victory, Tuf-Nut Garment Manufacturing president R. A. Nelson visited Hattiesburg. Understanding that Hattiesburg was somewhat desperate, the Tuf-Nut president negotiated from a position of strength. According to the Hattiesburg American, Nelson “made it clear that he was in Hattiesburg by invitation and not to beg or solicit but to make a business offer.”40
After meeting with the Chamber of Commerce board of directors, Nelson attended a town-hall meeting at which he presented the company’s terms. To locate a new factory in Hattiesburg, Tuf-Nut required the city to raise $75,000 in capital stock subscriptions and procure a two-story brick building of at least 22,500 square feet. Hattiesburg leaders tentatively agreed to the terms. W. S. F. Tatum and his son West vowed to finance the new factory building at an estimated cost of $35,000, and several other prominent white men, including Louis Faulkner, signed pledge cards vowing to help raise $75,000 of capital stock. The stock, they estimated, would provide 7 percent dividends after three to five years.41
As Christmas approached, members of the Chamber of Commerce scurried to secure stock subscriptions. Individuals pledged whatever they could afford and urged friends and neighbors to do the same. Four days after R. A. Nelson’s visit, a crew of thirty “volunteer stock salesmen” met at the Chamber of Commerce’s downtown offices to participate in an organizing session and pep rally before pouring out in a citywide canvassing effort. Each man was armed with a book of $125 stock certificates and backed by the economic and moral pretext that all sales would help save their beloved city.42
By December 22, the Chamber of Commerce had secured a reported $40,000 in pledges, more than half the total amount of capital stock required to underwrite the factory. Pleased with their effort, the organization decided to take a Christmas break before making what West Tatum dubbed one “final charge to victory.” “The good old ‘Hattiesburg Spirit’ still lives and wins,” he said encouragingly.43
But then a dramatic event occurred that threatened to disrupt their entire campaign. On the day after Christmas, amid an epic public-relations campaign to recruit new industries by highlighting the merits of their city, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce suddenly found itself forced to contend with a lynching.
At about midnight on December 26, approximately a dozen white men knocked on the front door of a black man named Emmanuel McCallum. A twenty-eight year-old laborer at a local garage, McCallum lived with his wife Mary and daughter in a small black neighborhood just south of downtown Hattiesburg. Mary answered the door to find the group of white men demanding entrance in the name of the law. She probably knew these men were lying, but she was powerless to deny them entry. The intruders stormed through the house and found McCallum sleeping in his undershorts. They dragged him from the home, pulled him into one of their two cars, and sped off into the night.44
Six weeks earlier, Emmanuel McCallum had helped a thirty-eight-year-old white clothing merchant named William D. Easterling pull a car out of a ditch. Easterling, who hailed from a long legacy of farmers, had been one of the ambitious white migrants who left behind a life on the farm to pursue opportunity in the Hub City. He had arrived in Hattiesburg during the lumber boom and opened a successful downtown clothing shop. The business had done well, enabling Easterling to purchase a modest home in one of Hattiesburg’s middle-class white neighborhoods. By the time of his roadside encounter with McCallum, Easterling had owned the store for more than eleven years.45
The precise details of this roadside exchange are unavailable, but the interaction led to some type of conflict, probably related to payment, that ultimately resulted in the black man striking the white man. Easterling reported the incident to the local sheriff, and McCallum was arrested. But then Easterling refused to press charges, resulting in the eventual release of McCallum. The black man left town for a few days to let tensions calm before eventually returning to his job at a garage on Main Street.46
Over the next several weeks, Easterling began harassing the black mechanic. He twice appeared at the Main Street garage, where he tried to convince McCallum’s white boss to let him take custody of the black employee. On another occasion, he and an unidentified group of white men arrived on McCallum’s doorstep only to be rebuffed by a collection of black men waiting with guns. McCallum appealed to local officials for protection, but the authorities appear not to have taken any steps to ensure his safety. When another group of white men appeared at the McCallum home on the night after Christmas in 1928, there were no black men waiting with guns to drive them away.
The white men drove McCallum to a nearby gravel pit and tied a noose around his neck. They slung the other end of the rope over a low pine-tree branch and began to pull. Of two common methods to kill someone by hanging, this is the least humane. Because McCallum was lifted rather than dropped, the noose did not kill him by instantly breaking his neck, as in jailhouse executions. Instead, McCallum dangled alive from the branch, struggling to breathe as he stared out into the faces of his killers. Losing oxygen, he slipped out of consciousness and then died of asphyxiation.
McCallum’s body was found the next morning still hanging from the tree. A group of bystanders gathered to look at the corpse. When a photographer from the Hattiesburg American arrived to snap a picture, someone in the crowd reportedly said, “It ought to be against the law to take pictures of anything like that.” A local law enforcement official joked, “He’s a good nigger now.” Later that day, a coroner’s jury visited the scene of the lynching and returned a verdict of “death at the hands of parties unknown.”47
Two days after the lynching, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce called an emergency meeting of local citizens to address the murder. A downtown auditorium swelled with “between 125 and 150” of the city’s most “honest, law-abiding, God-fearing, determined men,” reported the Hattiesburg American. A group of local white ministers condemned the killing. The all-white Hattiesburg Ministers Association issued a statement reading, “The Christian sensibilities of our community have been outraged by an atrocious murder disguised as a lynching.” Reverend Joseph Smith of the Main Street Baptist Church demanded justice. “I am painfully tired of these perfunctory verdicts of coroners’ juries,” he said. “I want the cowardly, cringing, white-livered, yellow-blooded scoundrels arrested and convicted.”48
The Chamber of Commerce resolved to act. Well-versed in committee work, the organization formed a special committee to respond to the lynching. Louis Faulkner was selected to serve as its chairman. The committee passed a series of six resolutions, including an official condemnation of the act, a formal recording of the town’s “sense of shame,” a pledge to underwrite “the expenditure of any funds necessary for the apprehension and conviction of the guilty parties,” and a call for a special grand jury investigation. These resolutions were published in the Hattiesburg American, and copies were sent to various city leaders and to Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo, a notorious white supremacist who routinely defended the practice of lynching throughout his political career. (There is no record of his response.) The Chamber of Commerce also began collecting donations to pay for McCallum’s funeral. Then they announced an effort to raise a reward of several thousand dollars for information leading to the “apprehension and conviction” of the men who killed Emmanuel McCallum.49
By the late 1920s, anti-lynching sentiment among white civic leaders was not especially unusual. Religious groups, including the YMCA and YWCA, commonly criticized the immorality of mob violence, and even a handful of the state’s white politicians condemned the practice. Much of their rhetoric, though, was motivated by national efforts to pass anti-lynching legislation that would expand the jurisdiction of federal investigators to investigate Southern lynchings. If lynching became a federal crime, then white Southern prosecutors, sheriffs, and grand juries would no longer be able to protect participants in lynch mobs by declaring lack of evidence or simply ignoring murders. And because the cases would fall under federal jurisdiction, investigations would be led by federal agents and trials would take place in federal circuit courts as opposed to Southern county courthouses, where all-white juries regularly acquitted murderers despite often overwhelming evidence. Anti-lynching legislation was eventually defeated. But one bill—the Dyer Bill—did pass the House of Representatives, alarming some Southern politicians enough to compel them to speak out against lynching in an effort to curb mob rule and thereby limit the need for federal intervention.50
The Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce, however, had other concerns. Emmanuel McCallum was the fourth man to be lynched in Hattiesburg during the 1920s, but none of the earlier murders had drawn such a widespread public response. Regardless of any personal attitudes toward lynching, Chamber of Commerce leaders worried about how their city’s image would affect their pursuit of external capital. By the end of 1928, Hattiesburg’s leaders understood that potential investors did not want to send executives, products, and capital to unstable communities susceptible to mob rule. Nor did potential investors want to hire murderers to run their new factories. From the perspective of the Chamber of Commerce, lynching was simply bad for business.
Prominent members of the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce explained how the murder negatively affected their efforts to save the Hub City. “I have told interested people that they would find the Hub City as educational center, a cultural center, a moral, law-abiding community,” T. S. Jackson lamented. “This terrible crime has upset everything the Chamber of Commerce has done for the last five years.” Louis Faulkner echoed a similar sentiment. “We might as well cease all stockraising efforts, stop our work to build a bigger Hattiesburg,” Faulkner said, “unless we can build a better Hattiesburg and make this town safe.” A Hattiesburg American editorial reinforced the concern: “Recognition of the fact that law and order is the primary requirement of community life means that as Hattiesburg’s Chamber of Commerce seeks for new factories, it also seeks to strengthen the moral fibre of the community.” “Commercial growth and moral advancement,” the paper stressed, “go hand in hand.”51
Hattiesburg judge Robert S. Hall answered the Chamber of Commerce call for a special grand jury investigation. At that time in Mississippi, grand juries were still used to investigate unsolved crimes or public complaints. West Tatum, just days away from assuming the presidency of the Chamber of Commerce, was appointed foreman of the grand jury. Members of the grand jury spent four days poring over evidence and interviewing forty-two witnesses in their search to uncover the identity of the “parties unknown.”52
These responses drew a great deal of attention in the national media. Mississippi was infamous for its racial violence, and many outsiders viewed these actions as promising signs of a possible decline of lynchings in the Magnolia State. An Associated Press story about the promised reward for information leading to conviction was carried in dozens of newspapers across the country. Other coverage highlighting the efforts of the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce appeared in major media outlets such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Constitution, and African American newspapers in Chicago, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. In a special editorial, the New York Times highlighted a segment from a Hattiesburg American editorial and praised local residents for “beginning to take up that State’s lynching habit from an angle typical of the age in which we live.” Even the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s boldest critics of white Southerners, applauded the effort in Hattiesburg. “Time was when Mississippi led America in the drive for the yearly lynch record and was proud of it,” editorialized the Defender. “It is inspiring to see those same white people up in arms and obviously serious about catching the persons responsible. Mississippi may be making progress toward civilization after all.”53
Locally, the Hattiesburg American similarly praised the grand jury investigation. On January 10, it ran the headline “Grand Jurors Condemn M’Callum Lynchers” and celebrated West Tatum as a “worthy successor” to the presidency of the Chamber of Commerce. Judge Hall congratulated members of the grand jury for their efforts, telling them, “your searching investigation will make lynchers think twice before they take a human life and will go a long way toward checking mob violence in this part of the state.” The Hattiesburg American concluded that “the mass meeting of outraged citizens, the strong charge of Judge Hall, the searching and determined investigation of the grand jury and its stinging condemnation of this lynching—all these mark important steps in the molding of an overpowering public sentiment against mob murders.”54
But they did not take the final and most important step. No one was ever indicted for the murder of Emmanuel McCallum, a fact that reveals a sobering incongruity between public sentiment and legal action. At least one suspect could have been identified without question. Mounds of evidence pointed to the involvement of William Easterling. Testimonies provided by Hattiesburg sheriff Bud Gray and McCallum’s employer Charlie Ross offered a clear motive and indicated at least three separate incidents in which Easterling had tried to abduct Emmanuel McCallum. Yet Easterling was neither arrested nor charged.55
It is also worth scrutinizing the role of the Chamber of Commerce, especially the organization’s purported reward for the “apprehension and conviction” of the killers. At least one media outlet reported that the organization was prepared to offer a reward as high as $20,000. Such an amount is preposterous. In fact, it is extremely doubtful that the organization ever intended to issue any reward at all. Even if it wanted to, the Chamber of Commerce simply did not have the money. One member pledged $1,000, but a closer look at the organization’s records reveals that it was broke. When the reward was offered, the organization had less than $130 in its bank account, the same account it had overdrawn by $100 the year before. And even if it could have somehow miraculously raised several thousand dollars in a week, the possibility that the Chamber of Commerce would have used this money as a reward in a murder case, especially in the middle of its efforts to raise money for Tuf-Nut capital stock, is unimaginable, as is the chance that it would ever have handed over such a large reward to a black informant, should one have come forward. In the end, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce was far more concerned with appearances than justice.56
But the murder did carry some consequences for one of its likely perpetrators. Although William Easterling never faced a murder charge, his role in the McCallum lynching appears to have dramatically altered his life. Within days of the grand jury investigation, Easterling suddenly sold the clothing store that he had owned for over eleven years. Little is known about the details of the sale, but the timing certainly suggests a connection to the murder. The sale was announced in a front page story in the Hattiesburg American, which reminded readers of Easterling’s initial dispute with McCallum. The story also reported that Easterling was leaving Hattiesburg for good. This turned out to be inaccurate; though he may have left for a brief period, Easterling soon returned to Hattiesburg, where he lived until his death in 1971. He worked a variety of jobs over the following years, but he never again owned his own store. That part of his life was over.57
On the day before Easterling sold his store, the Hattiesburg American announced the return of Tuf-Nut president R. A. Nelson. The Chamber of Commerce had completed its stock-raising effort soon after the New Year and was ready to sign a deal with the company. By mid-January, everything seemed in place. During the visit, Nelson and Mayor W. S. F. Tatum visited prospective sites for the new Tuf-Nut factory. On January 16, the Hattiesburg American told readers that the factory would open within three months. Nelson did not sign the final agreement during this trip, but the American assured readers that he would return “in about 10 days, when formal commitments will be signed.”58
But Nelson never did return, and Hattiesburg never got its new Tuf-Nut factory. After stringing the city along over the ensuing weeks and months, Tuf-Nut informed the Chamber of Commerce in April it was no longer interested in establishing a new factory in Hattiesburg. Company officials explained that they were concerned about expanding too quickly and had decided to slow down. It is unknown if any other factors affected their decision. In any case, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce had failed in its first serious attempt to attract a major new employer.59
Regardless of the reasons behind Tuf-Nut’s retreat, the local reaction to the McCallum murder offers two important lessons related to the future of the relationship between economic development and racial violence in Hattiesburg. First, the local response to the lynching clearly demonstrated an awareness of outside perception and an understanding that racial violence could undermine efforts to attract jobs. Second, although some white citizens would have sympathized with Easterling’s actions, virtually all local white residents would have come to understand that such acts of violence that threatened to put “a stain upon the fair name of Forrest County,” as the grand jury concluded, could jeopardize their own standing in the community. Although Easterling was never indicted, his financial fate did serve as a clear deterrent for any citizen, especially businessmen, who did not want to risk social and or financial ostracism for their role in a lynching.60
The lynching of Emmanuel McCallum was the last of its kind in Hattiesburg. Other African Americans were later murdered by white assailants, and in the late 1960s, a black civil rights leader was assassinated by a group of Klansmen, several of whom were later convicted of murder. But the classic form of New South lynching—premeditated and unprosecuted mob-based capital punishment—never again occurred in the Hub City. The ending of this type of lynching in Hattiesburg was not the result of black activism or any type of moral or religious crusade. Nor did it necessarily represent a major alteration to the socioeconomic underpinnings of Jim Crow. Rather, this change was a product of the economic realities facing white Hattiesburg leaders. Although their reaction to the McCallum murder left much to be desired, it also clearly indicated that whites who engaged in the most severe acts of racial violence could face consequences. Offenders might not be imprisoned, but they also could not count on the complete immunity of previous eras.61
Little is known about how local African Americans felt about the lynching investigation of Emmanuel McCallum. Over half a century later, Hammond Smith remembered, “They had a big investigation and all this. But they ended up doing nothing.” Yet Smith also remembered the McCallum murder as Hattiesburg’s “last lynching.” The fear of a lynch mob could never be fully dissipated for most African Americans. All black Mississippians grew up hearing stories of lynch mobs. And lynchings did continue in other parts of the state. During the 1930s, fifty African Americans were lynched in Mississippi. Nevertheless, in Hattiesburg, the nature of racial violence had clearly changed since the era when thousand-person mobs gathered to publicly torture and kill black people.62
Hattiesburg’s next opportunity to secure a major new employer did not come again until the fall of 1932. Just weeks before company officials visited the city, a white man named J. P. Lee shot and killed a black man named Leroy Ward in southern Forrest County. After a short investigation, Lee, a notorious bootlegger, was arrested and charged with murder. During the subsequent trial, Lee’s four-man defense team argued that he had killed the black man to defend his wife from an attempted rape. The team contended that Lee was defending white womanhood and “applauded his manhood and chivalry,” wrote a Hattiesburg American reporter. Toward the end of the trial, Lee’s wife even testified that she was actually the one who fired the bullet that killed Leroy Ward.63
But the all-white jury did not believe the self-defense argument. Three black men were also allowed to take the stand to testify that they had seen the white man shoot the black victim in cold blood. After deliberating for forty-one hours and twelve minutes, the jury returned a guilty verdict and recommended that the white defendant, Lee, spend the rest of his life in prison for the murder of the black victim, Leroy Ward. (We can be fairly certain that a black man convicted in a similar case would have received the death penalty.)64
Just days after the conviction, the Hattiesburg American ran an editorial congratulating the city for its commitment to justice across racial lines. “The conviction of JP Lee,” the paper editorialized, “constitutes a tribute to the justice and impartiality of the jurors. Every person in Forrest County should be righteously proud of the manner in which justice is being administered.”65 At the national level, the Associated Negro Press ran a bulletin that appeared in African American newspapers across the country: “The verdict of the jury after deliberating some 40 hours came as a surprise to many who yet feel that a white man in this section can kill a Negro without punishment.”66
Several writers documenting the civil rights era have incorrectly claimed that the first convictions in Mississippi of whites for the murder of blacks occurred during the 1960s. To those scholars and many others, it is inconceivable that such convictions could have happened earlier. Perhaps some rural hamlet somewhere in the state did previously convict a white man of killing a black man, but in all likelihood, J. P. Lee was the first white person convicted of murdering an African American in Mississippi since Reconstruction. This might defy common stereotypes about the absolutism of Mississippi Jim Crow, but the verdict is more understandable when viewed within the context of the 1928 McCallum murder and the city’s economic goals. Not all future whites accused of killing African Americans would be convicted. And in this particular case, J. P. Lee’s shoddy reputation as a bootlegger surely eased the racial barriers to conviction. But all things considered, J. P. Lee was white, and Leroy Ward was black, meaning that this verdict, as the Associated Negro Press observed, “was history making.”67