Hale, Grace Elizabeth
In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning
Little, Brown and Co. (New York)
2023
OUR SYNOPSIS: Grace Elizabeth Hale explores the story of the killing of Versie Johnson by her grandfather, Jefferson Davis County sheriff Oury Berry, and other law enforcement officers in 1947. She argues that “in the grim context of Jim Crow Mississippi, the part of the Piney Woods that became Jeff Davis County was something of a refuge for many Black people, among them Versie Johnson and members of his family. Without an understanding of this Black flourishing, of the separate Black world some Black people were able to build in Jeff Davis County, it is impossible to know what was lost when Versie Johnson died.” (xxxviii) Black residents built their own rural community in the first half of the twentieth century, largely separate from the nearby white community. The Johnson family created the Prentiss Institute, a school for Black children, and also established themselves in the funerary business. Versie Johnson’s part of the family were farmers. As in the rest of Mississippi, racial violence was common. In the Johnson case, law enforcement officers fatally shot him at a farm rather than handing him over to the lynch mob. The story that he tried to escape from jail was a cover-up. Hale makes clear that this was a lynching.
BIG QUESTIONS:
What are the implications of a scholar writing about history that their own family shaped?
To what extent does this story shed light on the role of state officials in lynchings?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“When white people attacked Black people in the South, they did not just kill individuals. They took aim at entire communities. Yet despite this violence and other forms of white supremacy and as a form of resistance to it, Black residents built their own separate world in the light between the pines. South-central Mississippi, where Versie Johnson lived, was not just a place of Black death. It was also, first and foremost, a place of Black life.” (26)
“The murder and the lie set the tone, dividing local time into a before and an after. They made it clear just how far white county residents were willing to go to preserve white supremacy.” (134)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: The New York Age Print, 1892), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Relates to histories of lynching in and around Baltimore.
