Mississippi hanging exposes Black struggle for land
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
Roy Veal, a descendant of African American
farmers who was fighting to hold onto his family's land, was
found hanging from a tree on April 23 in Woodville, Miss.
Woodville is in Wilkinson County just south of Natchez. It
was the childhood home of Jefferson Davis, president of the
slave-owning Confederate states, and site of his plantation,
Rosemont.
Veal's relatives are emphatic that his death was a lynching.
"They hang one and scare the rest, that's the way they do it in
Mississippi," family member Willie Brad ley told Brooklyn's
Daily Challenge newspaper.
Veal had returned to his home from Seattle to help his
family fight a land-grab attempt by whites who alleged title
and timber rights to acres that had been in Veal's family for
three generations, since the late 19th century.
Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesperson Warren
Stain declared the death as "consistent with suicide." But
there are serious and troubling contradictions to this
explanation, including the fact that Veal had been hooded in a
pillowcase before his death. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
Theft of Black land
There is a long history of white vigilante violence against
Black economic independence and land ownership in the
region.
At the close of the Civil War, a few Union generals began to
allocate the plantations of the former slave owners to freed
African Americans, part of the "40 acres and a mule" land
redistribution.
In Wilkinson County, Davis' 10,000-acre plantation,
Rosemont, was declared a "home colony" under the protection of
a Black regiment. The land was farmed cooperatively by newly
freed people who set up a self-governing community there.
(James Allen, "Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy
1865-1876")
Their hard-won freedom was pushed back by an alliance of the
old Southern slaveocracy and Northern capital eager to profit
in the region. A horrific wave of legal and extra-legal
violence against African American people attempting to exercise
basic democratic and economic rights swept through the
South.
This violent assault on their self-determination was
accomplished through torture, sexual humiliations and
mutilations of men and women--similar to the torture of Iraqi
resistance fighters by U.S. soldiers holding them as prisoners,
as reported by Amnesty International and news media worldwide.
And these were the same kind of tortures that were used against
Native American people resisting colonization of their lands.
(David E. Stannard, "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the
New World")
Black resistance
The Black community in the South mounted ferocious
resistance to the white ruling class's attacks on their
freedom.
During a gubernatorial election in 1876, white night riders
in adjoining West Feli ciana, La., raided a section of the
parish where they thought African Americans "hadn't come into
line as they should" and hanged their leader, Tom Rice--not
before, however, he, "hearing the horses' hoofs, hid in the
brake back of his house and killed Mr. West," one of the white
vigilantes. ("Eyes on the Prize" documentary)
The struggle for Black people to gain and retain land
ownership was central to their survival in the South. If they
could not win redistribution of the land, through outright
occupation or through reparations legislation such as the "40
acres" grants, then newly freed Black people had no material
basis for survival and no way to stand against the seizure of
their newly won rights by a resurgent slaveocracy.
All other bourgeois democratic rights--the right to vote, to
testify in court, to form civil contracts such as
marriage--were completely, inextricably and openly linked to
this fight for economic justice.
Roy Veal, in his life and death, was part of the heroic
struggle for Black independence in Wilkinson County.
Preceding him in the fight were such ancestors as noted
author Richard Wright's maternal grandfather, Richard Wilson,
who farmed in Woodville. Wilson escaped out of the fields of
slavery to enlist in the Union Navy. He returned to the county
after the war "to stand armed guard in front of ballot boxes to
protect blacks who were voting." (Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright:
The Life and Times")
During the civil-rights battles of the 1960s,
state-sponsored white vigilantism continued in what activist
Bob Moses called "symbolic acts of terror"--the attempt to
intimidate the Black community through assassination of its
leaders. In Wilkinson County, Lewis Allen and four other such
leaders were killed in 1964.
Speaking that year, Moses said: "But while that was
happening, what kept people going, and what still keeps people
going, was that you were able to reach and make contact with
the Negro farmers, with the people in the cities. You were able
to actually grab a hold of them. There was some feeling that
you had hit some rock bottom, that you had some base that you
could work with and that you could build on, and as long as you
had that, then maybe there was some hope for making some real
changes someday." (Bob Moses, Voices of Freedom Project)
Defeating the Monolith
The fight to keep land in the hands of Black people in the
South continues in the face of a system Moses characterized
then as "the white citizens councils, the governor, the state
legislature, the judiciary--one monolithic system."
In 1920 over 925,000 Black farmers controlled over 15
million acres of land. Today there are only 15,000 to 18,000
farmers, with less than a million acres.
A 2001 Associated Press study documented "a pattern in which
Black Amer icans were cheated out of their land or driven from
it through intimidation, violence and even murder. In some
cases, government officials approved the land takings; in
others, they took part in them. The earliest occurred before
the Civil War; others are being litigated today. ... Today,
virtually all of this property, valued at tens of millions of
dollars, is owned by whites or corporations." (Dr. Raymond
A.Winbush, "The Earth Moved: Land Theft and African Americans
in the United States")
The taking of these lands continues with the complicity of
the U.S. Depart ment of Agriculture, which denies loans to
Black farmers, thus furthering the interests of corporate
agribusiness. Resistance also continues, however, as shown last
July 4 in the dramatic takeover of USDA offices in Tennessee by
300 Black farmers.
Speaking for Roy Veal's family, Willie Bradley says: "This
is not over. We want to find out what happened, and the fight
will go on to keep the family land." (Daily Challenge)
Reprinted from the May 13, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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