August 20, 2026: Laurel (Mississippi) Histories: Race and Rights

[We all need comfort texts in 2026, and for my wife and I one of our most surprising finds has been the delightful home renovation show Home Town. The show is deeply tied to its historic community of Laurel, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Laurel histories, leading up to a special weekend tribute to what makes Home Town so special!].

On three telling moments in the history of race and Civil Rights in Laurel.

1. A 1942 Lynching: That hyperlinked piece, shared on the website of the esteemed civil rights lawyer Julian Johnson and his Memory Justice Project in particular, does an excellent job telling the painful and all too typical story of Howard Wash, a 45 year old livestock overseer on a dairy farm near Laurel who in May 1942 defended himself from his violent boss Clint Welborn, ending up fatally injuring Welborn in their fight, and in October 1942 was convicted of murder, spared the death penalty, and then lynched by a white supremacist mob. But here I want to highlight the last sentence from this brief New York Times notice of the lynching: “This was the third lynching in Mississippi this week.” When I teach the lynching epidemic I talk about the 1890s as the nadir of this horrific practice in the U.S., but clearly it was still an everyday occurrence (and the phrase is only slightly hyperbolic) in 1940s Mississippi, and a terrifyingly present threat for African Americans in communities like Laurel.  
2. A 1951 Execution: Lynching was still part of the history of Mississippi and the U.S. well into the 1950s, as the 1955 murder of young Emmett Till in Drew (in the northern part of the state near the city of Cleveland, MS) makes all too clear. But even as that form of extralegal racial terrorism began to disappear somewhat in the early days of the nascent Civil Rights Movement, the white power structure still found ways both to murder Black people and to make the violence into communal celebrations. I’m talking about the May 1951 execution of handyman Willie McGee, convicted of raping a white woman (despite the usual lack of clarity when it came to every part of the case) and executed in Laurel by the state’s “traveling electric chair.” Over a thousand white residents gather at the town courthouse to celebrate the execution, and it was also broadcast live on the radio for many more such celebrations (and other witnesses, including the number of folks such as William Faulkner who had pleaded for clemency). White Laurel and white Mississippi still reveled in Black death in the early 1950s.   
3. A 1968 Speech: The growth of the Civil Rights Movement did not in any way end that disturbing trend, as illustrated by the KKK’s firebombing of Laurel’s St. Paul Methodist church in 1967. But things were nonetheless clearly and inspiringly changing, as illustrated by another event at that same church one year later: a March 19, 1968 speech by Martin Luther King Jr., in advance of a planned April March on Washington (a couple weeks before which King would be tragically murdered). This beautiful piece in the town’s Black newspaper the Leader-Call on Grace Amos’s memories of attending King’s speech as a 10 year old does not minimize such tragedies, but it does remind us that the town’s and state’s Black communities cannot be reduced to the worst of what white supremacy and domestic terrorism did to them. There’s no Laurel without its Black community, past and present, and I hope even the most horrific histories can help us better remember that overarching fact as well.

Last LaurelStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?