October 5, 1875
U.S. Sen. James Alcorn and former Confederate Gen. James Chalmers led a political coup in Coahoma County. The white mob they gathered had a “dead list” of Black men they planned to assassinate. At the top of the list? Sheriff John Milton Brown, a Black man they falsely accused of planning a massacre of white men. They planned to hang him.
When a white mob of up to 1,500 moved to seize power, a few hundred Black men, who had been attending a Republican meeting, tried to fight back at Friars Point, only to be overwhelmed.
“Don’t shoot these Negroes, boys,” Chalmers was quoted as saying. “We need cotton pickers.”
The coup ended Black participation in local government, signaling the restoration of white supremacy that would continue across Mississippi in the years to come.
Brown and others fled the community. He went on to serve as superintendent of the Kansas Freedmen’s Relief Association, where he helped other African Americans flee racial violence and economic oppression. He later became a leader in Kansas Republican politics and a major in the 23rd Kansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the state’s only all-Black militia unit during the Spanish-American War, a pioneering effort to have Black officers command Black soldiers.
As for Alcorn, he continued serving in the U.S. Senate until 1877 when he retired from political life. He died 17 years later and was buried at his “Eagle Nest” plantation in Coahoma County.
Three years after Alcorn retired, Brown took his seat in front of a committee of that same U.S. Senate. He testified that he told Chalmers “there would be no trouble,” but when that failed to help, he fled through the cane-break.
“I heard the shotguns going off all around me.”
The mob killed a group of Black men, whose bodies weren’t found for another two months. The mob also shot an unarmed Black preacher, killed another man and pulled a Black man by a rope for eight miles, he said.
“They had him say his prayers and hold up his hands, and they discharged two barrels of a shotgun through him. That is the way they murdered him,” Brown said.
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