Lynch Law

Shortly past midnight a group of about eight or ten dark figures darted through the moonlight toward the Poplarville, Miss. courthouse. Opening a window, they slipped into the sheriff's office. They seemed to know that the jailer had gone for the night. They knew, too, that the cell keys were in a metal cabinet in the sheriff's office. Some of the raiders waited in the darkened second-floor courtroom, while a few others, wearing gloves and masks, pushed their way through the courtroom into the cell area just above. A voice barked and startled Prisoner C.J. Monday: "Boy, where is M.C. Parker?" Monday yelled to his jailmate: "Better get up, M.C."

"Help Me!" Mack Charles Parker, 23, a truck driver scheduled to go on trial in a few days for the rape of a 24-year-old white woman last February, leaped from his bunk, pulled on his pants, made for the shower. For a moment the men fumbled with the key, then opened the cell door and rushed in. "Get him! Get him!" one man snarled. They swarmed all over him.

"I didn't do it," Parker screamed. "I didn't do it! Monday! Don't let 'em do me like this! Help me!"

One of the intruders began bludgeoning Parker with a pistol, another with a stick. A third picked up a garbage can and hit him. Parker went down, bleeding. "I didn't do it!" he cried again. "Well, who did?" demanded a man. Wildly, furiously, Parker pointed at his fellow prisoners: "He did it!" The raiders began dragging him toward the stairs. One of them turned to the other five frightened prisoners and warned: "Keep your damn mouths shut!" Parker wailed: "Don't take me out! Don't let them kill me!"

Down the concrete steps they dragged him, feet first, his head cracking again and again on the treads. Parker pleaded in vain: "I'll walk if you all don't drag me!" Blood trailed the figures as they stumbled onward, and a bloody handprint was slapped on the doorstep. The other prisoners ran to the window, saw the men fling their victim into a car, watched as the car and four or five other autos drove off. Parker's terror-choked voice was drowned by the chatter of youngsters leaving a dance down the street.

The Hunt. But one outsider heard the commotion. A nurse in a hospital, some 200 ft. from the jail, telephoned the town marshal, who called Sheriff W. Osborne Moody. Quickly Moody called his deputies, alerted the highway patrol, the city police. Soon a huge posse fanned out from Poplarville into the countryside of heavy woods crisscrossed with streams. Within a few hours, Mississippi's Governor James P. Coleman called in the FBI.

Proud of his record of law and order, Coleman declared fervently that he "never expected to see the day" when there would be mob action in Mississippi. It was, said he, "the first such incident in 20 years."

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