The long shadow of the Klan (1920 – 1924) 

The rise of the Klan did not go unchallenged. All across the Delta leading families of the old planter class united together to defeat the Klan or at the very least hold them at bay. And in the end, only the rising of the Mississippi River in the spring of nineteen twenty seven secured victory for the anti-Klan Forces, as the breaking of a dozen or so levees once more forced this fragmented region to pull itself together again. And face with trembling knees the wrath of nature.

The Klan started in the hills that surrounded the Delta. Benton like Yazoo City has always straddled the two regions. The differences between the two are like daylight and dark. The Delta is home to numerous plantations that yield millions of dollars each year in cotton. The hill farmers though, mostly scratched a living and barely made it from one planting to the next. A few of them could afford to plant Cotton, and many did in the bottomlands of the many creeks and rivers.

Cotton defined the region, the growing of cotton, the harvesting of cotton, the grinning of cotton, the baling of cotton and the transportation of  cotton were all vital to Delta. The wealth generated from the annual cotton crop made millionaires of the plantation owners, who could afford to travel yearly and often sent their sons to Harvard or Swanee. Many of these plantation owners were also “High Church” Episcopalians. Episcopalians have always numbered in the minority in the Delta. To this class the Klan was something to be looked down upon, and squashed out. 

On the other side you had the poor hill farmer, who's life depended on the rain and luck. Since he could not afford to hire help, he had to make his own help and he often raised a brood of children to help work his small holding. He considered the Klan a force of positive change and it was often him that dawned the white sheets and went riding at midnight up and down the country lanes.

Between these two classes. There was another class. The town-dwellers, trained and skilled labors who had attended some formal education. Doctors, dentists, merchants, craftsmen, bankers, clerks, and priests and preachers. 

Now the first signs of trouble did not take place in Benton in the river front town of Satartia some fifty seven miles west of Benton. Now, Satartia had been built as a river port to ship cotton from a very large and prosperous plantation called “No Mistake Plantation” Who's owner was named Brian Bright. The Bright family owned most of the surrounding farmland and often rented it out to tenants. Most of these tenants happen to be newly arrived Italians who spoke little or no English and worst of all many if not all of them were Roman Catholic.

The present of these strangers caused mummer of discomfort to run through the tiny village of Satartia, a budding stronghold of the Klan in Yazoo County.  The local leader wanting to make a name for himself lead a column of hooded men into a Mass that was being held and ordered the priest to leave and the church closed. The gathered  crowd responded in kind and pounced on the column and bumbled them with their fist and and rained kicks down upon their head. After fifteen minutes the column sounded return and retreated with the crowd following them, as they rushed to their horse's the crowded picked up wash rocks and tossed it at the hooded men, stones the size of men's fist fell down upon the men's head, knocking many off their horses. 

At first it seemed like the small Italian colony had won an impressive victory, but a few days later the church was burned down and the young priest who was ministering the tiny colony was  found dead in his bed. A bullet to the head had ended his life.  That was troubling enough on its own but the trouble was just getting started.

In Yazoo City, the county seat, the Catholic church was also firebombed. The Pro-Klan “The Yazoo Herald'' did not report the bombing of either churches or the death of the young priest. But a small, independent paper did report on the bombing and the killings. The office of the paper was in turn firebombed. 

In Vicksburg, The Bell's, took a firm stand when the Klan tried to push into the city. James William Bell, now an Anglican priest took a stand and used his position as a priest to voice his concerns. He condemned openly those who supported the Klan on the City council and poured fire down upon the heads of those in his church who supported the Klan. So fearsome were his attacks that a group of parishioners who supported the Klan broke off and formed another Episcopal Church, Christ Church, the church still endures to this day but is known for being very “Low Church” while St. Katherine's is known for being “High Church''.

Closer to home in Benton though, Klan Activity started to be noticed. It came on slowly like a fever, the once friendly town turned on itself. Before the coming of the Klan, people use to linger by the soda fountain and catch up on idle town gossip. Now the soda fountains seemed barren, and nobody dared to visit them. People did not stay to eat their hamburgers, fries and enjoy their sodas, they took it on the run.  Nobody spoke around the cooler at work, or around the Coke-Cola tub at the local hardware stores or at the general store. 

Everybody looked over their shoulders. The first signs of trouble came when the town's Catholics, a bid more plentiful than Episcopalians but not as numerous as the Baptist were dismissed from their employment. Accounts on Catholic families were closed down. And many Protestant merchants refused to trade with Catholic clients. Only the Potter, Croft and Brewer families refused to follow the trend.

Then came darkness. At Oak Grove Plantation, a sprawling estate located fifteen miles east of town something happened. A black man by the name of John Smith was lynched after he supposedly whistled at a white woman in town. The manager of the plantation, a mean fellow by the Nick Jean is said to to have witnessed the lynching but failed to report it to either the police department or to owner John William Sharp III, who was away at the time, hunting quail in nearby Arkansas with his good friend LeRoy Percy of the Greenville Percy's.

The lynching sent shock waves through the town. Their had not been a lynching in Benton since before the civil war. The Sharp family had kept a tight lid on things. But now it seemed their power was starting to wane. When Mr. Sharp returned from his hunt, he was both shocked and angered and at once fired Nick Jean.

A few nights later, Oak Grove Plantation was the scene of the largest Klan raid this side of the Mississippi River. One hundred horsemen all dressed in white stormed the estate, they set fire to the railroad depot and burned several hundred bales of cotton. The bales of cotton burned brightly into the night. The gin was also burned to the ground and several tenant houses were sacked and burned, only the main house escaped harm.  And that because of John William Sharp, his older brother Noel and his younger brother Adam, along with LeRoy Percy, and his only son William Percy, put up a spirited defense and shot down several of the attackers as they neared the house.

The first rays of morning revealed a scene of total destruction, fourteen of the thirty tenant houses had been burned down to the ground. The new railway depot was a smothering pile of burning wood, the smothering remains of countless bales of cotton dotted the railroad as well as the burning remains of a dozen flat cars, the gin was a total loss. All told the damage came to around three million dollars. In the number of human death's fourteen tenant farmers had been killed and twenty of the raiding Klan's men were found dead.  Some it seemed had been pulled from their horses and hacked to death with shoves, and axes. 

The news of the raid shocked not only the tiny township of Benton, but Mississippi as a whole, and then the nation. But the story died on the vine as it were. None of the regional newspapers reported on it. All but on a tiny news paper out of Benton. A few days  following the pattern so well established the Klan once more firebombed that paper, punishment for speaking out.

And so as 1924 drew to a close, James Christopher Potter said best of all. “The shadow of the Klan is growing stronger with each passing second. That shadow has covered not only Benton, the whole of Mississippi and has grown beyond that. It now covers not only the southern states, but also the northern states, and even the western states. It's a dark cloud that hangs over the nation. It's all we can do to just keep the Klan at bay. We must keep fighting, for the darkest days I'm afraid lay just ahead of us. If that is the case then, we'll do well to remember that it's always the darkest before dawn.”

Here ends the first volume of The Benton Historia that covers the years 1820 to 1924. The first volume covers the first one hundred and four years of the settlement. And Chronicles the the growth of the town from tiny river port settlement, to the first county seat of Yazoo County, the depression that followed the moving of the county seat from Benton to Yazoo City, the Antebellum Period, the Civil War, the Reconstruction and finally the Rise of the Klan.