History of Benton: A town of Culture, the First World War and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan (1910 - 1920
Disclaimer: This chapter of “The History of Benton” deals with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Because the author wishes to deal fairly with this matter. And wants to present a very accurate picture of that time and place the author is not shying away from strong words that might be offensive to some people. The views presented here are not of the authors. But were only written so the darkest period of the township can be brought to light. The author feels that honest is the best policy and that only being honest can we achieve growth. The author hopes you the reader will understand this.
In 1910 the township of Benton welcomed a new hospital, the hospital was a state of the art, modern hospital that boasted one hundred rooms. A staff of four highly trained down and twelve skilled nurses. The hospital was located in the heart of the thriving “Garden District”. The hospital was named “King's Daughters Hospital” after the charitable organization that had brought the land, and raised funds for the construction and oversaw the work.
The following year of 1911 saw another milestone of the township being reached. The Freemasons established a lodge in Benton. Lodge No. 48. Later that same year the local Methodist Church organized a local boy scout troop to educate the young men of the town. The town had grown in both modern day convinces, population and now it seemed in culture. Benton was considered by many to be a thriving little town, a mini Yazoo City. But things started to change. Darker days were in store for Benton a storm was once more starting to brew. A storm that would test the moral fabric of the town. And strain the friendship of many of the older more settled families.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand cut little ice in the small town. June 28, 1914 was just another day for the people of Benton. Nobody cared much about Europe and only the wealthy planters of the area traveled there. But on August 4, 1914 when the The British Empire declared war on the German Empire, all the church bells in Benton started to ring. The churches were once more filled with people as they rushed to fill the pews and pray for peace and offer their prayers. America was not a war, but its neighbor to the north was. And so a plan was hatched among the young men of the town. They would band together and travel north, and then cross into Canada and once there they would enlist in their armed forces.
Many of these young men considered the war a grand adventure, a chance to prove themselves in a battle. A chance that came only once in a generation. Many had grown up listening to fireside stories of battles told to them by their grandfathers about the American Civil War, and their fathers too about the Spanish American War. Many considered this war a chance, a chance to prove themselves worthy of the family a name. They would not let this once in a lifetime chance slip through their fingers.
And so around one hundred young men from Benton, most Episcopalians and Roman Catholics left for Vicksburg were many like minded fellows were gathering from all across the Delta. All told around twelve hundred young men left their settled homes in the Delta for Canada, they came not only from tiny Benton, but from Rolling Fork, Greenville, Yazoo City, Jackson, Belzoni, Leland and Vicksburg.
Churches as St. George in Yazoo City, St. John the Blind in Leland, St. Thomas of Greece in Belzoni, St. Katherine's in Vicksburg, and even tiny St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Benton, all Episcopal churches gave up the flower of their congregations to service of freedom. The Catholic churches too responded to the call. St. Mark's in Greenville, St. Leo in Leland, All Saint's in Belzoni, St. Paul in Vicksburg, St. Mary's in Yazoo City and All Saints in Benton too gave up the flower of their congregations to serve the Empire so far away.
What became of these twelve hundred men. Nobody really knows. A handful returned home with a chest full of metals, many though vanished into the fog of war, never to be heard from again. Among those who left home was a young lawyer named James Christopher Potter. A young man who in the years to come would find himself fighting a war of shadows. Going to war with him was his best friend.
A son of a local planter. Albert Jones Brewer. Who in the coming war of shadow would fight alongside him and remain loyal to him through shadow of the years to come. Another young man, James Alexander Bell, a shy fellow, unfit for war, pale with bright pink eyes joined the band. His dream was not battlefield glory, but the Episcopal Priesthood. His Father had forced him to join, hoping to war would toughen his son and make a man out of him. The latter was noted for holding Episcopal Services under fire and would thrice decorated for bravery under fire. He too would stand beside his friends in the coming fight.
While the world bleed in the muddy fields of France. Chances were taking place in Benton. On February 8, 1915 The Birth of a Nation, a silent drama film that was directed by D.W Griffith that also starred Lilliam Gish premiered at the DixieLand Place. Benton's only playhouse. Tickets to the film cost a whopping two dollars per ticket and the show ran for a unheard of three and a half hours. The film glorified the Ku Klux Klan and gave fuel to the growing “Lost Cause” ideology that was already taking root in the minds of many southerns.
And so while volunteers from the Delta bleed on the Western Front. Other Delta men dawned white sheets and loose fitting cloth masks and started to ride around the countryside. Houses were burned, crosses were set ablaze, lynchings, floggings and hanging became all too common. The goal of the Klan was to “Clean Benton Up!” as one Klan newspaper promised. “A return to old Southern values. Of a simpler, better way of life. Like the one we enjoyed before the Civil War and before the wrath of the North was released upon our humble homesteads” read one pamphlet that was published by the Klan and handed out at the annual country fair.
Klan propaganda also promised to, “Put the Irish, the German's, Italian's, Jews in their place and let them stay there. We are going to clean this town up. We are going to put a halt to boys who take them girls car riding. We are going to close all those dance halls, all those pool halls, all those saloons. We are going to enforce the ban of trading on the Sabbath. We are here to promote a peaceful town, one that is full of God fearing men and women.”
Then on May 7, 1915 the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. 1, 195 people were killed in the sinking. Including 128 Americans. The death of so many innocent civilians at the hands of the Imperial Underwater German Navy galvanized American support for entering into the war on the Allies side. And soon war was indeed declared. News of war being declared brought a brief moment of peace to Benton
The townspeople put aside their differences and shifted all their energies to “Defeating the Hun!” And for a blessed moment all the Klan Madness was forgotten about.
Once more the difference between Northern and Southern had been forgotten, once more the country was united behind a common goal. America's army was remodeled, volunteers streamed into training centers all across the country. Farm boys, shopkeepers, steel mill workers and construction works all flocked to the colors. The name given to this collection of forces was The American Expeditionary Force, The force left for Europe on September 12, 1915 and was in the front lines a few months later. The force fought well under its commander General John J. Pershing and launched many more offensives as an independent army.
The “Forces” as it was nicknamed fought well alongside its battle hardened allies the French and the British. And in the end turned the tide of war. Fitting enough many of the early volunteers who had left Benton at the outbreak of the war were allowed to join their countrymen, these handful of men, who had endured some of the hardest fighting quickly rose through the ranks. Many of them received commissions and served as officers. Of the three mentioned above James Christopher Potter was commissioned and rose to the rank of Captain. Noel Brewer was commissioned and also rose the rank of Captain. And James Bell, who was the last to be commissioned but rose the furthest reached the rank of Major.
The German Empire formally surrendered on November 11, 1918 and all the nations agreed to a cease fire while the terms of peace were being negotiated. Then On June 28, 1919, The German Empire and the Allied Nations (including The British Empire, The French Empire, Italy, The Russian Empire and The United States of America) signed the Treaty of Versailles formally ending the war to end all wars.
And so Potter, Brewer and Bell returned home to find the world they left changed. With the return of peace, the Klan Madness returned. And a long shadow had been cast over the township of Benton and the surrounding tiny farms and settlements. And upon their weary shoulders would the cause of Fighting the Klan fall. And so Potter, Brewer and Bell would come together and swear an oath, an oath that would bind the three families together, and forge a bind that endures to this day.
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.