On April 24, 1959, a white mob abducted Mack Charles Parker from the Pearl River County Jail in Poplarville, Mississippi, where he was awaiting trial for the alleged crime of rape. The mob dragged Parker from his cell shot him twice in the chest, and then weighted his body with chains and threw him into the Pearl River

On April 24, 1959 a white mob abducted Mack Charles Parker from the Pearl River County Jail in Poplarville, Mississippi where he was waiting on his trial to start for the alleged crime of rape. The mob shot Parker twice in the chest, and then threw his body into the Pearl River. Parker, 23, was a truck driver who had returned to his hometown of Lumberton, Mississippi, after receiving a general discharge after two years in the Army. After the death of his dad, Parker took on the role of supporting his mom, Liza, and his two younger siblings, Dolores and Charles.

On the morning of February 24, 1959, Parker was woke up by Marshal Ham Slade and several sheriff deputies, who claimed that he had raped a young white woman, June Walters, the night before. The previous night Parker and a group of friends were out drinking and saw a disabled car along the side of Highway 11, between Poplarville and Lumberton. Parker got his car, perhaps hoping to steal the tires, and approached the car. After seeing Walters inside the car, however, Parker returned to his car and drove away.

Jimmy Walters had gone to get a tow truck, leaving his pregnant wife June and their four-year-old daughter Debbie Carol in the car. The police alleged that Parker returned to the disabled vehicle, forcing June Walters and her daughter into the car with him. He then drove to an isolated spot where he raped her.

Walters said that a black man had raped her, but she was unable to state with certainty that Parker had been the assailant. The description of her rapist was a middle-aged man who was 5’10” and 160-to-170 pounds which didn’t fit  Parker, who weighed over 200 pounds. Walters picked Parker out of a line-up, but she later recanted this identification.

On April 13, a grand jury indicted Parker on two counts of kidnapping and one count of rape. On April 17, he pleaded not guilty to the charges, and the trial was set for April 27. Three days before the trial, an eight-to-ten person mob, wielding guns and clubs, dragged Parker from his jail cell. The participants included J. P. Walker, a former deputy sheriff, and Jewell Alford, the jailer, who provided the keys. The men drove Parker to the Bogalusa Bridge. After shooting him, they weighted his body with chains and threw it into the river. Parker’s badly beaten and decomposing body was discovered floating in the Pearl River ten days later.

After the murder, Governor James P. Coleman called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Despite the unwillingness of the townspeople to cooperate, the FBI filed a 370-page report which was forwarded to the governor and then the prosecutor. However, those suspected in Parker’s death were never indicted.

In 2009, the FBI reopened investigations in 43 civil rights era hate crime cases in Mississippi, including the Parker case, but it still remains unsolved.

SOURCES: 

Sano, Y. (2015, June 12). Mack Charles Parker (1936-1959). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/parker-mack-charles-1936-1959/

Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim
Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Dennis J. Mitchell, A
New History of Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2014); Howard Smead, Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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