Wilkinson County,
Mississippi Lynching Called Another
‘Suicide’ by state and county
authorities
By
Earnest McBride
Ó2004. Earnest McBride, Freelance Writer with the Jackson Advocate, Jackson, Mississippi.
==============
Wilkinson
County relatives of the 55-year-old Roy Veal have declined to comment on
published reports about his death at the end of a rope several miles outside
the town of Woodville.
“We
are aware of the reports that are being disseminated and we are very upset by
some of what is being reported,” said a male family member Wednesday, asking
that he remain anonymous until the family has had time to issue a formal
statement. “We are all going through a very traumatic time right now,” the man
said. “But we hope to issue our own story sometime tomorrow (Thursday,
4/29/04).”
A
pair of turkey hunters reportedly found Veal’s body dangling from a tree with a
pile of burned rubbish beneath it around 9 a.m. last Friday in the Donegal
Community near Woodville.
A businessman in the nearby community said
Wednesday that he had spoken to the hunter from New Orleans who had discovered
the suspended body. According to him, Roy Veal had driven his truck out into
the wooded area and was seen walking about the woods mumbling to himself. The
hunter, who was not identified by name by the businessman, thought that Veal
was another hunter but realized his error only when he later found the same man
he had encountered from a distance in the woods hanging from a tree limb, with
his feet reportedly only three or four inches off the ground.
Veal had also written several pages of notes
concerning the property case and the circumstances that led to his death,
according to the Woodville businessman. Five or six sheets of paper were found
on the ground near the body, a fact not reported in the popular media.
The
autopsy was completed over the weekend, according to a report in The Woodville Republican, the local
weekly newspaper. Release of the information is pending a toxicological report
from the state Crime Lab. Veal family members will be the first to be informed
of the coroner’s findings, the newspaper reported.
According
to various wire-service news reports, Veal, a resident of Washington state,
came back home as one of several defendants in a claim against four acres of
his family’s property in what appears to be an “adverse possession” action by
land claim jumpers, which is a common practice in Mississippi today, as it was
during the Jim Crow era when black men challenged white land claims at the
peril of their lives.
Mississippi law allows a person to claim the
property of others if they can prove they have had access to the land for at
least ten years without hindrance from the actual owners of the property. The
Jackson Advocate has reported nearly a dozen such cases in the last two
years, the most recent one involving Governor Haley Barbour and several other
prominent white Yazoo County residents who seized the property of a black
family there some years ago.
Instead
of getting his day in court, Veal wound up last Friday dangling from the end of
a rope, a pillow case over his head and a pile partially burned papers evidently
set to burn his dangling body to a crisp. There was talk of oil on the piece of
Veal property in dispute. This property
has been in the Veal family for 120 years, says Wilkinson County Chancery Clerk Thomas Tolliver.
“Our investigators' findings are consistent with
a suicide," DPS
spokesman Warren Strain reported yesterday.
Wilkinson
County Sheriff Reginald Jackson has joined the State Department of Public
Safety in claiming Veal’s death to be a suicide, thereby changing his more
cautious statement issued Sunday.
"We
can't say if this was a homicide or a suicide at this point. We'll have to
await further results from the crime lab," Jackson said then. He was
unavailable for comment Wednesday.
Wilkinson
County Prosecutor Homes Sturgeon is representing the Veal family in his
capacity as a private attorney. Should
criminal charges be filed in the case related to Roy Veal’s death, however,
Sturgeon says that he will recuse himself.
The lawsuit was filed on Oct. 30 by Boyd and Marjorie Alexander of
Natchez and Kevin Krick of Baton Rouge. The trio claims that they had bought
four acres of the Veal property and reportedly are asking for $18,000 in
restitution for timber that was cut and sold from the disputed land.
The attorney for the plaintiffs, Wayne Smith of Liberty, says the
lawsuit has not been in court very long and was barely under way when Veal met
his death last Thursday or Friday. Smith says he doubts that the death had
anything to do with the land dispute.
Mississippi’s
peculiar form of suicide by rope, especially among modern era black men in
conflict with their white peers, whether in a prison or in the backwoods, or
even in downtown Jackson, as happened last October, has whetted the world’s
curiosity and scrutiny over for years now. The managers of a Website in Norway
have kept tabs on the “Strange Fruit” still found in Mississippi trees.
Jackson State University Administrator Monique Guillory lent some
insight into the possible motives for lynchings today as compared with the
past. Guillory is director and organizer of the “Without Sanctuary” exhibit on
lynching now on display at JSU through July 30.
Guillory referred to several instances of lynching that had economic motives behind them. In the case of Anthony Crawford, a wealthy black planter in South Carolina, who refused to sell his cotton on the market for less than white farmers received the economic motives were very transparent, Guillory points out.
“He told the market agents that he would take his cotton down to
New Orleans to be sold before he would sell at cut price.” Guillory said.
“There was a heated exchange, and Crawford, of course defended himself, and he
ultimately was lynched. And
subsequently his land was taken and his family was dispersed.”
The great anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells launched her
lifelong campaign against lynching when she realized the purely economic
motives behind the racism of many whites, Guillory said.
“Ida B. Wells involvement with the anti-lynching crusade was based
on the fact that she had a black friend who owned a store that was next door to
a white-owned store. The whites wanted him close down the store, but he
refused. As it turned out, the whites torched the store, and the black men
defended themselves. And ultimately they lynched black men. That was what led
to the great crusade by Wells that later became a worldwide movement against
lynching.
“So there are often economic motivations behind lynchings.”
Guillory, a native of Louisiana, says she is not familiar with the
Wilkinson County area. She declined to speculate on the Veal lynching or its
causes.
Wilkinson County is the home of such musical legends as William
Grant Still and saxophonist Lester “Prez” Young. It is also the home of modern
day author Anne Moody, author of the best seller “Coming of Age in
Mississippi.”
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