Lynching in America / The Lynching of Elwood Higginbottom

Marker Text: On the evening of September 17, 1935, Elwood Higginbottom, a 28-year old African-American tenant farmer, husband, and father to three children, was in custody in the Oxford jail. Four months earlier, landholder Glen Roberts led a posse to Higginbottom’s house over a property dispute. Higginbottom defended himself and fled after Roberts was fatally shot. After Roberts’s funeral, “citizens of Oxford and the county joined with officers of [Lafayette] and other counties” in a manhunt. They beat Higginbottom’s sister and threatened burning his brothers to death in retaliation. Captured a few days later in Pontotoc County, Higginbottom was held in Jackson until his trial date in Oxford. With anger mounting that a guilty verdict was not forthcoming quickly enough, a mob of 50-150 white men gathered outside the jail. They broke in and drove Higginbottom to a wooded area near this location, the Three-Way, on Old Russell Road. Higginbottom fought for his life, but the mob forced a rope around his neck and hanged him to death. Reports described five bullet holes in his body. The lynching sparked outrage from the NAACP, which wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt and blamed Higginbottom’s death on “callous indifference” toward federal or state protections against “anarchic mobs.” Roosevelt’s administration did not respond. Officials in Mississippi charged no one for Mr. Higginbottom’s murder.