The Howze Sisters

Marker Text: On December 20, 1918, a White mob seized two Black sisters, Maggie and Alma Howze, and two Black brothers, Major and Andrew Clark, from the Shubuta jail and hanged them from a river bridge one mile north of town. The quadruple lynching, followed twenty-four years later by the lynching of two teenaged boys, Ernest Green and Charlie Lang, at the same “hanging bridge,” accelerated a national NAACP anti-lynching campaign underscoring the threats of racial violence to Black women and children.

Howze Sisters Maggie and Alma Howze were two of six Black victims killed at the nearby “Hanging Bridge” during the first half of the twentieth century. These lynchings occurred at important moments in the Black struggle for freedom and equality. The victims, and the site of their killings, became powerful symbols in the campaign against racial violence and hatred in Mississippi and beyond. These killings and the investigations that followed connected this rural community to a national civil rights struggle. The Howze sisters’ fate reflected the enormous risks faced by Black Mississippians and particularly Black women—who were deemed a threat to white control. Just before Christmas in 1918, local authorities charged Maggie and Alma, along with Major and Andrew Clark, in the murder of their white employer. Several days later, a mob seized the four suspects, all in their late teens and early twenties, and hanged them from a local river bridge. Local whites alleged that the four Black laborers conspired to murder their boss over a wage dispute, but an undercover investigation launched by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) uncovered a more complicated story. Multiple sources alleged that the murdered employer had sexually exploited the Howze sisters and that both women were pregnant at the time of their deaths. The 1918 Hanging Bridge killings figured prominently in the NAACP’s landmark report, Thirty Years of Lynching, released in 1919 as the organization convened a National Conference on Lynching. In the wake of a war that President Woodrow Wilson had claimed would “make the world safe for Democracy,” Black activists memorialized the Howze sisters and other mob victims to pressure government officials to make America safe for them. Although the anti-lynching campaign struggled to compel legal and legislative action, the response to a 1942 double lynching at the Hanging Bridge revealed the impact of this pressure campaign. After white vigilantes murdered Black teenagers Ernest Green and Charlie Lang, the U.S. Department of Justice authorized the first federal lynching investigation in Mississippi history. While the federal government failed to bring the killers to justice, civil rights activists again contrasted America’s lofty war rhetoric with its failures to protect its own citizens from racial abuse. The memory of lynching victims served as a source of motivation, but the Hanging Bridge stood as symbol of intimidation as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s. Despite the risks they continued to face, local Black women and youth participated in civil rights activities and antipoverty programs that challenged the local status quo. While they continued to endure harassment and intimidation, they defied their community’s violent legacy in pursuit of a better future. As in previous generations, Black women played a central role in the struggle for political equality and economic opportunity in rural Mississippi and beyond.