The Free State of Jones, Movie Edition: Mississippi's Longest Civil War by Victoria E. Bynum

Author:Victoria E. Bynum [Bynum, Victoria E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies
ISBN: 9781469627069
Google: hGvoCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2016-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

Anna Knight. Photograph courtesy of Minneola Dixon, Oakwood Archives and Museum, Oakwood College, Huntsville, Alabama.

Tom Knight’s racial views conformed to those of his society. He reconciled with the memory of his dead father only by ignoring what he referred to during the trial as that “supposed business.” The trial’s revival of old scandals shattered his hard-won peace of mind. On the witness stand, eighty-eight-year-old Tom described Rachel as a full-blooded African with “kinky hair, a wooly head, or whatever you want to call it.” Rachel was “just a regular Negro woman . . . she wasn’t no half-mixture, wasn’t no half-mixture to it.” Having suffered the humiliation of his family’s miscegenation for seventy years, Tom seemed determined to prevent those responsible for “tainting” his family’s blood from becoming white, disdaining to recognize his mixed-race kin. One of those kin, Flo Wyatt, remembered being frightened as a child by this disheveled old man reduced to selling peanuts, chewing gum, and candy bars on the streets of Laurel.31

Apparently on the strength of Tom Knight’s testimony as to Rachel’s race, the Jones County Circuit Court convicted Davis Knight of miscegenation on December 17, 1948. Attorney Quitman Ross immediately requested a new trial, citing several procedural errors and “for the additional reason that the statute under which the defendant was tried and convicted is unconstitutional.” The court denied his motion, and on December 20 Davis Knight appealed to the state supreme court. Fourteen citizens, including Wiley Jackson and John Stringer, posted his $2,500 bond.32

Since Ross had argued in the circuit trial that Davis was legally white and therefore had not questioned the constitutionality of Mississippi’s miscegenation statutes, no issue of constitutionality was addressed by the state supreme court in Knight’s appeal. On November 14, 1949, the high court reversed the lower court’s verdict and remanded the case, concurring with Ross that the state had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that “the party in question [Davis Knight] had one-eighth or more of Negro (or Mongolian) blood” and therefore was African American. Ross’s original decision not to raise issues of constitutionality allowed the high court to base its decision strictly on laws governing racial identification, thereby circumventing criticism from civil rights groups. Since the case was not tried again, the high court, in effect, granted Davis Knight legal status as a white man.33

In the aftermath of their ordeal, mixed-race Knights differed in the way they racially identified themselves. For example, Davis Knight lived as a white man until his accidental death on August 8, 1959, in Houston, Texas, but his cousin Anna Knight spent twenty-six years as the president of the Seventh-Day Adventists’ National Colored Association of Teachers. She died in 1972 at her beloved Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. Until the very end of her ninety-eight years, she combined religious work with efforts to advance African American education and social mobility.34

Davis Knight’s legal victory enabled his sister, Louvenia Knight, to wage a successful battle between 1960 and 1965 to have her two sons admitted to a white school.

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