Rebels Against Confederate Mississippi 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, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780807838501
Google: BdEgD4Sm044C
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2012-03-15T16:00:56+00:00

Epilogue

The Free State of Jones Revisited

Davis Knight’s Miscegenation Trial

Segregation was the rule and always will be the rule as long as one Southerner descended from the old South lives, and as long as the teachings of the old Christian colored race are remembered by their descendants there will be no danger of a Mongrel race, as purity of race is the primary objective of segregation.

—Ethel Knight, The Echo of the Black Horn, 1951

As soon as I knew where I was, I got out.

—Van Buren Watts, grandson of Rachel Knight, 1969

Not until author David Cohn returned to his native Mississippi after an absence of two decades did he understand the complexities of the racial system in which he, a white man, had been reared during the early twentieth century. “I began to discover that this apparently simple society was highly complex,” he wrote in the 1948 foreword to his memoir of Delta life. “It was marked by strange paradoxes and hopelessly irreconcilable contradictions. It possessed elaborate behavior codes, written, unwritten, and unwritable.”1

In the same year that Cohn’s words were published, Davis Knight, age twenty-three, collided with this system of paradoxes, contradictions, and codes. On June 22, 1948, the Jones County Circuit Court of Ellisville indicted Knight, who claimed to be—and certainly looked—white, for the crime of miscegenation. Two years earlier, on April 18, 1946, he had married Junie Lee Spradley, a white woman. The state claimed that even though Knight appeared white, he was in fact black.2

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