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Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in Carroll County, Mississippi.
History
This area was developed by European Americans for cotton plantations near the rivers. These were dependent on the labor of large gangs of slaves. After the American Civil War, many freedmen worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers on the plantations. Other areas were harvested for timber.
The county is named for Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence.
After the Civil War, whites used violence and intimidation to suppress voting and enforce white supremacy. In 1890 the state legislature disenfranchised most blacks, who were a majority in the state, by creating barriers to voter registration; it also passed Jim Crow laws, segregating public facilities and treating freedmen and their descendants as second-class citizens.
In the period from 1877 to 1950, Carroll County had 29 documented lynchings of blacks, the second-highest number in the state. Twenty-five of these killings were committed in little more than a one-month period in Carrollton, the county seat, in the late winter of 1886. Twenty-four deaths are associated with what has been known as the "Carrollton Courthouse Massacre", called a "riot" at the time and blamed on blacks by the grand jury. But 60 armed, masked white men entered the courthouse, fatally shooting brothers Ed and Charley Brown, the black plaintiffs who had filed an assault case against a white man, and 18 other blacks, who died that day. Another three black men died of their wounds soon after. The father of the two Brown brothers was also fatally shot days later. No one was prosecuted for these killings.
Adjacent Counties
Towns & Communities
- Avalon
- Black Hawk
- Carrollton (County Seat)
- Coila
- McCarley
- North Carrollton
- Teoc
- Vaiden (County Seat)
- Valley Hill
Links
Carroll County Courthouse Massacre of 1886
Cotesworth Culture & Heritage Center
National Register of Historic Places
