Editor’s note: This story contains graphic descriptions of race violence and white terrorism.
DUCK HILL, Miss.—Jimmie Lee lifted her head from her pillow on the night of April 13, 1937, in Duck Hill, Miss. In the distance, the 9-year-old girl heard the faint cries of distressed men. What she did not know was that in the woods east of the town in Montgomery County, a white mob was torturing two Black men to death for an alleged crime. Blowtorches and bullets served as the aggravators’ weapons of choice, but the act of violence was a lynching all the same.
The mob took pride in their work, even managing to photograph the bodies before the lightning, thunder and rain scattered the crowd—a common practice at festive lynchings across the U.S. in the 20th century.
Burnt and bruised from hours of torture and white hate, the bodies remained even after the mob left. The ferocity of the storm would have suggested to some that God was angry. The following morning, a white minister called a Black minister to offer prayers over the bodies of Roosevelt “Red” Townes and Robert “Bootjack” McDaniels.
Townes, unrecognizable and scorched to a crisp, and McDaniels, whose body was riddled with bullets, were buried together in one unmarked grave.
“May the horror of this moment, may the consciousness of this community be seared as much as this man’s flesh to bring righteousness,” the Black minister resounded.
Authorities neither arrested nor charged anyone for the lynching of Townes and McDaniels. For decades, their names and memory had been just as buried as their bodies. Photos of the two Black men tied to pinewood trees with metal chains were the first lynching photos that national presses published, which sparked conversations about anti-lynching laws.
The tragedy that took place near Duck Hill on April 13, 1937, still haunts those who remember. Not much is known about “Bootjack and Red” outside of those gruesome photos, but a Jackson woman, Talameika Brice, is working her hardest to free their story from the confines of that Montgomery County dirt. By the time she is