"A Piece of Your Own": The Tenant Purchase Program in Claiborne County

Abstract

PHOTO ESSAY ;?? Piece ofYour Own" The Tenant Purchase Program in Claiborne County by David Crosby photographs by Roland L Freeman KILLING NEAR MARTIN J. A. ROAN KILLED M. NUSOM TROUBLE OVER BOARD TREE Fast SaturdayJ. A. Roan, white, shot andkilledM. Nusom, colored, both ofthefifih district . The trouble arose over a board tree belonging to one oftheparticipants. The men had quarreledprior to the killing, and when they met on the road the trouble was renewed. It is saidthatNusom advancedon Roan with a heavy stick, when the latterseizeda rifle lying in his buggy. Nusom, it is claimed, caught thegun, anda scuffle ensued. Finally Roangot the mu^le turnedtowardNusom andfired, the woundproducing death soon after. Roan hadapreliminary hearing beforeJustice Mitchelland was discharged. ^^ ? 3 January 1907, this news story appeared on page one of the Port Gibson Mississippi Reveille. Although the bare recital of facts and allegations attempts to conceal more than it reveals, it does betray its intention. The swift dismissal of the charges against Roan, the polite concealment of the names ofwitnesses who "said" or "claimed" that Min Newsome was the aggressor, and the lack of specificity about who owned the board tree suggest that it was safer to be a white man than a black man in Claiborne County, Mississippi, around the turn of the century. No great news there, I suppose, but when I heard the Newsome family's version of the story from Min's son Milligan, it occurred to me that this single tragic incident epitomized a set of conditions that led direcdy to the Tenant Purchase Program ofthe New Deal Farm Security Administration. But let me continue the story ofMin Newsome. When the Reverend Milligan Newsome related the story to me in 1979, he was seventy-nine years old. At the time of his father's murder he was six, so the version I heard had been handed down in the family and was clearly polished from much telling: 46 Milligan Newsome, at seventy-nine, narrating thefamily's oral history ofhisfather's murder by a white man who didn't believe a black man should own land. Photo by Roland L Freeman, May 1982. WeU now, my daddy, he was a prosperous colored man, and down where I was bred and born, going out towards Brandywine, where you go across the bridge across Clark's Creek, my daddy, he piad] a hundred and sixty acres back here in the swamp. And my daddy purchased that. And back yonder, they didn't want to see a man to have a horse back in that day. He was a prosperous —now he was aJoseph. He would work night and day in the swamp, with cutting and digging and what not, and piling brush and what not kind. And then he just had him a new-ground plow with a colt on it, and everybody around him would come to him and get corn, across the winter. And then he had a mill, and he had molasses. He had two mules and a black mare—and he kept them so a fly like to set on mem, so to say. And then we had a wagon and a double surrey, and when they started it, back yonder, he started taking his Reveille. And so [John Roan] wanted the place, and he just thought it was too good for a black man to have. A tornado or slycoon or whatever you call it had come through here and just laid the trees down where you could walk across from here to the graveyard, without getting on the ground . . . and some ofthem [oaks were so large that] The TenantPurchase Program in Claiborne County 47 This church near Clark's Creek marks the spot on Highway /47 in Claiborne County whereJohn Roan shot andkilledMin Newsome on 29 December 1906. Photo by RolandL Freeman, May 19S2. you couldn't hardly see the man—putting a crosscut saw across—you couldn't hardly see the man on the other side. And so in 1906, December 29, 1906, [my father] had went to Utica to take Christmas with his father-in-law. So when my mama was there sewing, this man come up there, he asked...