Shubuta, Mississippi

Nearly a century ago four young African-Americans were lynched in Mississippi. Two bore the name Howze, Sala Udin’s original surname.

fountain. It was the white power structure’s method of maintaining a brutal status quo.

After Maggie’s face was smashed by the wrench-swinging man, someone, or perhaps several people, tossed each victim off the bridge. Alma Howze and the Clark brothers fell several feet before their descents were violently arrested by the ropes around their necks.

Maggie, however, grabbed a bridge support as she was thrown from the span. The mob hauled her back up, then tossed her a second time. Again, she caught herself. On its third attempt, the mob succeeded. Four bodies hung lifeless from the Shubuta bridge. Two of those bodies bore developing children.

Gravediggers buried the young victims on Sunday. Rumor spread through Shubuta that workers could see movement in Alma Howze’s womb.

News of the lynchings soon reached members of a decadeold organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. One of its officers was a lightskinned black named Walter White, whose appearance allowed him to “pass” as a white man. He traveled to Shubuta to investigate, and his account of the incident was published in a 1919 report titled “Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889 to 1918.” A tattered copy of this report is held at the Carnegie Library in Oakland.

The story carries significance for Sala Udin for one reason: Sometime in the months before that night of horror on the bridge, a 9-year-old boy living somewhere in Mississippi, not far from Shubuta, climbed into an automobile with his sister and a few other relatives and began a long journey north.

Sala wonders if the boy had some connection to the sisters murdered on Shubuta’s bridge. Perhaps the boy’s parents sensed trouble and hustled him away to a place where blacks did not have to live in fear of being thrown from bridges and hanged.

That boy was William H. Howze, Sala’s father. He was heading to a place called Pittsburgh.