DeKalb

Kemper County's nickname, Bloody Kemper, comes from its violence after the Civil War. On 29 April 1877, less than a month after Reconstruction ended, a mob of about three hundred men killed Judge William Chisolm, a Republican and former sheriff accused of shooting Sheriff John Gully, a Democrat. They also killed his son John, fourteen, his daughter Cornelia, nineteen, and three other men. Nobody was convicted, and Governor John Marshall Stone declined to investigate. That December a freedman, Walter Riley, was hanged for killing Gully, and on the gallows he named another man as having persuaded him.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty Site — 17 mi
  A National Historic Landmark in rural Noxubee County where the Choctaw Nation signed away its last Mississippi land on September 27, 1830.
• Mount Zion Methodist Church — 20 mi
  The Black church in Longdale burned by the Klan on June 16, 1964, rebuilt by its congregation, and the place Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had gone to visit when they were murdered.
• Nanih Waiya — 20 mi
  The Mother Mound of the Choctaw in Winston County, a sacred origin place returned to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in 2008.
• Old Neshoba County Jail — 27 mi
  The 1955 jail in downtown Philadelphia where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were held on June 21, 1964, hours before they were murdered.

More markers nearby

• Reuben Kemper — 0.6 mi
• John C. Stennis — 0.6 mi
• Gen. Sam Dale — 14 mi
• Ross Alexander Collins — 22 mi