Lynching of John Hartfield

John Hartfield, a Black man from Ellisville, had left for East St. Louis in search of a better life. In 1919 he came home to see his white girlfriend, Ruth Meeks, and took a job as a hotel porter in Laurel. White men who learned of the relationship accused him of raping her and hunted him for weeks. Newspapers announced his lynching in advance, and Governor Theodore Bilbo took no action. Hartfield was killed on June 26, 1919, before a large crowd, and postcards of the lynching were printed and sent out.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Amos Deason House — 0.5 mi
  A Greek Revival house in Ellisville where a Confederate major was shot in 1863, tied to the history of the Free State of Jones.
• Lauren Rogers Museum of Art — 7.6 mi
  Mississippi's oldest art museum, a 1923 memorial to a timber heir in Laurel, with a major Native American basket collection and no admission fee since it opened.
• African American Military History Museum — 19 mi
  The wooden USO club that opened in March 1942 for Black soldiers training at Camp Shelby, now a museum of African American military service from the Revolutionary War to Iraq.
• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — 20 mi
  The courthouse where Hattiesburg held Freedom Day on January 22, 1964, and where a memorial now honors Vernon Dahmer, killed by Klansmen in 1966.

More markers nearby

• JCJC Bobcats Defy Segregation — 0.6 mi
• Ellisville State School — 1.5 mi
• Ralph Boston — 5.5 mi
• Oak Park School — 6.0 mi