Sheriff Peter Crosby

Peter Crosby, the county's first Black sheriff, served less than a year before armed white men of the Taxpayers' League forced him to sign a resignation on December 2, 1874. When Black citizens marched to the courthouse on December 7 for his reinstatement, white men fired on the crowd. Estimates of the dead range from 29 to 50 in the city to about 300 across Vicksburg and Claiborne County, in historian Emilye Crosby's count. Federal troops restored him in January 1875, but on June 7 his deputy, J. P. Gilmer, shot him in the head. He never fully recovered.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Court House Museum — steps away
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 1.6 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 1.8 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.

More markers nearby

• Vicksburg — steps away
• Old Natchez District — steps away
• Tommie Lee Williams Sr. — steps away
• Anchuca — steps away