Carroll County was created on 23 December 1833 from land the Choctaw gave up in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and Carrollton became its seat. By 1860 the county held 13,808 enslaved people and 8,227 free residents.
On 12 February 1886 a Carrollton lawyer, James Monroe Liddell, and two Black brothers, Ed and Charley Brown, traded gunfire after a dispute that began with molasses spilled on a white man. The brothers charged Liddell with attempted murder. At the hearing on 17 March, between 50 and 100 armed white men entered the courtroom through four doors and fired on the Black people inside. People who tried to escape through second-story windows were shot as they hung from the sills or after they fell. Accounts count ten dead at the scene and thirteen more who died of their wounds, while no white person was hit.
No one was arrested. Governor Robert Lowry blamed "the outrage and conduct of the Negroes," and Blanche K. Bruce and John R. Lynch asked President Cleveland for federal action without result. Bullet holes stayed visible in the courtroom walls until renovations in the early 1990s. Few of the dead appear by name in the records.
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