Successful Black businessmen faced lethal violence as late as the 1950s

Evidence

In Yazoo County, Mississippi, the twin brothers Norman and Homer Stephens ran a trucking business “hauling cotton pickers to plantations.” When a white farmer couldn’t get workers delivered to his field quickly enough, because the Stephenses had other commitments to attend to first, he sent the sheriff after them. The two brothers wound up in jail that night and overheard the sheriff “talking about where to hide their bodies.” The year was 1950. Luckily, Norman and Homer crawled out a window and escaped from their cell on the second floor of the county jail. They ran home, immediately packed their bags, and took the first bus out of town, headed to Ohio. Norman’s wife and five kids joined him there a year later. The family continued to pay the mortgage and property tax on their house back in Mississippi but were too afraid to ever return. In the 1960s, they stopped making payments and lost the house for good. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 317

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail that two brothers running a trucking business in 1950 were jailed and threatened with lynching — sheriff ‘talking about where to hide their bodies’ — would interest anyone working on civil-rights era economics.