Tragedy in Mink Slide

One morning last week, in a downtown store of Columbia, Tenn., a Negro woman, her son and a white man engaged in a brief scuffle. Its cause was obscure; its result was a tragedy.

Through Tennessee's Maury County, which has had two lynchings within young Negro recollections, news of such scuffles spreads fast. All day long white men poured into town. They were mostly small farmers, and they mostly had guns.

Local Negroes rallied, too, instead of fleeing homeward in the usual pattern of fright. In Mink Slide, a rickety Negro business district, they gathered.

By dusk local peace officers had persuaded some of the white men to go home and had jailed two who were drunk and particularly loud. But in blacked-out Mink Slide the rumors still hummed behind closed doors: the white men were coming.

Sure enough, white men came--but not looking for trouble. The police chief and three patrolmen ventured to look over the tinderbox Mink Slide district. A panicky Negro opened fire. For an instant, Mink Slide was loud with gunfire. All four policemen were hit by buckshot.

Minutes later, state highway patrolmen and guards were burning the roads to Columbia. At dawn the patrolmen moved into Mink Slide, smashed its stores, pulled quaking Negroes out of the miserable buildings. As their Tommy guns blazed, one Negro was seriously shot (see cut)', the patrolmen beat others, then marched them off to jail.

The tragedy had one more chapter. Two days later there was a melee in the jail. State patrolmen shot two of their Negro prisoners to death. Once the spark was kindled, in towns like Columbia, there was no stopping it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.