Parker, Mack Charles

Source:

 African American National Biography

Parker, Mack Charles

(1937?–24 Apr. 1959),

lynching victim, was born near Tylertown, Mississippi, the eldest of four children born to Liza Parker (maiden name unknown). The name of his father is unknown, as is the family's means of making a living, but it is known that they were very poor—perhaps among the most poverty-stricken of families living in the nation's most economically deprived state. Sometime around 1942 the Parkers moved to Lamar County in the Piney Woods section of southern Mississippi, where the family of six crowded into three small rooms in a shack in the town of Lumberton. Parker, or M.C., as he came to be known, attended Lamar County's segregated public schools, but, like many African Americans in Mississippi—a state which spent far more to educate its white students than its black students—he dropped out before graduating from high school.

Faced with meager job opportunities in Lumberton, Parker enlisted in the U.S. Army when he was eighteen. His service record was unremarkable, but he appeared in military court twice; first, in 1956, during his basic training at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and again in 1957, while he was stationed at Fort Crowder, Missouri. On both occasions he was found guilty of theft of government property. Parker's second conviction resulted in a general discharge from the military. Back in Lumberton in 1957 he was unemployed for a short period, but after his father died, he found a job as a truck driver for a pulpwood firm. His younger brother Elmo had enlisted in the military, and thus Parker served as the primary breadwinner for the family, working long hours to look after his mother, his youngest brother, Charles, who was only four, his sister Dolores, and her son, Peanut. Not long after returning to Lumberton, Parker had married Mattie Pearl Ott, a childhood acquaintance, but the marriage lasted only a year or so. In spite of his trouble in the military, Parker had never been arrested in his native Mississippi, and he managed to avoid any run-ins with the law. A neighbor of the Parkers, Ruby Lee, described him as “a decent sort. He did his work and came home at night” (Smead, 19).

Parker did, however, run with a gang described by one neighbor as a “hard-drinking crew”—David Alfred, Rainbow Malachy, Curt Underwood, and Tommy Lee Grant, all in their early twenties, who “did what came to their mind” (Smead, 19). On the evening of Monday, 23 February 1959, the five friends set off drinking in Elmo Parker's Chevy. It was cold and blustery, but Monday was payday in the lumber industry, and they began by purchasing a half gallon of moonshine, which they quickly consumed. With Parker at the wheel—having drunk as much as his passengers—the five spent the next few hours drinking, playing cards, and, as one of them put it, “just joe-jacking around” the juke joints and bars on the road between Lumberton and Poplarville, in nearby Pearl River County (Smead, 5).

Sometime around midnight, Parker parked the Chevy behind a broken-down Dodge on a quiet stretch of Highway 11, near where Lamar and Pearl River counties meet. After telling his friends that he might steal the car's tires, Parker jumped out and shone his flashlight into the Dodge, before returning to his own car. Three of Parker's companions, including his sister Dolores's ex-husband, Curt Underwood, later told police that Parker told them that there was a white woman in the car and that he had suggested, “Why don't we stop and get some of that white stuff?” (Smead, 5) Shortly afterward Parker drove past a white man attempting to hitch a ride and identified him as the woman's husband, seeking help for his broken-down car. Again Parker boasted that he would “git back down there before [the woman's husband],” but to the relief of his friends he kept on driving into Lumberton, where he dropped his friends at their respective homes, telling at least one of them that he had only been joking about the white woman (Smead, 5). Heavily drunk by the time he arrived home around 1:00 A.M., Parker fell and cut his hand; he bandaged it roughly, and, in spite of his mother's pleas, he drove off again, alone.

The next morning police officers dragged Mack Charles Parker from his bed, where he lay asleep and hung over, took him out to the nearby woods, and beat him severely. Despite the beating, Parker refused to confess to the charge laid against him: the rape, earlier that morning, of a white woman, June Walters, on Highway 11, just inside the Pearl River County line. Walters, who was two months' pregnant, had been waiting with her four-year-old daughter Debbie in the family's broken-down Dodge while her husband, Jimmy, had set off for help. June Walters told police officers that a middle-aged man with a bandaged hand had approached the locked car, smashed a window with the butt of his gun, and threatened to kill both Walters and her daughter. The man, who claimed to be an escaped convict who had killed five people, then forced the woman and girl into his car and drove a mile away to a narrow dirt track road, where he forced Debbie out of the car. The man then raped June Walters inside the car.

The police had rounded up thirty black men that night as possible suspects, but were convinced that M. C. Parker was their man. David Alfred had told his father of Parker's boast that he would return to have sex with the woman in the broken-down car, and Alfred's father had told the police. The three other young men confirmed the story, though it later emerged that some of them had been beaten by police officers before doing so, and that others were threatened with beatings. The police also believed they had compelling circumstantial evidence that indicated Parker's guilt: June Walters had mentioned her attacker's badly cut hand and gave a description of the interior of her assailant's car that closely matched Parker's beat-up Chevy; tire tracks left at the scene of the crime also matched.

R. Jess Brown, the Vicksburg attorney hired by Liza Parker to defend her son, believed, however, that Parker, who insisted on his innocence and had passed several lie-detector tests, had a case. Though Brown accepted that the confessions of Parker's friends were problematic, he began assembling a case that questioned the validity of June Walters's testimony. Her identification of Parker as her assailant was uncertain; she had stated that the rapist was large and aged thirty-nine to forty, while Parker was slight and either twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Brown also intended to challenge the proposed venue for Parker's trial, the Pearl River County Court, on the grounds that African Americans were unconstitutionally excluded from jury lists in that county. Brown was unable to raise these points on Parker's behalf, however, because a white mob of eight to ten men abducted M.-C. Parker from his Pearl River County jail cell on the evening of 24 April 1959. The hooded mob beat Parker, dragged him from the jail, and shot him several times. Parker's body was found ten days later in the Pearl River.

Coming only four years after the Emmett Till lynching, the Mack Parker case again focused national and international attention on Mississippi's disregard for the rule of law. Civil rights activists and others charged that the sheriff of Pearl River County and his deputies had assisted the white mob and shared the mob's view that it would be an outrage for a black attorney to question a white female rape victim in court. An extensive FBI investigation of the case also found a prevailing white belief that the federal courts would release Parker on the grounds raised by Jess Brown, namely that Pearl River County's all-white jury pool was unconstitutional. The FBI's investigation established the identity of several members of the lynch mob—who were also known to local law enforcement agencies—but an all-white grand jury refused to return indictments against the men. No one has ever been convicted for his or her role in lynching M. C. Parker.

The Mack Parker lynching was in one respect a rather traditional lynching. During the nadir in southern race relations at the turn of the twentieth century it was not at all unusual for white mobs to break into jails to lynch African American prisoners. By 1959, however, such flagrant disregard for the rule of law came as a surprise, even to hardened civil rights leaders. Upon hearing of the case, Mississippi's Medgar Evers was so angered that he told his wife that he'd “like to get a gun and just start shooting” (Dittmer, 85). The North Carolinian activist Robert F. Williams likewise cited the Parker lynching as justification for his call for African Americans to arm themselves. Williams noted that “non-violence never saved George Lee [shot dead by white supremacists in 1955] in Belzoni, Miss., or Emmett Till, nor Mack Parker” (Tyson, 154). Most African Americans did not share Williams's view that the Parker lynching justified an armed response, but it proved to be one of several prominent cases in the late 1950s that stiffened the resolve of young civil rights activists and spurred the more militant and more successful campaigns in the 1960s to overcome racism, especially in Mississippi.

Though he was never a member of the NAACP and never went on a civil rights march, Mack Charles Parker has subsequently been regarded as a civil rights martyr. His name is one of forty listed on a Montgomery, Alabama, civil rights memorial, which honors those killed during the black freedom struggle in the South between 1955 and 1968.

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