Leaving Mississippi

By Betty R. Dickson and Martha Lee Hall

One month shy of her 13th birthday in 1952, the author watched as a portable electric chair was off-loaded from a huge flatbed truck and into the Simpson County courthouse. A Negro man who had killed a constable in 1951 was to be electrocuted that night. His wife, Martha Lee Durr, eight-months pregnant, was arrested, charged with accessory to murder. She lost the baby. She spent six months in the Simpson County jail before several Negro farmers posted bail for her to be released and reunited with her three children. Martha Lee was never tried in court. Upon release, she focused on getting herself and her children away from Mississippi. Martha Lee Hall, age 93, today lives in Grand Rapids, MI. This is her story of survival and forgiveness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664141100

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Copyright © 2020 by Betty R. Dickson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The background cover photo from the Jackson Daily News July 14, 1951 and all other Jackson Daily News and The Clarion Ledger photos and the Birdsong article were obtained from IMAGN, part of the USA Network.

Rev. date: 11/10/2020

Xlibris

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Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1     Friday, the 13th

Chapter 2     The Killing

Chapter 3     Martha Lee in Jail

Chapter 4     Jim Brent Durr on Trial

Chapter 5     The Trial Process

Chapter 6     The Trial Gets Under Way

Chapter 7     July 25, 1952: The Execution

Chapter 8     Portable Electric Chair Retired

Chapter 9     Willie Bell Stood by Her Side

Chapter 10   Martha Lee Packs and Leaves

Chapter 11   Martha Lee Talks

Chapter 12   Building a Tribe

Chapter 13   Martha Lee Today

Chapter 14   Finding Forgiveness

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Wherever there walked black women in the 1940s and 1950s in the South, there walked an untold story. Martha Lee has such a story. She packed up her worldly possessions in a paper bag and ran away from Mississippi.

Dedication

Martha Lee’s story

is dedicated

to

Martha Lee

Beth and Lynn

Judy

Jack

Introduction

It was the early fifties in south Mississippi. It was a time when white children whose parents both worked, and living in a small town in the South, had free rein to get up in the morning, explore the neighborhood, play with friends, ride bikes, smell the daffodils and magnolias, swim in the creek, fish, and explore in the many acres of woods in the pasture behind the house. No one checked on us unless we didn’t show up for lunch or dinner.

We were not even aware that being white gave us privilege. There was no textbook that defined our role as being superior to the Negro. What we learned was purely by watching, by observing and making up our own minds as to how we felt about our Negro neighbors. The very minute we walked into our first-grade classrooms in our segregated schools, we knew. We were completely surrounded by Negroes, except in the classroom or the church. The Negro men worked at the cotton gin mill near our home, the Negro women worked for the white women cleaning and ironing. The Negroes lived on an alley that ran between our house and the once-famous Mendenhall Hotel. Some were friends of my father’s, and some of my mother’s, who worked for the Simpson County school system and helped Negro administrators in a segregated system with their bookkeeping.

In our younger years, we were playmates with some of the Negro children who lived on that alley.

We chased mules, listened to the messages from the train whistle, and stuck our noses into every aspect of a carefree childhood, all with very little adult supervision. There was no television. We lived one block below the railroad tracks in Mendenhall and learned to pass through the cars that were being switched. Listening for a loud hiss, a signal indicating the cars were about to uncouple, we dare-deviled our way between the cars en route to a trip uptown. We lived by the cycle of the trains that passed through there daily and would have won awards for who played the hardest, was the most creative, and who spent the longest time outdoors should there have been one.

We were getting into and out of as much we could, living a safe and secure life, loving every moment of our existence in the late forties to the early fifties, when something happened or was going to happen in our lives. Only a few years away from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the rumblings and unrest amongst the Negroes were beginning and the rumors about integration had started. Several issues were about to force change. Negro men coming home from the war, interested individuals from the north picking up on the injustices toward the Negroes in the South, and other forces were beginning to lay the foundation for monumental changes. Mississippi was about to become the epicenter for the civil rights movement.

Our days of playing with our Negro playmates came to an abrupt stop, and somehow the atmosphere in our little Southern community slowly began to change.

While we were enjoying our safe and carefree existence afforded to white children, a young black woman living only ten miles south, was chopping and picking cotton, hoeing weeds from the corn, plowing, cutting wood, digging up potatoes, and, by age fifteen, the mother of a baby girl.

Her life and mine could not have been more different. But in 1951, something happened that introduced me, indirectly, to this woman who was in her early twenties. Her name was Martha Lee Durr, and she was charged with accessory to murder. Her husband, Jim Brent Durr, was arrested and charged with murdering a constable, an act that most assuredly would mean death to a Negro accused of killing a white officer of the law. The reason for this unfortunate event that escalated out of control was Durr’s failure to pay on a loan of about $25 to $40, depending on who was telling the story, on the purchase of a wooden farm wagon.

I first learned about Martha Lee in the spring of 1951. When I was thirteen, my brother, nearly twelve, and I were employed by the local county weekly newspaper, the Simpson County News. We were more up to date on local news than most of our peers because we were considered printer’s devils working at the newspaper. Every Wednesday, press day, we caught stacks of newspaper from the old letter press; and our job was to collate one section into another. Once that task was finished, one of us would stamp the address of the subscriber onto the upper-right section of the front page, tie up the bundles, and deliver them to the post office. We worked in every facet of the newspaper—breaking down the pages and replacing the handset type back into their respective drawers, sweeping the floors, and working in the print shop the rest of the week. We listened as the older employees talked about the constable killing, the legal process, the electric chair that may be put into use, and speculation as