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Myisha S Eatmon, Wielding an Unlikely Weapon: Black Americans, White Violence, and Damage Suits during the Early Days of Jim Crow, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 267–289, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae095
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On the bitterly cold night of March 7, 1899, Mary Ward, Mary Martin, and Rosa Rend, three Black women, were all waiting for their train in a Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad depot in Elizabeth, Mississippi. Mary Ward was traveling from Hickory Station, where she was a school teacher. She was headed to her summer job at the Negro World, a Black newspaper in Cary, Mississippi. Mary Martin and Rosa Rend were traveling home from the seminary they attended, which had recently been torched, likely by night riders or Ku Klux Klansmen who resented Black advancement represented by Black churches and schools.1
When they arrived at the Elizabeth depot, the women met E. A. Humphreys, a white man who was also traveling. Although Jim Crow segregation was on the rise in the mid- and late 1800s, Humphreys had sought refuge in the warm “colored” waiting room. The four passengers found themselves in grave danger after they had a nasty exchange with the white, allegedly drunk, depot agent named McDowell. According to the victims, including Humphreys, agent McDowell made a sexual advance toward Mary Ward when she tried to purchase her ticket. When Ward declined McDowell's sexual proposition, he cursed the women and Humphreys, pointed a pistol at them, cocked it, and chased the four passengers from the depot, threatening to shoot all four of them. Scared for their lives, the passengers left their purses and personal effects in the depot that night.2
