Location: Amite County, Mississippi
Age: 22
Year: 1945
Eugene Bell, 22, was a WWII veteran and farmer who was killed in 1945 in Amite County, Mississippi.
When he returned from the war, Bell worked for his father-in-law Herbert Lee, choosing not to return to his previous employer, white plantation owner Russ McDowell.
McDowell was not happy that Bell had decided to work for Lee and threatened him with lynching.
Not long after these threats were made, Bell and his family were ambushed as they drove along a highway. Reports suggest that three white men waylaid Bell’s vehicle and lynched him.
In an affidavit with the NAACP, Bell’s father-in-law named Oball Mundrey, a relative of McDowell, Earl Moore and Wiley Banns as responsible for the killing.
For more information, search CRRJ’s archive.
Read more about Bell’s death on the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive
About the Archive
The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive houses case files and documents for more than 1,000 cases of racial homicides in the Jim Crow South. Co-founded by Melissa Nobles, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Margaret Burnham, CRRJ director and professor of law at Northeastern, these uncovered stories highlight how violence affected lives, defined legal rights and shaped politics between 1930 and 1954.