A Lynching in Creoletown

In the old cemetery of the Black Catholic Church in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the church in which I was raised, lies the unmarked grave of a man who was lynched on June 20, 1899, at 1:40 in the morning. His grave is surrounded by my grandparents on my dad’s side, uncles and cousins, and ancestors I do not know but I have heard their names over the years. Pascagoula stood next to the old railroad town of Scranton then, the two would merge in 1910. The man lived in the northeast section called Creoletown, which stretched north of Telephone Road, where the Josephite mission that would become St. Peter’s Apostolic Catholic church stood. Men and women who were so light-skinned as to look white walked the streets. Some spoke creole French. Others were dark or had a reddish hue with straight or curly hair and aquiline noses. Their faces and food resembled the layered colonial histories of the region.

On a hot and humid Monday in June, a young Dan Patrick stopped and asked Miss Bessie Ireland for a glass of water. The Pascagoula Democrat-Star reported that Miss Ireland “acceded to his request and as she was in the act of handing it to him he caught her arm and struggled with her.” She tried to resist, the paper recounted, but eventually succumbed to “his hellish deed.” Patrick, who was well known in Pascagoula, was captured in Scranton near the Scranton Hotel bar the next day by the local Sheriff, taken to jail where he confessed his crime and, according to the reporting, admitted that “he was ready to face any punishment that would be meted out.”

Crowds began to gather. Rumors swirled. The local sheriff got word that a mob was planning to take Patrick by force. He decided to put Patrick on the freight train arriving from Mobile on Wednesday morning. The idea was to take the prisoner to New Orleans “until the public cooled off.” But the white residents of Scranton and Pascagoula had other ideas. The sheriff brought Patrick to a secluded spot near the depot where the train pulled up around 1:30am only to be overwhelmed by a mob of about 300 people hell-bent on a lynching. According to the Pascagoula Democrat-Star, the sheriff “made a brave stand and did all in his power to hold his man from the infuriated crowd, but after several shots had been fired and [the sheriff] shot in the leg he was compelled to give in.”

Patrick was taken to the Hangman’s Tree, which stood at the intersection of Krebs Avenue and Magnolia Street in Scranton, about a hundred yards from the depot. As they placed the rope around his neck and swung him up, it was reported, Patrick “proclaimed his guilt and cried out to the mob, ‘shoot me, shoot me, get rid of me quick.’ Several hundred shots rang out as his body dangled from the old Oak tree. The Coroner’s jury concluded that “We, the jury, find that the deceased came to his death by climbing a tree, venturing too far out on a limb and broke his neck.”

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