page_title: Lexington, Mississippi
section_title: 20th century to present
hierarchical_section_title: Lexington, Mississippi / History / 20th century to present
caption_attribution_description: Digital ID: 1260038. Selling fish on Saturday afternoon, Lexington, Holmes County, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi, November 1939.. Wolcott, Marion Post -- Photographer. November 1939 Notes: Original negative #: 30657-M2 Source: Farm Security Administration Collection. / Mississippi. / Marion Post Wolcott. (more info) Repository: The New York Public Library. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Photographs and Prints Division. See more information about this image and others at NYPL Digital Gallery. Persistent URL: digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1260038 Rights Info: No known copyright restrictions; may be subject to third party rights (for more information, click here)
context_page_description: Lexington is a city in and the county seat of Holmes County, Mississippi, United States. The county was organized in 1833 and the city in 1836. The population was 1,731 at the 2010 census, down from 2,025 at the 2000 census. The estimated population in 2018 was 1,496. It has declined from its high of 3198 in 1950 due to the expansion of industrial-scale agriculture. Because of the difficulties in making a living, many people have left the rural county to seek work elsewhere.
context_section_description: Edmund F. Noel, an attorney in Lexington, was a son of planters Leland and Margaret Noel, from Virginia and North Carolina, respectively. His father had developed cotton plantations in Holmes County in the antebellum period. The younger Noel became a politician, elected as a state legislator and later as District Attorney. In 1906 he was elected as governor of Mississippi, serving through 1912. His house at North Street is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its distinctive architecture, and is known as the "Gov. Edmond F. Noel House". It was bequeathed to him by his mother.
  In the early 20th century, Mississippi planters recruited Chinese immigrant workers to satisfy the demand for farm labor, and some came to Holmes County. As the area suffered from the boll weevil infestation, the cotton crops suffered. Agricultural mechanization reduced the need for farm labor, leading to a decline in county and town populations from the 1930s on. Many African Americans left the South for northern and midwestern industrial cities, seeking more opportunities and escape from the violence of lynchings and oppression of Jim Crow rules.
  In the 1940s, two lynchings of black men took place in or near Lexington: singer B.B. King later recounted having seen a youth hanged in the courthouse square during the short time he was living there as a teenager, about 1942–1944. The body of 35-year-old Leon McTatie was found on 24 July 1946 in a bayou in nearby Sunflower County. He was beaten to death for allegedly stealing a saddle. Six white men were charged in his lynching but quickly acquitted at trial.
  Lexington was distinguished by two nationally known women: Arenia Mallory, an African-American music teacher from Illinois, started teaching at the newly established Saints Academy in Lexington in 1926, which was affiliated with the Church of God in Christ. She led the school for more than 50 years, expanding its programs to grades 1-12, and establishing a junior college. She developed the school from the early 20th century as a model of academic excellence for African-American students. During her long tenure, she also founded an associated junior college. During the 1960s, she was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to national positions and committees in the federal government.
  Hazel Brannon Smith, a white woman from an upper-class family, was based in Lexington, where she owned and published several rural newspapers. She promoted integration and change in the region during the civil rights era, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her editorials in 1964, the year of Freedom Summer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, organized by African Americans before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed by Congress.
caption: Selling fish on Saturday afternoon in Lexington, 1939. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott.
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