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Travis Armstrong, Ed.D
Dr. Travis Armstrong is the community outreach coordinator of the Foot Soldier’s Journey organization led by his cousin, Thomas Armstrong, who is an original Mississippi Freedom Rider of 1961. The organization’s purpose is to provide civic education and engagement to educate organizations about the lessons of the civil rights movement era and to inform on the contemporary civil rights issues of today. Dr. Armstrong also serves on several committees including the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Prentiss (MS) Normal and Industrial Institute Partnership Team. Armstrong retired from the United States Air Force in 2014 after 23 years of active duty service and served in Operations Southern Watch, Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom and in Europe, Asia, and the continental United States. He specialized in combat troop deployment services and designed, produced, and implemented instructional development programs for the Air Force Human Resources career field, serving over 44,000 personnel.
Black scholars have theorized about how people of African descent use their ways of knowing and culture to resist white supremacy. Given our contemporary challenges, this is a historically fitting moment to discuss the decision-making considerations of Isaiah Montgomery, the founder of Mound Bayou and a leading Black politician in Mississippi during Reconstruction. Montgomery’s fateful decision in 1890 in the Mississippi legislature fits into ideas of Africana community’s self-preservation amid the threat of white violence on Black communities. Montgomery crossed the boundaries of dehumanization and oppression to build a community of resistance that still exists today.
Reconstruction was a hopeful time for African Americans. This period witnessed the passage of the Reconstruction amendments: 13th,14th, and 15th amendments, which abolished slavery, granted citizenship, and gave Black men the right to vote. However, less than a decade later, the Compromise of 1877 marked the end of Reconstruction and the reconsolidation of white supremacist power in the South.
Mississippi was the second state to secede from the Union in 1861 and its history of racial violence is well known. Born in 1847, Isaiah Thornton Montgomery, toiled on the Hurricane Plantation situated along the Mississippi River in southwestern Mississippi owned by Joseph Davis, the older brother of the future Confederate States of America President, Jefferson Davis. While stories of a “model slave society” on that plantation are prevalent, that myth is a form of “violent nostalgia” utilized to sanitize human trafficking and enslavement. Montgomery obtained his freedom after he fled with his family to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1862. Following the war, Montgomery returned to run the plantation in Old Natchez where he was once enslaved and raised enough money to buy the land. Even though Mississippi enacted a more “benevolent” state constitution in 1868, these fleeting gains were erased by the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877.
While the entire state of Mississippi was drenched in violence, Montgomery’s Old Natchez was especially violent. From 1881 to 1940, one hundred and five lynchings were reported. In 1884, white militias ousted the Black sheriff in nearby Vicksburg and the Davis Bend Plantation was near one of the bloodiest acts of white mob violence against Blacks in U.S. history. In Clinton, Mississippi, approximately sixty-six miles east of Davis Bend on September 6, 1875, Redeemers, a white terrorist group, slaughtered over fifty African Americans. The Redeemers wanted to abolish Reconstruction and restore a white republic. Doing so required violent force and nullifying the rule of law. Montgomery realized that lynching and mob violence destroyed Black political gains and led to the re-subjugation of the Black population. By 1875, white rule had been restored in Mississippi.
Despite the violence, Montgomery and his cousin, Benjamin Green, led a group that purchased an 847-acre swamp area halfway between Vicksburg and Memphis. They incorporated the town of Mound Bayou in July 1887. Mound Bayou became a haven for Black self-determination. Within three years of Mound Bayou’s establishment the Mississippi legislature prepared to fully eradicate Black franchise rights and Isaiah Montgomery would play a key role in its demise. The dynamics of this decision were complex. Mr. Montgomery built a prosperous city that boomed with the production of the “best single bale of long staple cotton” in the world. In 1870, Booker T. Washington visited Mound Bayou affirming the self-reliance and independence of Mississippi’s first all-Black colony. The success of Mound Bayou presented a dilemma for Montgomery. He had to walk the dangerous tightrope of Black self-preservation amid white counter-emancipation violence.
Politics was the engine that Blacks envisioned would wield power and economic freedom. This was especially true in Mississippi represented by the nation’s first Black Senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche Kelso Bruce. Spurred by fusion politics, Montgomery was convinced by whites to act as a delegate to the 1890 constitutional convention, which was convened for the express purpose of eliminating African Americans from the voting rolls. As the sole Black delegate to the convention, Montgomery feared racial terrorism. He felt the only way to avoid it and ensure the survival of Black society, required endorsing the bill to disenfranchise his fellow Black citizens. The idea that Montgomery considered Blacks unworthy of the vote is false, instead he sought to limit the continued suffering of Blacks at the hands of Mississippi’s white supremacists. Montgomery’s vote was criticized harshly by many leaders such as Frederick Douglass who condemned Montgomery’s action and Mississippi native Ida B. Wells who excoriated Montgomery as a “Judas.” Conversely, he was supported by journalist T. Thomas Fortune who opined that Montgomery “perhaps (he) adopted the wisest and safest course available to him.” He knew the law would not protect him.
The disenfranchisement of Black voters still reverberates today, there are twenty-three specific disenfranchising crimes listed in the 1890 constitution and between 1994 and 2017 some 50,000 citizens were disenfranchised with 59% of them being Black. Furthermore, Mississippi is one of only four states that do not automatically restore voting rights to individuals who complete their sentencing term. Isaiah Montgomery’s memory is still as strong as ever. He made his dream come true; to build a city led by a vision of independence and self-reliance. That city still exists and harbors the Mound Bayou African American Culture and History Museum which proudly narrates Montgomery’s story to the world. The museum is led by a spry and sharp 95-year-old Korean War Veteran curator Hermon Johnson Sr., and his two sons Hermon Jr. and Darryl. It is rooted in the West African Akan people’s historiography, the principle of Sankofa, “to go back and get it,” or to bring the past forward to inform us in the present and the future. Africana ways of knowing persist.
#IsaiahMontgomery #MoundBayou #WhiteSupremacy #MississippiConstitutionof1890