In Mississippi, the troubled situation was thrown into bold relief as scores of black churches and schools were burned without prosecutions. In March 1871, three blacks in the small town of Meridian were brought up on charges of delivering “incendiary” speeches. At the court hearing, the Republican judge and two black defendants were killed. The violence spilled over into gruesome riots in which thirty blacks were gunned down, including “all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions.”67 During the first three months of that sanguinary year, sixty-three blacks were murdered
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