In Laurel, a bit north of town, just a few months before the Nisei soldiers arrived, a mob had dragged two fourteen-year-old boys—Charlie Lang and Ernest Green—out of jail, tied ropes around the terrified boys’ necks, and thrown them to their deaths from what locals had long quietly and confidentially called the Hanging Bridge. The bridge, on the Chickasawhay River, had earned its grim name in commemoration of an earlier lynching, in 1918, when two young men and two young women—both women pregnant, both begging for their lives—had been hanged there. Five days after Charlie Lang and Ernest
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