Lynching of Mack Charles Parker

In 2009 the FBI announced they were re-opening the Mack Charles Parker case.

Almost immediately, 60 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation descended upon the town of Poplarville. In the two weeks following Parker's death, the FBI questioned hundreds of potential witnesses and suspects. Several local Poplarville men, Jewel Alford, Christopher Columbus "Crip" Reyer, L. C. Davis, "Preacher" James Floren Lee, his son James Floren "Jeff" Lee, Herman Schultz, Arthur Smith and J.P. Walker, a former Pearl River County Sheriff's deputy, who would be elected sheriff of Pearl River County in November 1963, quickly became the focus of the FBI's intensive probe into the abduction and death of Parker.

During a speaking tour for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in the North on 1963, Dale said, to persons asking him about the Parker case, that he didn't think the perpetrators would be caught, adding three of them already died.

After a Mississippi grand jury refused to indict the lynchers, a federal grand jury in Biloxi then oversaw the case under District Court Judge Sidney Mize in January 1960 and failed to indict some of the mob by a single vote. Before the trial, Dale went to meet Mize and managed to convince him to narrow the Federal kidnaping statute

Mack Charles Parker (1936 – April 24, 1959) was an African-American victim of lynching in the United States. He had been accused of raping a pregnant white woman in northern Pearl River County, Mississippi. Three days before he was to stand trial, Parker was kidnapped from his jail cell in the Pearl River County Courthouse by a mob, beaten and shot. His body was found in the Pearl River, 20 miles west of Poplarville, 10 days later. Following an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the men who killed him were released. Despite confessions, no one was ever indicted for the killing. Historian Howard Smead called the killing the "last classic lynching in America."

Parker was arrested for the February 23, 1959, rape and kidnapping of June Walters, a pregnant white woman, in Pearl River County, Mississippi. Walters reported that the crime occurred on a dirt logging road called Black Creek Ford Road, off U. S. Route 11, approximately seven miles south of Lumberton, Mississippi, where she and her child were waiting alone in a car while her husband, Jimmy sought help for repairs. Parker vehemently denied having raped anyone, and statements from his supporters after his death suggested that the rape accusations may have been fabricated by the alleged victim as a means of concealing an ongoing consensual affair with a local white man.

In June 1959, attempts were made to enact an anti-lynching bill, which was stalled, as many others, by the Southern Democratic bloc.

In a three-hour interrogation session, FBI agents browbeat Crip Reyer. Reyer finally admitted that his red and white 1956 Oldsmobile 88 had been used by the mob, but denied having anything to do with the abduction or killing of Parker.