De Kalb, MS news and local guide

White planters developed the county for cotton using enslaved African Americans, and Black residents have been the majority since before the Civil War. After Reconstruction, racial violence rose as whites worked to regain power and suppress Black voting. On April 29, 1877, in the Chisolm Massacre, a mob of about 300 Ku Klux Klan members stormed the county jail and killed Judge William Chisolm, who had been accused of killing a sheriff, along with his teenage son and daughter and friends who were held with him in protective custody. Kemper County recorded 24 lynchings of African Americans between 1877 and 1950, the third-highest number in Mississippi. De Kalb was the home of U.S. Senator John C. Stennis, born in the Kipling community in 1901. As a circuit judge he heard cases in the De Kalb courthouse, and he served in the Senate from 1947, becoming president pro tempore and writing the Senate's first code of ethics; the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis was named for him in 1993. Sources The Historical Marker Database: DeKalb; Rueben Kemper; John C. Stennis (Mississippi Department of Archives and History) Wikipedia: Kemper County, Mississippi Wikipedia: Chisolm Massacre