The Ballad of Joe Pullen

Banned Histories of Race in America

There was probably a moment when Joe Pullen realized he was he was worth more dead than alive. There was probably a moment when he knew he wasn’t going to make it. And it was probably when he saw W. T. Saunders approaching.

It was December 14, 1923 in Drew, Mississippi and Pullen was a sharecropper. If you’re unfamiliar, sharecropping was a system of debt slavery in which Black folks worked white-owned land for a share of the harvest and/or profits. The landowner was usually a former enslaver or a direct descendant of one and the farmer was often formerly enslaved or family of someone who had been. The white landowners and plantation managers frequently and perpetually falsified debts, essentially enslaving the Black farmer. And if the whites were unsatisfied with the crop or really anything else in their lives, the sharecropper could just be disappeared or lynched and the land would be leased to another potential victim.

Negro sharecropper and wife. Mississippi. They have no tools, stock, equipment, or garden (Source: Library of Congress)

Sharecroppers were much more likely to be lynched when it came time to settle up. Just a few years prior to this moment, 80 miles from Drew, hundreds of Black men, women and children had been killed by a lynch mob. The mass killing happened over a period of three days and was a white reaction to Black farmers meeting with a union organizer. There’s a good chance Joe Pullen thought about this as W. T. Saunders approached, holding a rifle.

Saunders probably thought about it, too. He was the plantation manager and it was time to settle up. Pullen and Saunders argued about a supposed debt of $150. Some said it was only $50, but the truth for Joe Pullen in that moment is that it could have been $0. The presence of a plantation manager with a rifle meant it was already too late.  

Joe Pullen was 40 years old at the time—nearly five years past the average life-expectancy for a Black man back then—and you don’t live that long in those circumstances without learning a few things. So, when Saunders shot Pullen—only wounding him in the arm—Saunders probably had no idea it was the last thing he would ever do.

Pullen was a sharpshooter.

Some say it was a pistol, some say it was a rifle, but Pullen got his hands on one type of gun or another. He quickly returned fire, sending a bullet right through Saunders’ heart.

The entire incident could’ve ended right there, but Saunders had not come alone. He’d brought a man named J. D. Manning. Manning must’ve recognized that his racism wouldn’t be much use in a gunfight—especially with a sharpshooter, because he took off for town. Pullen let him go, grabbed another gun, ammo and set out for the swamp three miles away.

Pullen probably knew it wouldn’t take long for Manning to get a lynch mob together. And it didn’t. Some versions of this story have the lynch mob at 1,000 members. Others at 100. Either way, it was enough for Pullen to know the end was certain.

But the end is always certain…

The lynch mob spread out as they entered the swamp. Someone yelled out that they saw Pullen, but then couldn’t find him. Someone else yelled the same thing from another part of the swamp, also to no avail. And then a third. And a fourth. And then a shot rang out. One of the lynch mob fell, a hole where his face used to be.

A second shot fell a second member of the mob. Then a third. And a fourth. Then Pullen was spotted sniping from inside a hollow tree. The mob gathered, but he had already escaped.

The local sheriff brought a machine gun. As members of the mob attempted to assemble it, Pullen began picking them off, but it was eventually assembled.

Pullen was again spotted, this time in a drainage ditch. The mob was able to start a fire, driving him out into a hail of machine gun bullets. Pullen was dead. His body was dragged back to town. Pullen’s ear was cut off, placed in a jar of alcohol and displayed in a storefront.

But even this grotesque trophy couldn’t hide that they knew the truth: Pullen had killed 13, wounded 26, and as Fannie Lou Hamer recalled of the incident, “... it was awhile in Mississippi before the whites tried something like that again."