In a scene in the movie "Sinners," a gifted blues singer is urged to give up the precarious life of performing in Jim Crow America and escape racism by settling in the all-Black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi.
Many viewers might think Mound Bayou is fiction, America’s Wakanda. Many, but not all.
The day the movie opened, Hermon Johnson Jr. began hearing from people with whom he'd grown up in Mound Bayou, praising the movie and proud to hear their hometown mentioned.
As Johnson, who founded a museum in Mound Bayou to showcase the unique history of the town founded by former slaves in 1887, told me, its "diaspora is spread out across the country."
I'd met and interviewed Johnson, 69, and his 95-year-old father last fall in their museum in the Mississippi Delta town.
When Louisiana-born Hermon Johnson Sr., bearing a fresh Southern University business education degree, took his first job in Mound Bayou seven decades ago, he marveled at its zoo and swimming pool. He married a local woman, Alfreta Thompson, and went on to serve in city government for decades.
The couple's two sons grew up seeing Black Mississippians running local government and schools and owning factories and a hospital, opportunities denied them elsewhere in the South. Black people in Mound Bayou were not limited to “Blacks only” drinking fountains or barred from restaurants. But they knew whites would use violence to ensure Jim Crow held sway outside their refuge, and that they could be touched by the brutality.
“It was a sanctuary city,” said Johnson Jr., a percussionist who grew up playing the blues and built his career in the Los Angeles music scene before retiring to his hometown.
That first job Johnson Sr. took, as an agent supervisor for a Black-owned insurance company, was available because Medgar Evers had just left the post to become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s founding Mississippi field secretary.
At the insurance company, “Medgar's job was not necessarily to oversee them (agents) but to go with them into the fields and talk to their clients about voting rights," Johnson Sr. said, saying the last two words softly, as if they were sacred.
The insurance company’s owner was T.R.M. Howard, who first came to Mound Bayou to be chief surgeon at its hospital. Evers and Howard organized a boycott of gas stations that barred Black customers from their restrooms, and held civil rights rallies that drew thousands to Mound Bayou.
During the 1955 trial of Emmett Till’s murderers at a Mississippi courthouse not far from Mound Bayou, the 14-year-old lynching victim’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley stayed at Howard’s home. Evers, other activists and Black journalists also gathered at Howard’s home to strategize during the trial.
Till's murder helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, in part because his mother had insisted on an open-casket funeral to show the violence that even Black children faced under Jim Crow.
After an all-white jury acquitted the two white men who later confessed to Look magazine that they had tortured and killed Till, Howard spoke out in protest. That drew threats, and Howard moved to Chicago, closing his insurance company.
In 1963, a white supremacist segregationist shot and killed Evers as the NAACP leader was walking into his home in Jackson, Mississippi's capital.
A Mound Bayou story I heard there has been passed down from generation to generation. It tells of whites on horseback arriving to burn the town to the ground soon after its 19th century founding. Mound Bayou residents had gotten word the attack was coming. They armed themselves, laid in wait and opened fire when the mob arrived, killing some and sending others fleeing.
Could the story be legend? Surely if residents of an all-Black town in Mississippi had killed whites, more whites would have come and razed the town. Think of Wilmington in 1898, Atlanta in 1906, Tulsa in 1921, and so many others.
“Sinners,” set in Mississippi around the time Johnson Sr. arrived in Mound Bayou, can be viewed as legend. Or historical fiction with a supernatural twist. When Black characters who have been turned into vampires disappear in flames at sunrise, I thought of all the Black victims who were never found after lynchings, of all the lynchings that were never documented.
I glimpsed details in the movie such as an extra with hair styled as the abolitionist former slave Frederick Douglass wore his, and a vampire victim whose battered face resembled Till's in his coffin.
In a scene that surely resonates with Mound Bayou residents, Coogler depicts one of his protagonists waiting in hiding to pick off white marauders who arrive on horseback (and in trucks).
Johnson Sr. told me that most of the attempts to stamp out Mound Bayou were economic. Banks refused to loan to Mound Bayou businesses. Powerful state politicians tried to dissuade the federal government from funding projects in Mound Bayou. Once, a white woman was given a speeding ticket while driving through town. She claimed she tripped on a faulty step and injured herself when she came to the municipal courthouse to pay her fine. She sued in county court in a nearby white-run town and won a large settlement. The Mound Bayou diaspora helped raise funds to pay her.
After the insurance company was shut down in the wake of the death of Till, Johnson Sr. took home the desk, typewriter and chair that he and Evers had used. His sons did their homework at the desk.
After Johnson Jr. and his brother Darryl opened their museum in 2021, their father donated the Evers desk, typewriter and chair to the collection.
"They haven't found a way to destroy us yet," Johnson Sr. told me.
Perhaps "Sinners" director and writer Ryan Coogler heard the story of the white mob turned back by Mound Bayou’s Black residents. Certainly, he understood what Black Americans endured and created, and what they insist never be forgotten or erased.