Isaiah Montgomery

Mound Bayou was founded in 1887 by Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green, cousins enslaved as boys by Joseph Davis, eldest brother of the president of the Confederacy. The Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad was pushing track through the Delta and needed towns along it to make the line pay, and it commissioned Montgomery as a land agent; what he built with that commission was a town owned and governed entirely by Black people. The ground was swamp forest and had to be cleared by hand. By the 1910s the town had thirteen stores, a sawmill, three cotton mills, ten churches, the leading Black owned bank in Mississippi and a private high school of two hundred pupils, a rarity for Black children anywhere in the country. Booker T. Washington wrote that outside Tuskegee no community interested him so deeply. Montgomery's own record is harder, and it is the reason the name is argued over. In 1890 he sat as the only Black delegate among 134 at the Mississippi constitutional convention that wrote the poll tax and the literacy test into law, and he voted for them. His reasoning was that Black voting had already been destroyed by fraud and violence, that a bargain might buy security instead, and that the requirements would prove temporary as schooling spread. Nobody in Mississippi had seen a fair count since 1875, so his own seat was a gift from the men he voted with. Frederick Douglass called it treason to the cause of the colored people, while allowing that Montgomery retreated only when he could no longer fight. The clauses he endorsed disenfranchised Black Mississippians for three quarters of a century. His house on West Main Street, built in 1910, still stands.