Madison “Mat” Bibbins: A legacy of rising above oppression

There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
-W. E. B. Du Bois

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Madison “Mat” Bibbins grew up during one of the most turbulent periods in U.S. history. Born in 1853 to Dan and Harriet Bibbins, Mat likely began life on one of the cotton plantations in the Old Natchez District located along the Mississippi River. With more than 340 planters in this district who each owned 250+ slaves, this area was a hub for the cotton culture, spawning the most active slave market in Mississippi. Tens of thousands of enslaved individuals were ripped from their families in the Upper South to be sold at the Forks in the Road Slave Market. It is possible that Mat’s father, Dan Bibbins, born in Kentucky, came to Mississippi via this slave market.

The End of Slavery and The Beginning of the Fight for Equality

Mat Bibbins was about 10 years old when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation announced that “all persons held as slaves within any state…in rebellion against the United States, shall be henceforth and forever free”. Although this declaration was the first step toward freedom, the disparity between ideologies of newly freed slaves and their former masters would seem insurmountable in the coming decades.

In 1863, Civil War Union troops pushed into the South occupying the area around Natchez. This promise of freedom prompted African Americans throughout the region to flee their slave masters and either join Union troops or fall under U.S. Army protection. The process of post-war reconstruction began in the summer of 1865. As part of the reconstruction efforts, schools were established throughout the Natchez district. The pursuit of education was important to the Bibbins family as evidenced by the 1870 census which indicated that the entire Bibbins family—including parents Dan and Harriet—could read and write, uncommon among the emancipated population at that time.

In the Natchez district, the abolition of slavery was a major disruption to the region’s economy. Cotton planters who felt disenfranchized by the government’s “theft of property” were resistant to changes in their way of life, which prompted the creation of Mississippi’s notorious Black Codes Bill in 1865. The codes were an obvious attempt to circumvent the Emancipation Order and restore southern plantations to their pre-civil war modus operandi.

“The codes used “vagrancy” laws to control the traffic of black people and punished them for any breach of Old South etiquette. Blacks could not be idle, disorderly, or use “insulting” gestures. Blacks could not own a gun or preach the Gospel without first receiving a special license. Black children were forced to work as “apprentices” for white planters, usually their former masters, until they turned eighteen. Most blatant of all, the state penal codes simply replaced the word “slave” with “freedman;” all the crimes and penalties for slaves were “in full force” for the emancipated.”

(Phillips 2006)

When the 15th Amendment passed in 1870 granting voting rights to all men, regardless of color, the population disparity between white and black voters in the Natchez district flipped the balance of electoral influence on its head. This enraged the wealthy planters who were used to wielding political power.

For the first time in U.S. history, black men had a voice in politics. Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi and Representative Joseph Rainey of South Carolina became the first African Americans to serve in Congress.

Over the next two decades, a clash between white southern Democrats struggling to maintain the status quo and the African American community fighting for their lawful freedoms would escalate to the point of guerrilla warfare, with white regulator clubs similar to the Ku Klux Klan using threats, lynchings, and murder in an attempt to suppress black votes. Judge J.J. Chrisman unabashedly explained voting inequity in Mississippi to the 1890 constitutional convention in the following terms:

“Sir, it is no secret that there has not been a full vote and a fair count in Mississippi since 1875—that we have been preserving the ascendency of the white people by revolutionary methods. In plain words, we have been stuffing the ballot-boxes, committing perjury, and here and there in the state carrying the elections by fraud and violence until the whole machinery for elections was about to rot down.”

(Mabry 1938)

To Boldly Lead and Empower

Despite the extreme danger of holding any type of black gathering, Mat Bibbins, now a young adult, joined the efforts of Alfred Black, a local farmer, who as a black freedman, had advocated for slaves rights before the civil war. Alfred and Mat risked their lives by establishing a group to defend labor rights by holding regular meetings to educate and counsel their black neighbors who could not read or write. Mat’s literacy was a valued commodity within their community, and his responsibility within the group was to review labor contracts and ensure that black workers received a fair wage. Although they were no longer slaves, black men had limited work opportunities and many returned to plantation jobs in order to support their families. Mat worked to ensure the equity of contracts written by white planters who were known for cheating.

The Race Riots of 1875-76

In 1876 Alfred Black was intercepted on the road home by a group of white regulators who demanded information about his meetings. As part of their interrogation, the men put a noose around Black’s neck and repeatedly hoisted him in the air until he blacked out. After regaining consciousness the men threatened that if Black continued to try and organize black workers they would kill him.

About a week after the attack on Alfred Black, a white merchant was murdered in a different part of the county. Though the murderer was unknown, the merchant’s death quickly escalated the violence by white regulators, prompting men to ride through the county on horseback looking for Black Republicans to kill. In response, black militias organized in Wilkinson County and adjacent West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, to defend their families.

On May 15, 1876, 1,100 white regulators mounted into three companies determined to quash the black militias. The old shotguns shouldered by the black militias didn’t hold a candle to the powerful Winchester carbine rifles used by the regulators. The battle carried on for several hours and resulted in the death of at least 30 black men. Outnumbered and outgunned, the black forces finally called for a truce which resulted in prominent local black Republicans being forced out of office. The following Natchez Democrat newspaper article, published two days after the conflict, is an example of the overt discrimination and hatred that African American families, like the Bibbins, faced during this period.

Conduct of the Regulators

As a result of the election-related race riots and violence that erupted across Mississippi from 1875-76, Congress appointed a special committee to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the 1875 election. Alfred Black testified during the Congressional hearings naming eight of the regulators who had tortured him. During his testimony, Black recounted their interrogation:

“These men told me that my republicanism was played out, and I was going to be put back in my place, and they said that they had killed fifty, that they had shot them; that they had hung twelve, and I could go to the forks of the road and see them, some with their tongues hanging out, as black as a tar-bucket. And they asked which I would rather choose, to be shot or hung, and I said I would rather be shot than hung; that was the words I told them.”

(Boutwell and Sewall 1876)

Black went on to testify about the purpose of their meetings naming Madison Bivens [Bibbins] as the meeting Superintendent and stating:

“My business is this: to learn how to keep them from taking all our labor away from us. That was our business; for to get some man to attend to it that could read and write. That was our business, to know whether we was cheated or not cheated.”

(Boutwell and Sewall 1876)

Alfred Black’s full testimony is available online in the Report of the Select Committee linked here.

The End of Reconstruction

When federal troops pulled out of Mississippi in 1870, the Democrats quickly enacted laws to disqualify black voters, the worst being a literacy requirement which eliminated 60% of eligible African Americans. Over the next several decades the racist voting policies worsened to include poll taxes, white primaries, intimidation and threats of eviction, lynchings and mob violence—by 1940, only 1% of voting aged men and women in Mississippi were registered to vote. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that discriminatory laws were abolished resulting in 66% of eligible African American voters being registered by 1970.

The Bibbins Legacy of Community Leadership

Mat Bibbins eventually married and relocated to West Feliciana Parish, LA, where he passed away in 1924, but his legacy of exceptional bravery, leadership, and resilience against impossible oppression reached beyond his death. Succeeding Bibbins generations followed in his footsteps to become notable scholars, activists, and artists. Currently, Mat’s 3rd great-granddaughter carries on his legacy in her work as a professor, speaker and community leader. She also serves as President of the National Career and Technical Education Equity Council and as Workgroup Chair on the Executive Team for the Infant Mortality Alliance of Oklahoma County, which addresses social, racial and economic inequities that impact health for the black community.

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Sources and Further Reading

Barnett, Jim, and H Clark Burkett. 2003. “The Forks of the Road Slave Market at Natchez.” Mississippi History Now, February. http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/47/the-forks-of-the-road-slave-market-at-natchez.

Blight, David W., and Jim Downs. 2017. Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

Broussard, Joyce L. “Occupied Natchez, Elite Women, and the Feminization of the Civil War.” THE JOURNAL OF MISSISSIPPI HISTORY, July 6, 2013, 189. Accessed April 16, 2019. https://www.mdah.ms.gov/new/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/occupied-natchez.pdf.

Boutwell, George S, and George Sewall. 1876. Mississipi in 1875. Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875, with the Testimony and Documentary Evidence ..Washington: Government Printing Office.

Davis, Ronald L. F. 1993. The Black Experience in Natchez 1720-1880, Special History Study. Archive.org. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O. https://archive.org/details/blackexperiencei00davi.

Du Bois W. E. B., Henry Louis Gates, and David Levering Lewis. 2016. Black Reconstruction in America: the Oxford W.E.B Du Bois. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mabry, William Alexander. “Disfranchisement of the Negro in Mississippi.” The Journal of Southern History 4, no. 3 (1938): 318-33. doi:10.2307/2191292.

Phillips, Jason. 2006. “Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1865-1876.” Mississippi History Now, May. http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/204/reconstruction-in-mississippi-1865-1876.