Tennessee Weighs Whether To Form A Commission Or Not To Examine Brutality of Jim Crow [View all]

Charlie Morris vividly recalls his brother's murder.

Jesse Lee Bond was a sharecropper in Shelby County. Suspicious because his harvests never seemed to cover his debts, in the spring of 1939, Bond asked the local general store for a receipt of his seed purchases.

For his diligence, he was shot, castrated, dragged and left for dead in the Hatchie River.

"The medical examiner at that time, as well as the sheriff, when they took him out of the river, they told the Commercial Appeal there was no signs of anything but drowning," Morris says.

Now 97, Morris described the killing and cover-up at a legislative hearing earlier this year.

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