Fears of a Negro Insurrection

• Scipio Atchison

Fears of a. Negro Insurrection. Selma, Ala., May — The excitement still prevails in the vicinity of Dixey’s station over the killing of Scipio Atchison, found in the woods riddled with buckshot, and whose death is supposed to have been caused by white men against whom he had made threats for pursuing his son. It is found two more negroes, Steve Sullivan and Tom Ward, are missing. There, are good grounds for believing Sullivan was killed on the same night that Scipio Atchison was murdered. Ward is thought to have escaped. Sullivan and Ward were both friends of young Atchison, who outraged the white woman, Mrs. Hesler. and had made frequent and violent threats. The shooting in both cases is supposed to have been done by a party of 300 men, gathered from a section twenty miles square. Young Atchison is still at large, but is being traced up. The white people in the section where the murder occurred have become alarmed, owing to threats of the negroes and fear an insurrection in the saw mill and charcoal section, where there are several hundred colored people.

“Fears of a Negro Insurrection.” St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, MN), May 14, 1885.