During the period of Indian Removal, under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, the Choctaw people ceded most of their lands to the United States.

It became a market town for an area developed for cotton plantations, which depended on the labor of enslaved African Americans.

At one time the largest town between Meridian, Mississippi, and Mobile, [citation needed] Shubuta attracted people from 40 miles (64 km) around to shop at its many mercantile businesses.

[4] In late December 1918, five weeks after the armistice was signed in the Great War, four black farmworkers were lynched and hanged from a railroad bridge in Shubuta.

[5] When the NAACP asked for a state investigation, their representative was told by Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo to "go to hell".

Johnston the son had jealously threatened Clark, saying he would kill the young black man unless he ended his relationship with House.

In addition, men cut off power to the town from the main station, perhaps to support witnesses' later claims of being unable to identify members of the mob.

When the victims were buried the next day, witnesses reported seeing Alma House's unborn baby moving in the womb.

[9] In 1942 during World War II, Ernest Green, a fourteen-year-old black boy, along with Charlie Lang, aged fifteen, were seen speaking to Dorothy Martin, a thirteen-year-old white girl whom they knew from the area.

The boys were arrested by Clarke County Sheriff Lloyd McNeal, and appeared before justice of the peace W.E.

[6] The sheriff told the Pittsburgh Courier that the local people respected law and order, but that "Them niggers is gettin’ uppity, you know.”[10] Walter Atkins, a black journalist, asserted in 1942 that the “rickety old span is a symbol of the South as much as magnolia blossoms or mint julep colonels.”[11] Sherriff McNeal was said to have expressed remorse on his deathbed for the murders of Green and Lang.

[6] Governor Paul Johnson declared that the lynchings were murders, there was nothing he could do about it, and criticized first lady Eleanor Roosevelt for discussing the matter in the national media.

[12] Because of its own history and connection to the white lynchings of thousands of blacks in the South, the bridge was added to the National List of Historic Places in 1988.

In Shubuta whites had also suppressed black voting by destroying ballots, imposing poll tests such as correctly guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan.

[11] Following the 1918 lynchings, many black workers left Clarke County, leaving cotton to rot in the fields.

(See Demographics, Clarke County, Mississippi) The first wave of the Great Migration from the rural South continued to the Second World War.

In the 1930s, a number of African-American residents from the Shubata area followed Reverend Louis W. Parson to Albany, New York to escape the violence and in a search for industrial jobs and better opportunities.

[11] They created a community to the west of the city, building houses along Rapp Road within what was one land parcel purchased by Parson.

Shubuta is located near the southern border of Clarke County at 31°51′39″N 88°42′2″W / 31.86083°N 88.70056°W / 31.86083; -88.70056 (31.860939, -88.700690),[15] on the west side of the Chickasawhay River.