- Every place has a dark side.
Every city, town, and state
has some sort of skeleton in its closet,
so to speak.
And that's what this video series
will be looking at.
What is going on, everyone?
Welcome back to the "World According to Briggs,"
and a video on some disturbing facts about Mississippi.
This is a new series here on "World According to Briggs"
and it's sort of a test video
to see how you guys like it.
I'd really like to know in the comment section
what you think about it.
If we get a good amount of views,
and likes and comments,
we'll continue the series.
What you'll get in these videos
are some bad history,
some spooky stuff,
natural disasters,
urban legends,
and just some plain weird events and happenings.
We're gonna start with Mississippi.
Let's take a look.
Number five,
the Mercritis Outbreak of the 1950s.
Now, this one's kind of interesting.
It's part urban legend, part conspiracy theory,
part just weird homicidal story.
The story goes like this.
In rural Mississippi in the 1950s,
there was an outbreak
of what was known as Mercritis.
There's not much information on it,
and a lot of people think
that's because the government
is actually blocking information
about the Mercritis Outbreak.
The Mercritis Outbreak has two stories
on where it came from
and how it happened.
The first one is it came from Europe
with some immigrants,
and they got to the United States
in the Mississippi area,
and infected the population.
Others say that it comes from lead paint,
and that's why the government is covering it up.
They don't want people to know
that they got it from lead paint
or some other lead-based product
and it affected people in strange ways.
Now, this is how it affected people.
I guess, men that were working with paint
or were exposed to European immigrants
got the Mercritis,
and it did all the things
that you'd expect lead poisoning to do to someone,
loss of appetite,
joint pain,
headaches,
difficulty remembering thing,
and hard to concentrate,
high blood pressure,
abdominal pain,
mood disorders.
The most alarming symptom of this
was that they emitted an odor or a pheromone.
Well, I guess this pheromone or scent
was exposing a lot of women in this town,
which the government now hides from everyone,
is the theory.
In this town, women were exposed to men
that had this lead poisoning or this virus,
or whatever it was that came from Europe.
And these women started acting strange,
eventually turning into a riot of angry women
who were out to kill any man they saw.
On one fine winter morning,
I guess the women found a guy
they had had enough with.
I'm thinking these were his mistresses or something.
They grabbed sticks, knives,
anything they can get ahold of,
and they chased this man through the streets.
Tn an attempt to get away from them,
he jumped into a river or a lake
that was nearly frozen.
He soon froze to death and drowned.
That wasn't enough for these crazed women.
They went into the water after him.
As we all know,
when women get pushed to a point,
or they've decided they're going to kill a guy,
dead isn't good enough.
They need you more dead.
And that's what happened to this poor dude.
These women chased this dude into the water.
He either froze to death or drowned,
and they continued to try and kill him.
There are a bunch of different stories about this one
where after the outbreak,
the government came in
and kind of corded off the town,
chased everyone out,
gave help to whoever they could,
and then swept the whole thing under the rug.
A lot of people say it had to do
with the local chemical company
that was emitting this chemical into the air,
these guys got lead poisoning,
and the women got lead poisoning too,
it just affected them differently.
The whole thing was,
I guess, swept under the rug
and covered up to protect this company
is one of the stories.
My theory is it was just like the local gigolo
who had a bunch of chicks on the side,
and they all got together one day
and decided to take care of business.
Number four,
Emmett Till.
Emmett Till is a true story,
and it's a sad story.
It's a story of racism,
which Mississippi, back in the day,
was kind of known for.
I mean, I'm not saying
that they've gotten past all their racist roots,
they still have some,
but in the 1950s and earlier,
it was horrible to be an African-American in Mississippi.
This is a state that didn't ratify the 13th Amendment
'till 130 years after everyone else,
that 13th Amendment is outlawing slavery.
Yeah, 1994 they decided to finally ratify it,
and then that's not where the story ends.
Nearly 20 years after ratifying it,
two Mississippi residents discovered
that the ratification
was not yet official in Mississippi.
They contacted the Secretary of State
and they told them about it,
and they finally filed the required paperwork,
and it was taken care of in 2013.
But Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago,
African American.
And he went down to Mississippi
to visit some family near Money, Mississippi.
The story goes that on an afternoon,
he went into a local grocery store,
and ended up flirting with a white grocery clerk.
A few nights later,
the clerk's husband and his half brother
dragged the teenager from his bed.
So, they brought broke into the house,
they pulled him out of bed,
took him outside,
and they shot him in the head.
Now, there's a whole bunch more that goes
into what happened to Emmett,
but it's graphic,
it's horrible,
and I don't think we need to get into it.
If you wanna look it up,
feel free,
there's plenty of information on it.
It's really sad,
I will warn you in advance.
They then disposed of his body in the Tallahatchie River.
That is a horrible story that just gets worse.
Everyone in town knew what had had happened
and knew who these guys were.
And the local authorities finally got around
to arresting the two brothers,
or brother and half brother, whatever.
The case eventually went to trial
and they denied they did anything,
went back and forth for a while,
and an all-white jury went on
to acquit the two brothers.
If you know anything about Mississippi back in the 1950s,
this should not shock anyone.
Emmett's body was taken back to Illinois
where he is buried there.
I was reading what happened
to the two guys that did this,
you know, later on in life,
well, they both died of cancer in the '80s
and then one in the '90s.
One of them was like a farmhand,
but eventually he had to move to Texas
because any farm he went to work for,
none of the African-Americans in that area
would work on the farm with him.
He owned his own property at one point,
and again, no African-Americans would work for him there.
So, he had to hire all-white farmhands,
which was more expensive at the time.
And he eventually just started working for farms.
Number three,
the 1962 riots at the University of Mississippi.
In 1954, the Supreme court Ruled
in Brown v. The Board of Education
that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.
Eight years after the Brown decision,
every Mississippi school district remained segregated,
and all attempts by African-Americans
to integrate into the University of Mississippi,
better known as Ole Miss, had failed.
They weren't letting 'em in.
They just told 'em no.
After President Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961,
he promised to follow up on all the civil rights things.
So, an African-American man named James Meredith
applied to Ole Miss.
Meredith was an Air Force Veteran
that was ready to go to a college,
and he chose Ole Miss
because of the ruling,
because of Kennedy,
and Ole Miss was known as a college for Mississippi's elite.
He didn't inform the college
that he was African-American
'till like midway through the process
of applying for the school.
And when they found out,
they told him no.
They kept telling him no for months.
When he got to the school in September,
they blocked the entrance.
In response, Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
the brother of the president,
and President Kennedy
sent military police,
troops from the National Guard,
Border of Patrol Agents,
and U.S. Marshals
to make sure he got onto the campus
and into his classes.
At his dorm room,
they had to actually post guards all around it,
which were part of the Marshal service,
and eventually the National Guard.
Well, this didn't go well,
and about 2,500 people showed up to protest,
and this just wasn't a normal protest.
They were angry and they were violent.
They threw bottles of acid and Molotov cocktails
at U.S. Marshals.
On two different occasions,
they tried to drive a bulldozer over the Marshals.
They looted labs,
burnt cars,
shot out all the lights around the campus,
and eventually President Kennedy
reluctantly invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807.
There's a whole lot of ugliness
that goes into this one,
but the final outcome was
that Meredith persisted through harassment and isolation,
and graduated on August 18th, 1963,
with a degree in political science.
Now, years later,
they actually erected a statue of him,
and his son went on to attend Ole Miss.
Number two,
the Great Flood of 1927.
Mississippi has a history of flooding.
I mean, really, the Mississippi River
has a history of flooding like most major rivers
in the United States and the world.
But this one in 1927
is called the Great Flood for a reason.
It was the worst.
In April of 1927,
water levels of the Mississippi began to rise
because of heavy rainfall.
They were having problems up and down the Mississippi River,
not just in Mississippi itself.
The National Guard was called out for sandbagging
and they were making progress,
but they needed help.
So, they started getting prisoners involved,
including a group of over 100 African American prisoners
that were basically in a chain gang.
Most of them were attached to each other
through chains on their legs.
They were brought to a levee
at a place called Mound's Landing,
which is just north of Greenville, Mississippi.
And they were told to get to work on the levee.
They weren't too keen on it,
and a lot of people thought it was dangerous at the time.
And then a few minutes later,
they found out it was dangerous.
The levee broke,
the water swept over a hundred of the prisoners away,
and down the Mississippi they went.
The river carried the men several miles down river.
They were discovered pressed up
against a dock the next day.
Those weren't the only deaths.
In total, the Great Flood of 1927
was one of the most damaging floods
in the United States history,
and it killed 246 people
and displaced 700,000.
All that remains of the little town of Mound Landing
is a boat ramp located on private property
owned by a hunting club.
That is it.
And number one,
The Rhythm Night Club.
The Rhythm Night Club fire,
which is also known as the Natchez Dance Hall Holocaust,
was a deadly fire that took place
at a place called the The Rhythm Night Club
on Tuesday, April 23rd, 1940.
This was a disaster.
The club was packed.
Attendance was about 750 people
that were there to dance and listen to music.
The attendees were, for the most part,
between the age of 15 and 25.
Everything was going well.
People were packed in,
people were dancing,
people were having a good time,
and then a fire broke out towards the entrance
of the dance hall.
They were trying to get it under control,
but it spread quickly.
Reports state that they had Spanish moss and drapes
all around the front for decoration.
They were afraid of getting insects
in the Spanish moss,
so it was sprayed down when it was put up
with a insecticide that was petroleum-based.
This was just like adding gasoline to the fire,
and it spread quickly.
And when fire spreads quickly,
so does panic,
and people rushed to get out of the building.
They had one exit.
We talked about this in another video
that I had on my other channel
about how a lot of the buildings back in the day
had doors that opened inward.
Of course, when there's a rush of people,
and they try and pull 'em back,
the press of the bodies hold the door shut.
That's what happened here.
People would've tried to get out of the window,
but the owner of the dance club
had boarded up most of the windows,
so people outside wouldn't look in the window
and listen to music,
so nobody could get out of this thing.
The Rhythm Club Fire is considered
the fourth deadliest assembly
and club fire in U.S. history.
209 people perished in the fire.
Today, a plaque sits listing the names
of all those who perished in the fire
where the Rhythm Night Club used to be.
All right, that's today's video.
Hope you guys enjoyed it.
Hope you got some information out of it.
This is a little bit different,
there was only five,
and we're just testing this out.
So, please let me know what you thought.
Give the video a big thumbs up if you liked it.
Everybody, have a great day.
Be nice to each other.